Tag: city

Urban Informatics and Visualization at UC Berkeley

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2015-08-20
10 Comments on Urban Informatics and Visualization at UC Berkeley

The fall semester begins next week at UC Berkeley. For the third year in a row, Paul Waddell and I will be teaching CP255: Urban Informatics and Visualization, and this is my first year as co-lead instructor.

This masters-level course trains students to analyze urban data, develop indicators, conduct spatial analyses, create data visualizations, and build Paris open data interactive web maps. To do this, we use the Python programming language, open source analysis and visualization tools, and public data.

This course is designed to provide future city planners with a toolkit of technical skills for quantitative problem solving. We don’t require any prior programming experience – we teach this from the ground up – but we do expect prior knowledge of basic statistics and GIS.

Update, September 2017: I am no longer a Berkeley GSI, but Paul’s class is ongoing. Check out his fantastic teaching materials in his GitHub repo. From my experiences here, I have developed a course series on urban data science with Python and Jupyter, available in this GitHub repo.

Tags academia, anaconda, arcgis, berkeley, cartodb, city, code for america, data, data science, geocoding, geopandas, geopy, geospatial, gis, github, javascript, land use, leaflet, localdata, mapbox, maps, matplotlib, modeling, numpy, pandas, planning, projection, qgis, science, scikit-learn, scipy, scrapy, shapely, smart cities, socrata, statistics, tilemill, tutorial, urban, urban design, urban planning, visualization, wordpress

Travel

The Beautiful Cities of Eastern Europe

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2015-07-15
4 Comments on The Beautiful Cities of Eastern Europe

Western Europe gets all the attention, but that means it also gets all the tourists. Here are some of my favorite old cities that I’ve visited on the other side of the continent, along with a few photos I took while there. Granted, a few of these places are now squarely on the backpacker circuit, but many remain underexplored. What they all share is an incredible, exhilarating sense of urbanism — old and new.

Eastern Europe itself is hard to define. Competing designations might include only the former Soviet states, or all the formerly communist European nations. Others might separate a limited Eastern Europe out from Central and Southeastern Europe. Here I will play fast and loose with the geographic boundaries: these are just cities somewhere vaguely toward the eastern side of the continent. Apologies to any readers whose country is usually considered a part of Central or Southern Europe.

First up: Mostar. A small city in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mostar is most famous for its medieval Ottoman center and its Old Bridge, or Stari Most:

Tags albania, architecture, athens, austria, belgrade, berat, bosnia, bratislava, city, croatia, czech, dubrovnik, europe, greece, istanbul, kiev, kosovo, kotor, krakow, macedonia, montenegro, mostar, neighborhood, ohrid, planning, poland, prague, prizren, sarajevo, serbia, slovakia, town, travel, turkey, ukraine, urban, vienna, village

Travel

Off the Beaten Path in Myanmar

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2015-06-24
No Comments on Off the Beaten Path in Myanmar

I recently had the opportunity to travel across Myanmar for the first time. It’s a fascinating country, only recently emerging from decades of isolation. Travelers here today are greeted with the first few baby steps toward a tourism industry, as well some of the kindest people and most spectacular sights in Asia.

Myanmar is not the easiest country to approach. It remains, effectively, a military dictatorship wracked with corruption and abuse. Government officials control the airlines and hotels for personal profit. Large swaths of eastern Myanmar are dedicated to opium plantations funneling foreign currency into the pockets of powerful officials. Even its name is controversial: many foreign governments still officially recognize only its traditional name, Burma, as a political statement against the authoritarian regime that renamed it Myanmar in 1989.

Tags architecture, asia, burma, city, design, myanmar, photography, travel, urban, village

Travel

Hong Kong at Night

Hong Kong is a remarkable place. It is the 4th-densest sovereign state or self-governing territory in the world (in 1st place is its neighbor across the delta: Macau). Yet this density is fantastically constrained by the mountains and the sea into narrow, snaking corridors of high-rises wherever the terrain permits. At no time is this unique urban development better seen than at night, when Hong Kong lights up like a carnival.

I took these photos from the top of Victoria Peak on Hong Kong island and from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade on the Kowloon peninsula, using long exposures of between 3 and 12 seconds.

Tags architecture, asia, china, city, design, hong kong, neighborhood, night, skyline, skyscrapers, travel, urban, urban design