Talking about a printed document containing things others said online. (photo: Cindy Hwang)

Stemming from my work with the Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health at NYU, there are two recent papers out. The first (International Journal of Hispanic Psychology) summarizes some of the initial work on HIV risk behavior within a tourism ecology, including spatial analysis of alcohol venues within a tourism town and the behaviors and populations that converge in those venues. The second (Drug and Alcohol Dependence) describes a latent class analysis of those venues and likewise includes a map of those classes by location. 

Wrapping up my four(-ish) years at the Buell Center, Comments on Foreclosed (publication and website -- ed. me, preface by Reinhold Martin) was launched last month, four years after The Buell Hypothesis takes place to the day (a magically unplanned coincidence). I've recently realized that I have not yet shared opinion of the project or the MoMA's Foreclosed here, which I plan to rectify soon.

CaerusGeo, on which I've had the pleasure to collaborate, has officially launched its public beta. The site is designed to allow data collection activities in low-resource environments to include a geographic component, augmenting the analysis possibilities, with (importantly) minimal changes to existing collection workflows.

Also with Caerus, I had the pleasure of taking part in a local, open, community mapping pilot project. Thile this was now some months ago, it deserves some note here given the tremendous coordination between Caerus, the World Bank, the ICT Directorate in Benin City, Nigeria, and a collection of diverse professionals and practitioners stationed on three continents. 

This school year has been among my busiest -- teaching, coteaching, and otherwise participating in a total of eight courses since the beginning of summer 2012. I've returned to the planning department at Columbia, teaching GIS courses as an adjunct. Also at GSAPP, I taught a visual studies course aimed at critically evaluating what can and cannot be known about cities via the data they seemingly produce in abundance. I've been enormously happy to start teaching in the Barnard-Columbia urban studies program and remembering all of the great things about a liberal arts women's college (despite the many differences between Barnard and my alma mater). And having cotaught a housing studio at NJIT last fall, I'm now one-half of a teaching team for an undergraduate architecture studio on public housing post-Sandy, asking students to simultaneously engage a public housing site in desperate need of attention before the storm and the challenges posed by the damage suffered and the many climate-related warnings for the future Sandy brought with her.

Lastly, a handful of small design and consulting projects have led to the formation of a new entity. However, official discussion of those goings on are still slightly premature.

That's perhaps the briefest update I can give. Each of those little summaries warrant elaboration and reflection. As the semester winds down, I plan to convert some of that elaboration and reflection into something worth sharing. In the meantime, baseball season is approaching and I, for one, cannot wait for opening day.

I am by no means the only person who has written on this, but here goes. In May, the House of Representatives passed (232-190) a bill to cut the American Community Survey (ACS). The bill was championed by Representative Daniel Webster (R) from Florida's 8th District. On the floor of the house, Webster said the survey is "intrusive," "unconstitutional," an "inappropriate use of taxpayer money," and "the very picture of what's wrong in DC." On every point, he is categorically wrong as are the 231 representatives who voted with him.

Yes, a very small number of the questions are somewhat personal (maybe?), but the survey responses are aggregated and made anonymous. Still, the very Constitution he cites allows for this survey, which includes questions that have been asked since Thomas Jefferson (Director of the 1790 Census). Also, let's recall my prior frustrations at opposition to the ACS (in which I rant about the difference between a citizen's reasonable right to privacy and that same citizen's responsibilities as a constituent in a representative democracy).

Regarding the use of taxpayer money and "what's wrong in DC": For literally centuries, the US government has been asking questions about how Americans live in order to responsibly determine how taxpayer money needs to and should be spent. Programs, policies, funding, and investment are created and calculated according to the results of the American Community Survey. While I will definitely agree that there are places where the federal government spends wastefully, the money spent on determining how to spend smarter is perhaps the most efficient use of taxpayer funds I can think of.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure how Representative Webster can legislate, adequately representing his constituents, without the information offered to him by the ACS. Maybe he would guess? Go with his gut? Maybe he believes everyone in Florida's 8th District is just like him? Or maybe he believes that there won't be problems requiring leglislative attention if we stop collecting information about those problems?

