Category: Academia

Categories
Academia

Access to the Exclusive City

I recently coauthored an article in Urban Studies with Julia Harten titled “Access to the Exclusive City: Home Sharing as an Affordable Housing Strategy.” We examined how shared housing serves increasingly diverse populations as a pathway into otherwise unaffordable housing submarkets.

From the abstract:

Home sharing, particularly via online platforms, is becoming a mainstream housing strategy as social processes evolve and housing costs rise. Recent research has studied shared rentals as a modality for students and kin-based households, as one strategy among diversifying pathways to housing and as a social phenomenon. However, we still know little about whether it actually creates opportunities for home seekers in unaffordable markets. Analysing online rental listings in Los Angeles, we find that shared rentals are both more affordable and more widely available across diverse neighbourhoods than traditional whole-unit rentals. Shared rentals have historically been understudied due to their limited data trail, but they offer important entryways into unaffordable markets. We argue for shared housing research to shift its traditional focus away from students and young adults and towards a broader exploration of the diverse populations that may benefit from or depend on shared housing.

For more, check out the article.

Categories
Academia

The Structure of Street Networks

I recently coauthored an article titled “A Review of the Structure of Street Networks” with Marc Barthelemy in Transport Findings. On a personal note, Marc has long been a personal hero of mine and was the 2nd most cited author in my dissertation, after Mike Batty (who I also recently had the pleasure of collaborating with).

Street network orientation in Chicago (low entropy), New Orleans (medium entropy), and Rome (high entropy) with polar histograms.From the abstract:

We review measures of street network structure proposed in the recent literature, establish their relevance to practice, and identify open challenges facing researchers. These measures’ empirical values vary substantially across world regions and development eras, indicating street networks’ geometric and topological heterogeneity.

For more, check out the article.

Categories
Academia

Urban Form, Transport, Environment and Health

I recently coauthored an article in Environmental Research, titled “Exploring the Nexus of Urban Form, Transport, Environment and Health in Large-Scale Urban Studies: A State-of-the-Art Scoping Review.” This arose from a symposium in Sitges, Spain which I was invited to last year by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.

From the abstract:

As the world becomes increasingly urbanised, there is recognition that public and planetary health relies upon a ubiquitous transition to sustainable cities. Disentanglement of the complex pathways of urban design, environmental exposures, and health, and the magnitude of these associations, remains a challenge. A state-of-the-art account of large-scale urban health studies is required to shape future research priorities and equity- and evidence-informed policies. The purpose of this review was to synthesise evidence from large-scale urban studies focused on the interaction between urban form, transport, environmental exposures, and health. This review sought to determine common methodologies applied, limitations, and future opportunities for improved research practice. Based on a literature search, 2958 articles were reviewed that covered three themes of: urban form; urban environmental health; and urban indicators. Studies were prioritised for inclusion that analysed at least 90 cities to ensure broad geographic representation and generalisability. Of the initially identified studies, following expert consultation and exclusion criteria, 66 were included. The complexity of the urban ecosystem on health was evidenced from the context dependent effects of urban form variables on environmental exposures and health. Compact city designs were generally advantageous for reducing harmful environmental exposure and promoting health, with some exceptions. Methodological heterogeneity was indicative of key urban research challenges; notable limitations included exposure and health data at varied spatial scales and resolutions, limited availability of local-level sociodemographic data, and the lack of consensus on robust methodologies that encompass best research practice. Future urban environmental health research for evidence-informed urban planning and policies requires a multi-faceted approach. Advances in geospatial and AI-driven techniques and urban indicators offer promising developments; however, there remains a wider call for increased data availability at local-levels, transparent and robust methodologies of large-scale urban studies, and greater exploration of urban health vulnerabilities and inequities.

For more, check out the article.

Categories
Academia

AI and NLP for Urban Mixed Methods Research

One area where urban AI research seems promising is in mixed methods work. For example, it’s hard to use traditional qualitative methods on really large text data sets because of the overwhelming manual labor involved. But if you could train a model to do, say, topic labeling for you, you’d be able to (potentially) analyze nearly unlimited text data nearly instantly after that initial training work. The mixed methods holy grail.

I coauthored an article recently in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems with Madison Lore and Julia Harten which takes up this challenge. Using Los Angeles’s housing crisis and rental market as a case study, we demonstrate how and when modern AI and NLP techniques can generate qualitative insights on par with traditional manual techniques, but at a far larger scale and requiring far less labor.

Continue reading “AI and NLP for Urban Mixed Methods Research”
Categories
Academia

Geospatial Tool Building

My new article “The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building” has been published in Transactions in GIS (free PDF). I originally presented this paper as the 8th annual Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG annual meeting last year. I argue that tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to build better tools. Better tools and data models, spearheaded by academics, can help infuse theory into our field’s quantitative work where it is too often lacking. But if we want better tools, we have to build them. It is not ESRI’s job to satisfy all the theoretical needs of the spatial sciences.

Continue reading “Geospatial Tool Building”
Categories
Academia

AnyConnect VPN on Linux

I run Linux on my school computer, which I brought home to get work done during the stay-at-home order. But when I tried to set up a VPN connection, I was surprised to discover that USC IT didn’t seem to provide a Linux client for Cisco AnyConnect. When I contacted them to ask how to connect, I was informed that “at this time IT doesn’t support Linux.” Shrug emoji.

Fortunately I do support Linux, so if anyone else wants to connect to the USC AnyConnect VPN, here’s how. You could roll your own solution using OpenConnect and a vpnc-script, but that’s complicated. Instead, you can download a current Linux client for Cisco AnyConnect here (you’re welcome). Install it and run it.

You want to connect to sslvpn.usc.edu (the normal vpn.usc.edu server does not work here). To log in, enter your normal USC username and password. For “second password” open your Duo Security app, generate a two-factor code, and enter it here. And ta-da, you’re in.

Linux Cisco AnyConnect VPN client

Categories
Academia

We’re Hiring

USC’s Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis is hiring! We’re looking for an environmental planner, broadly construed, at the Assistant/Associate Professor level. I am on the search committee and happy to answer any questions. You can apply online.

Continue reading “We’re Hiring”
Categories
Academia

New Position at USC

I’m happy to announce that I have accepted a tenure-track offer from the University of Southern California as an assistant professor in the Sol Price School’s Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis. I will be starting in the Fall and moving to Los Angeles later this summer! Looking forward to heading back home to California.

Categories
Academia

AAG Transactions in GIS Plenary

Manhattan, New York City, New York street network, bearing, orientation from OpenStreetMap mapped with OSMnx and PythonI am giving the Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG conference this afternoon. I’ll be reflecting on urban science, spatial networks, and tool-building in academia, focusing on OSMnx. A paper will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime, for any interested plenary session attendees or other folks, here are a few links to more info and related resources:

Getting started

What is OSMnx? What does it do? Here’s a succinct overview.

The easiest way to get started with street network modeling and analysis in OSMnx is with this docker image and these example/tutorial Jupyter notebooks. The OSMnx software documentation is available here and this journal article introduces it more formally.

Continue reading “AAG Transactions in GIS Plenary”
Categories
Academia

Spring Teaching

Happy new year! In the spring semester I’ll be teaching two new courses: Big Data for Cities and Advanced Spatial Analysis of Urban Systems. The former serves as a sort of gateway course to Northeastern’s urban informatics master’s program, introducing students to urban theories and scientific methods of analyzing urban data. The latter introduces advanced students to a computational workflow of spatial analysis and statistics with Python, PostGIS, and other open-source tools. I’ll be creating my lectures as Jupyter notebooks and will share a GitHub link soon when they’re all together.