AAG session call for papers: “Urban spatial analytics: Toward problem-driven methods instead of methods-driven problems.”

I’m organizing a session with Elizabeth Delmelle that asks: how can urban data science and spatial analytics meaningfully address cities’ “wicked problems” instead of just reaching for this year’s shiny new tool or the easy data set we can just grab and analyze?

Cities today face challenges that feel intractable. Despite significant progress in urban data science and spatial analytics over the past 20 years, the problems tackled by this scholarship too often prioritize the “low-hanging fruit” publication pipeline of letting easily available data and trendy methods determine the research question rather than confronting urgent but arduous challenges. Methods-driven research that gestures toward real-world applications frequently features policy implications wholly detached from the political constraints and implementation realities that practitioners must navigate.

We seek papers (theoretical, empirical, or viewpoint/commentary) that challenge and critique this status quo. This is an opportunity to experiment, try new things, attempt something hard that may not work, present null findings and research failures – as long as you propose something ambitious to use spatial methods to meaningfully improve urban living.

Submissions should use real-world problems to drive the methods (rather than letting preferred methods determine the research problem) in urban data science and spatial analytics. Example topics could include:

  • spatial data storytelling for societal change
  • data visualization to foster urban political conversations in an era of polarization
  • evidence-based communication to persuade local stakeholders for the public good
  • changing people’s minds about a crisis with frozen battlelines, such as climate change
  • tangibly attenuating an urban wicked problem like homelessness or unaffordability
  • shifting negative public narratives around cities that run counter to empirical evidence
  • communicating the value of planning, funding, and infrastructure in an era of budget crises and defunding
  • lessening (rather than merely describing) inequity in deeply segregated and unequal cities
  • anything else that ambitiously tries to address a big problem facing cities through the tools of urban data science and spatial analytics that has the potential to produce meaningful and plausible change

Where/When : this session will be in-person at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, March 17-21, 2026, San Francisco, California.

How to submit : submit your abstract to AAG by its Oct 30 deadline. Then email your abstract and AAG PIN to both Geoff (boeing at usc dot edu) and Elizabeth (delmelle at design dot upenn dot edu) by Nov 1 for us to consider for the session. Session participants will be notified by Nov 20.