Well, because it's the sorta helpful thing I do, here are some things I learned tonight from the ACS about Webster's district. If he has his way and this nonsense attaches itself to a bill that passes the Senate, this might be the last bit of reliable information we have about the counties included within his boundaries. I'm covering some common topics -- information about the state of the housing market while we continue to battle the housing crisis in the country, information about employment and education, information about what people earn and whether that allows them to afford their homes.

And on that note, Happy Fourth of July.

See? I was there. (Me with Rosten Woo, Photo: Ford Foundation via Flickr. Click Image for Source)

I was honored and delighted to join some incredible thinkers and doers on Monday for a one-day conference, Change by Design, at the Ford Foundation. The audience was chock full of many of the foundation's amazing grantees doing essential work on some of our toughest issues. 

The day's speakers addressed a range of topics all stemming from the proliferation of complex data, the techniques and technologies developing around its use, and its applications within the nonprofit world -- from research to advocacy to communications strategies. I was asked to discuss a project I hadn't touched in some time and attempted to frame that research within the frequent hope that through solid data alone we might make sound decisions. In addition to the opportunity to meet the speakers and grantees, I admit that much of the fun of the day came from revisiting the work in my own presentation as well as Laura Kurgan's presentation of Architecture and Justice and the Million Dollar Blocks project.

One of the several take-aways from the day (and a recurrent theme in conversation) was the inherent politics of information and the constant subsequent need to redefine the parameters and purposes of that information. Human data is generated, collected, and organized by people -- people with agendas and agendas that serve specific purposes. What was clear throughout the day, and in particular within my panel, was the need to redefine the context of that data in order to appropriate its use, whether that be to effectively address an argument on its own terms, to challenge existing assumptions, to shed light on what is absent from the conversation, or even just to make do with the often insufficient data out in the world. When you are not the person or organization collecting and generating information, it is that act of redefinition and appropriation that affords you control over the politics of the dataset. It is through redefinition and reframing that your work need not be constrained by the assumptions and values of the data sources you use, but can rather stand atop your own assumptions, injected with your own values.

Also mentioned in the day was the idea that people who use data for the purpose of driving social change (like me) might consider offering a list of online data (re)sources that they (we, I) frequently use. I'm officially taking this suggestion and will start compiling that list to make available here on my site. Please expect that new development soon.

Again, I'd like to thank the Ford Foundation, specifically Jenny Toomey and the Change by Design team, for a fantastic experience.

PRE-Office in Brooklyn in 2010. Taken from a photo by Noah Kalina for Architect magazine. (click image for source)

In the spring of 2008, Aaron Davis and I had a series of conversations regarding modes of architectural practice and wondered what a sort of collaborative office might constitute given our very different methods, approaches, and scales. We were graduate students with a year left while the bottom was falling out of the buiding industry in the US. A year later, we had our degrees in hand with almost no easy way to put what we had learned to use, save of course for the idea of collaborative practice we conconcted a year before. Along with two others, we formed PRE-Office, and we got busy researching the business of architecture. Perhaps more specifically, we researched the aspects of practice that were allowing some offices to weather the storm better than others, those others being seeimingly hopelessly tied to the larger economy. While we did a few other little things, it was this body of research that has had a lasting effect on me, my thinking, and my work.

practice. noun
1. habitual or customary performance; operation. 2. habit; custom. 3. repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency. 4. condition arrived at by experience or exercise. 5. the action or process of performing or doing something.

The complex relationship between architecture (the academic discipline, the profession, and the practice) and the world it helps create continues to fuel my investigation of multiple topics and at multiple scales. It has continued to shape my own relationship with what I see as my personal and professional agency. That there are modes of practice which remain not only relevant, but viable, despite an economy determined to see them fail is telling. What has been the fate of offices that follow profit-seeking development without diversifying their practice is also telling. That social responsibility is also a means toward financial sustainability is critical. That architecture should be held accountable for its role (however large or small, however active or passive) in the creation of the crisis is, to me, undeniable. It was through that research that I found the need to identify the functional, pragmatic, and instrumental meanings of practice, intervention, and place-making. The research asked whether what we design is directly influenced by how we work, by our business models, by our office structures -- sometimes asking whether a principal's relationship to his/her staff or partners might perhaps reveal something about his/her relationship with the work and with the world. Absolutely. The places we make are, in every way, the result of how we make them.

Last week, over a few beers, I signed myself out of PRE-Office, handing over my share of the company to Aaron who will be carrying on as only he could. I am very much looking forward to the future of PRE, the future of the thing that comes before, whatever that might mean or be. I want to thank him, along with Danny and Zach, for all the things people do when they don't know what they're doing, for the opportunity to live out a most unusual research experiment, and for the opportunity to practice in so many ways. As should always be the case I think, I can say that the thing that comes next for me comes out of the thing that came before.

No-Go Zone at Citifield

Admittedly, it's been a bit too long since I've posted here. In that span several changes -- some minor, some a little more than minor -- have taken place, and this summer is shaping up to be a doozy. So, perhaps a brief update is in order.

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream opened without a hitch at the MoMA in February and has since been extended into August. The catalog (designed by the ever-fantastic MTWTF*) is now available at the museum and online. In response to some of the early discussion surrounding the show, I wrote this piece for the Metropolis P/O/V blog in March about the need to think bigger, more strategically, and more structurally.

[*Also, a couple months ago I had the very fun opportunity to provide "additional editorial support" (as the colophon states) for this delightful read enabled by a fellowship created by Glen Cummings at MTWTF.]

Despite incredible effort and remarkable work, the first half of the year saw the scaling back of Urbanscale. As I wrote at the end of 2011, working with Adam, Jeff, JD, and Mayo was an invaluable learning experience with long-term payoffs, many of which I can already see forming.

There are several other irons in the fire these days. In a bit of follow-up work on the Foreclosed project, I've returned to the Buell Center through the summer. Work at NYU is moving steadily along, and a handful of exciting new projects have me considering cities and technologies I've thus far not had real opportunities to engage. This month, I'll be getting a new grant proposal out the door and speaking on design and technology for social change. If all that weren't enough, please expect updates regarding PRE-Office and a possible new organization as the summer unfolds. I realize I've offered no concrete specifics here, but with any luck there will be plenty of details to disclose on these and more before the end of the summer.

Lastly, baseball season is in full swing, and with a month left before the All-Star break it seems that 2012 might be the season no one saw coming. We've seen the Os on top and the Yanks at the bottom of the AL East. We've seen 19-year-old Bryce Harper (big fan here) steal home plate after being intentionally plunked in a blatant act of hazing. (And last night getting his first walk-off win?!) As sometimes shocking as the MLB has been so far this year, the icing on the cake was being told at Citifield, after the seventh inning, that management would rather have an almost fully empty section visible on television than allow paying customers the opportunity to upgrade their seats. So much for Pareto.

Happy summer...more to come soon.

from my hotel in Madrid

Without going into too much detail, I had a very interesting and rather enlightening time in Madrid this week, discussing what it might mean to create or engage a smart city, what we can do with the data generated and collected in that city, and how what we learn from it can affect how we live.

At the end of a two-day workshop, BBVA's Innovation Center hosted a public event featuring talks on "Beyond the Smart City"* by Adam Greenfield, Nicolas Nova, and Kevin Slavin. What they shared was a sense that autonomous technological infrastructure alone cannot and does not make a city smart and that such a definition of the "smart city" not only excludes people, but that it may in fact be dangerous for them. Where they differed, of course, is the slight variation on how such danger may be mitigated while taking advantage of what these organized technologies have to offer.

What got me thinking, however, did not come directly from the three, but from the final audience question of the evening. A gentleman stood and asked, "Who will win, Man or Machine?," and I realized what was missing from the evening's discussion. (To be fair, the point was implied a couple times and perhaps nodded toward another couple times...and, really, I realized what it was that I would write about here.)

The thing is that there are no purely autonomous machines, infrastructures, mechanisms, nor algorithms. The automated algorithms driving our financial systems discussed by Slavin, just as the highly efficient automated systems meant to run the city of the future, are indeed inhumane but are in every way human-driven. These things are designed and exist by design. Their purposes, products, and processes are not only man-made and human-determined but exist in service to mankind(ish). It is not a question of whether Man or Machine will ultimately prevail, but a question of whether those humans with access to the technology, the funders of those machines, the creators of those algorithms, will win over those who have no such access, no such resources, and no such funds.

The responses (excluding Adam's entirely warranted non-response) spoke of the need for cities to cooperate with the information they produce, but did not directly discuss the need for citizens to cooperate with each other (again, there was a nod but nothing so explicit as what I'm about to launch into). Adam ended his talk with one of my all-time favorite and oft-cited thoughts from Lefebvre's Production of Space: that "social space is a social product." Whatever it is that we make of our cities is something we will have to make together. Sadly, I fear, the concentration of wealth -- and thus the concentration of access to information, the concentration of the control of its use, the concentration of the resources to understand it, the concentration of the ability to deploy products and systems predicated on its interpretation, and the concentration of the technology to even engage or participate in those systems -- is making that collaborative effort more and more difficult.

In a nutshell, Great Cities are great because of the quality of life they offer, with manifestations of that quality ranging from the economic opportunities present for those who seek them to the availability of a delighful Saturday afternoon. By my personal definition, Great Cities are Just Cities -- not necessarily utopias of pure equality of all kinds, but places of equity at a minimum. Further, it matters not how smart a city claims itself to be if the benefits of that intelligence are not accessible to all of its citizens. A Great City can house and feed its population and addresses additional needs through multiple means, not just those available to the users of smart phones and Twitter.

Of course, I make my living off of the information produced by cities. I feed myself based on the dual facts that data proliferates in urban environments and that I have (borrowed lots and lots of money for) the privilege to work with that data. I also teach at a graduate school of social work, because I thoroughly believe that every dataset I crunch, every conclusion drawn from that information, and every map I draw is an opportunity for intervention, an act of advocacy, and an instigation toward change. I agree that in many ways our cities are already smart, but I know that they are not just. They are not smart enough to make their intelligence transparent, nor are they smart enough to fully share the opportunities presented by that intelligence.

In the terms of economics, information is a semi-public good: It is not consumable, but undeniably excludable. It if is the use of our information that will make our cities smart, then it is the control of that information that may or may not make our cities just.

[*Just for fun: If you follow that link, you'll see a slide of maps I had fun making a couple months ago.]

leaving Madrid, from the sky

A few years ago, in the development of a project called This is Later with Aaron Davis, I became rather obsessively interested in the smaller towns of rural Spain. As a late-industrializing nation, certain policies of the first half of the twentieth century pulled young people out of these regoins toward the city as necessary labor in new factories. Disinvestment in agriculture created a condition without incentive for them to ever return. Today, these towns are quickly becoming ghost towns -- depopulated and decaying ruins of the twentieth century. They represent the flipside of an urbanizing world. They represent the forgotten despite having thrived for centuries before the last hundred years. Further, they represent a fate ready to befall so many regions worldwide, as populations migrate to cities and the replacement rate in rural areas is simply not being met.

Cleveland (left) & Soria (right) : image credits linked in text

My last few days in Spain spurred a conversation that at once reminded me of these ghost towns and reminded me of the soon-to-be-ghost-town suburbs resulting from the American foreclosure crisis. (The above photos represent "Foreclosuretown" (i.e. Cleveland, OH) and Soria, Spain.) Despite the history and ocean that separates them, they share both an apparent future and interconnected economic causes.

Given my research on The Buell Hypothesis and the upcoming Foreclosed show based on that research, I had been necessarily focused on the phenomenon of suburbs failing for having been built on speculation and supported by an unsustainable building industry boom and the financial structures that enabled it.  What I hadn't yet considered is the global extent of the same phenomenon. And now I have learned that while long-standing towns of Spain are quickly disappearing (in population only, of course), so too are brand new satellite suburbs ringing around Spain's major cities. The global financial crisis seems to have similar manifestations in the built environment despite the differences in structure and place.

I feel new comparative research emerging.

work in progress (photo by Adam Greenfield; click image for source)

On Format
The most obvious (so we’ll get it out of the way quickly) difference between what I’ve done and what I’m doing is its ultimate format. These are not static cartographic images. These are not even the sort of dynamic, but limited, animated maps I’ve done on occasion before. While they are culled, curated, and designed, these are geographic information systems in their own right. Users are not just able to interact with the map; they must be able to query, analyze, and make use of the data (plural). The conceptual and methodological implications of this directive for my work flow, approach, and techniques really can’t be overstated. 

Because I’m designing more than my own investigation, because I’m designing for others’ investigations, there is no room for the messiness of artistic license or the idiosyncrasies of personal design processes. (By “artistic license” I am talking about the things we all do with our datasets, the analysis shortcuts that we’ve developed and that lead to solid results but may not constitute the sort of rigor that enables easy replicability.) For my component of Urbanscale’s projects, “interactivity” means that I’m designing more than a map interface, more than the ability to pan and zoom, more than the representation of information. It means that I am spending most of my energy designing Frankenstein datasets, stitched together from disparate sources, into something instrumental, something spatial that can functionally interact -- with users, with the city, and while enabling further interaction between the two. (Forgive me if I sound like an architect.)

meetingish (photo by Adam Greenfield; click image for source)

On Collaboration
Clearly, I can’t do this alone. While I collaborate on most, if not all, of my projects, there has always been a pretty clear-cut understanding of what portions of a project were my responsibility. Further, my results were always required to be “finished” before they went to someone else. These days, there is a daily (sometimes three or four times per day) need for handing off mid-process material. The back-and-forth between myself and JD (Urbanscale’s CTO and Developer Extraordinaire) has become a two-way street of datasets, databases, and geometries. Over the past several weeks, we’ve grown to identify where the fuzzy line between our skillsets might lie. Still that line remains fuzzy and for good reason: we enjoy an interesting overlap of capability wherein we can accomplish some of the same tasks through decidedly different avenues. The trick in our constant negotiation (toward a better product) is the process by which we are learning whose tools create cleaner, more elegant, methods. At the risk of sounding like even more of a data dork than usual, I have to admit that it’s insanely fun.

What I didn’t see coming with this collaboration is the need to flex more GIS-related muscle than I have in years. Because more is possible, more data changes hands than I could’ve predicted. More geometric analysis is needed on my part than in any set of previous work in order to enable his programming, as we realize that spatial questions he could crunch in code are more easily solved with GIS. In return, his ability to program more often creates that Aha! moment when we realize we can now give users access to even more useful data about their city. And so on.

queried -- work in progress. (photo by Adam Greenfield; click image for source)

On Storytelling
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? As we work toward giving users access to their city through its information, the format and collaboration become absolutely necessary because, for once, it isn’t my story (as geographer, analyst, or cartographer) to tell. It’s the city’s story. It’s the user’s Choose Your Own Adventure story to decide.

Most of my maps have been narrative and/or argumentative. At best, I hope they tell stories -- stories of research methods and conclusions, stories of city systems, stories of situations past and present. Some are expository. Some advocate. Some try to work toward intervention. Still, they are stories of my determination, decision, and design. Their data are analyzed by me toward a story I hope to tell. Their graphics are based on the communication of that story.

The most challenging and rewarding part of this learning curve has been adjusting my thinking away from a story I might want to tell. My want to editorialize through cartography must be shushed in favor of examining what cartography might do to democratize urban information, in favor of interpreting a dataset for any and all of its uses rather than my immediate use, in favor of showing the situation on the ground so that it might be inhabited, and in favor of creating a tool that enhances the experience of urban space rather than replacing it.

In this way, what I’m doing and learning at Urbanscale is not a step away from argument or advocacy through mapping. Far from it, in fact. My work, now more than ever, is advocating for a mutually beneficial and more transparent relationship between cities and their citizens. And I’m reconfirming, in light of current events and in light of my own learning, that considering the means toward mediating and enabling that relationship -- whether those means are tools or processes or spaces -- might just be what it is to consider living together, living in cities. In addition to the development of a citizenry and the development of a city, we must consider the development of their interaction. We’re responsible for all three elements, before we can rely on each other and say, “Here. Here is your city. Do with it what you will.”

2010 Housing Variables : Dot Density by block

2010 Population and Housing Variables by block

photo: DoctorTongs via Flickr (click image for source)

Upfront Disclaimer: This is not a short post.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I (like more or less everyone else) have had the Occupy Everywhere movement on my mind. I’m grateful for the courage many members of the ninety-nine percent have shown in their willingness to share what we so often don’t talk about in public. I am encouraged by the members of the one percent who understand that by and large their circumstances are the result of some work but also a great deal of luck. I am inspired that a movement can still emerge in this country without partisan politics and without hierarchical leadership. I am proud to witness concerned and concerted action when so many feel they lack agency and recourse as individuals. I am appalled when nonviolent assembly against real and significant economic injustice can be met with the organized deterrence of a (pseudo?-)police state. I am (somewhat selfishly) reinvigorated by the implications of a movement reliant and predicated on the availability and appropriation of space. I am hopeful the occupiers and those of us who stand with them will be heard.

While there is much that I could sit here and rant about w/r/t the Occupy movement, it seems like a perfect opportunity for two specific and related topics: (1) the continuation of my ongoing discussion of the degradation on a crucial freedom in this country and (2) the repetition of what many who have worked with me have heard about the utility of measures of distribution.

On the first: In the United States, we have nominal and cliche rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It seems ridiculous to explain how the last in that trifecta is today just a bait-and-switch April Fool’s prank played on most Americans. The so-called pursuit of happiness (and the American Dream it embodies) is a farce these days as structural barriers to entry can and do prevent its attainment from birth for many. As a means toward understanding that prank, we can focus on the concept of liberty. "Freedom" in its many incarnations is the ultimate American trope and rallying cry. Concepts of freedom and liberty allow for American individualism, American capitalism, and the American Bill of Rights. But today -- in a time when corporations are afforded the rights and freedoms of citizens, in a time when financialization structures are often impenetrable and opaque so as to prevent their oversight and use by average citizens, in a time when the freedom to lobby is more recognized than the rights of constituents for legitimately representative representation, in a time when the opportunities presented by the best education are only available to those who already have access to those opportunities as indicated by their ability to afford tuition -- today, one of the most impactful freedoms in the United States is financial freedom.

Figure 2: Gini Index of Various Countries during different years. (data source: US CIA World Fact Book)

This comparison includes all the countries for which the CIA offers Gini data between 0.40 and 0.50. That's it. The only other G8 country within this range is Russia. Where are the other G8s? Answering questions like that means things will start to get embarrassing: Americans must begin to realize that our national wealth and financial system along with the quality of life they imply are not globally up to par.

The G8 Nations and their Gini Scores, according to the CIA: 

• Canada: 0.321 (2005)
• France: 0.327 (2008)
• Germany: 0.270 (2006)
• Italy: 0.320 (2006)
• Japan: 0.376 (2008)
• Russia: 0.422 (2009)
• United Kingdom: 0.340 (2005)
• United States of America: 0.450 (2007)

According to the US Census Bureau, the US's Gini index score in 2010 was 0.469, which puts us squarely even with Equador. In fact, only three other G20 nations (Russia, Argentina, and China) have a Gini score within the range shown on Figure 2.

What am I getting at? While I admit the dangerously broad-brush language I'm about to use here, those among us who let blind national pride obscur our perception of the effects of our policies on our way of life may soon need to accept the notion that this Home of the Free is not the freest place on the planet. The American Dream is largely founded on the promise of financial freedom. Today, opportunity comes at a cost that most of us can't afford, and that problem can be inferred from the Gini Index. The condition wherein the already wealthy continue to accumulate wealth while the have-nots slip into having even less is not only characterized by this statistic, but exacerbated by the reality it describes. The thing is not that the have-nots lack access to opportunity; it is that access is offered with an interest rate, and Americans will purchase their opportunity on credit in the hopes of chasing that Dream unaware that they'll be shackled with debt they will not be able to repay.

We watch our population grow, our gross domestic product, our stock markets. For decades we've watched these numbers grow and felt confident in our prosperity in global comparison. Sadly, we've neglected several other indicators -- those that have been steadily aligning the US with much of the developing world. And in a year when citizens around the world have protested for their freedoms, it is no wonder that protest has come here.