Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP)
Assistant Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Assistant Professor of Technology-based Urban Planning
2022.spring | Capstone Studio: After the {Water, Data} Deluge Show More
After a natural disaster, the planning and prioritization of early recovery efforts are often difficult and can be misaligned with a community’s needs. Yet, planning has a unique role in building adaptation and resilience, especially in communities with high vulnerabilities, especially in the initial stages of recovery. Many researchers and responders have pointed to the emergence of digital data and emerging computational tools to assist in discovering and prioritizing needs in these communities. Still, there lacks a comprehensive investigation of how these may or may not be opportunities to shape policy decisions. Collaborating with the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center (NDPTC), the students proposed, tested, and validated emerging approaches to analyzing digital data, including satellite imagery, social media, and crowdsourced sources, to aid recovery prioritization. The project used the contemporaneous recovery planning efforts of government, non-profits, and community groups after Hurricane Ida as a case study to test and evaluate these technologies. Through interviews with residents, professionals, government officials, and advocates in St. Charles, Jefferson, and Lafourche Parishes, Louisiana, the students adopted a “Whole of Society” perspective on recovery planning and technology development. The impacts of this project go beyond a single planning/technology evaluation for the NDPTC. The students brought urban planning values to machine learning (all the while learning these technologies themselves), and their outcomes can shape future disaster research through the breadth of results for various audiences. 📸: Students from the course produced a public-facing website, report and Github repository. 🏅: The work was recognized with a 2022 Michigan Association of Planning (Michigan APA) Graduate Student Project award. |
2022.spring 2021.spring* |
Planning Representation and Communication Show More
Situated within the spatial practices of urban studies and city planning, this course is a hands-on introduction to design principles, theory, software techniques, and strategies for communicating data to various audiences. Classes will be a combination of lectures, design workshops, and labs. Through readings, design critique, and code assignments, students will learn how visual representations can help understand complex data and design, and evaluate visualizations for analysis or communication. Topics include visual perception, exploratory data analysis, task analysis, graphic design, narrative, etc. The course will not only introduce a suite of programs and skills, as visual languages play a much larger role in mediating our interactions, facilitating, and constraining our awareness of the systems we are embedded in. This course will actively maneuver through the inequal agency afforded by (and limitations to) visual and narrative representations for different communities. The course will ask in what ways representation is an act of advocacy or disenfranchisement. What are the effects of inequities in indexical data collection manifested in visual and narrative communication? More specifically, the course engages with how representation—in its practice of describing existing conditions or proposing imagined possibilities—can transcend supposed neutrality and promote the inclusion of communities otherwise excluded or counterweight the underlying data’s biases. |
2021.fall 2020.fall* |
Introduction to Urban Informatics Show More
This course provides students an introduction to the technical, theoretical and practice-based dimensions of urban informatics, an interdisciplinary field of research and practice that uses data and information technology for the analysis, management, planning, inhabitation, and usability of cities. Situated at the intersection of digital technologies and the human environments, this course situates itself at the emergence of new disciplines— urban science, big data, smart cities, civic technologies among others. The course is centered around technical lectures interspersed with guest presentations and class debates grouped into five topical categories—data acquisition, numerical analysis, mapping and spatialization, visualization and interaction, and civic technologies. Students will also have an opportunity to develop their project—based on their research question—that combines these technical aspects in a final analysis and demonstration. Within the seminar and lecture sessions, we will discuss the policy and design questions around the creation of, and use of urban data within the language of urbanism. Seminar and lecture sessions cover topics related to the context and practice models associated with urban technologies, including civic technology, indicators, smart cities, and performance management. |
2021.spring* | Advanced GIS: Intermediate Spatial Analysis Show More
The proliferation of technologies has brought a concomitant wealth of spatiotemporal data. Within the context of this wealth of data, and the tools by which we can explore the This course will draw upon various disciplines to interrogate the state-of-the-discussion of GIScience as well as extend it to the realm of “social physics” and network science (as a subset of topics from complexity science), as the volume and velocity extend our opportunity to extract useful information from digital traces of human activity. This course will, therefore, also extend to teach algorithms to model and to characterize complex networks, as it is applied to questions of urbanism, planning and design within the domain of physical space. However, with the nascency of these practices, this course situates itself in the uncomfortable middle of providing both the methods for answering complex socio-spatial questions and critiquing them within a professional practice discourse. tl;dr: We will critically explore and discuss advanced methods in analyzing spatiotemporal data within an urban context, with practice in |
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP)
Assistant Professor (Visiting)
2020.spring* 2019.spring |
Urban Informatics II (aka “The Sensor Class”) Show More
tl;dr: Build sensors. Consider how data can support agendas in spatial and environmental justice, as well as enumerating the use of public space. Play as a critical practice will be our M.O. In recent years, interest in “public life” — people’s daily interactions within the built environment (Gehl 2011) — has been renewed as urban spaces are being transformed into areas for recreation, socializing, and human activity. However, many commonly-accepted theories in environmental psychology and planning were generated from limited observations — limited by time and space. This course asks in what ways sensing technologies can validate or challenge these theories of public space and social interaction, and how do we intersect them with aspects of environmental quality and justice, sustainability, equity, and overall general well-being? Participants in this hands-on workshop will design and implement prototypes for the creation of data on human activity, environmental conditions, and quality. Students will also learn methodologies to analyze and present the data. We will use the university context as a living laboratory to test and reevaluate the commonly-accepted theories of public life while engaging in critical conversations that balance the positive aspects of better-informed design and policy with the challenges concerning data ethics, surveillance, and privacy. 📸: The course website for 2019 and 2020 archives critical and process work from the course, while selected student work can be found on the respective course pages for 2019 and 2020. course website, and select work can be found on the GSAPP website. |
2020.spring* | Advanced Spatial Analytics Show More
The proliferation of technologies has brought a concomitant wealth of spatiotemporal data. Within the context of this wealth of data, and the tools by which we can explore the data, this course seeks to introduce students to advanced techniques in creating, utilizing, and critiquing methodologies for addressing questions relevant to urbanism. Aimed at covering a variety of topics in both practice and in research, the course operates with a two-fold mission: (1) to critically discuss the theories, concepts, and research methods involved in spatial analysis and (2) to learn the techniques necessary for engaging those theories and deploying those methods. The class will work to meet this mission with a dedicated focus on the urban environment and the spatial particularities and relationships that arise from the urban context. This course will draw upon various disciplines to interrogate the state-of-the-discussion of GIScience as well as extend it to the realm of “social physics” and network science (as a subset of topics from complexity science), as the volume and velocity extend our opportunity to extract useful information from digital traces of human activity. This course will, therefore, also extend to teach algorithms to model and characterize complex networks, as it is applied to questions of urbanism, planning, and design within the domain of physical space. However, with the nascency of these practices, this course situates itself in the uncomfortable middle of providing both the methods for answering complex socio-spatial questions and critiquing them within a professional practice discourse. tl;dr: We will critically explore and discuss advanced methods in analyzing spatiotemporal data within urban contexts. 📸: Select student posters may be found on the GSAPP course description. |
2019.fall | Thesis Workshop |
2019.spring | Mobility Workshop: Data and Urban Mobility Futures Show More
Large-scale human mobility data can be collected from mobile phones, road surveillance cameras, and location-based applications while opportunistic methods are revealing movement patterns from the data exhaust of our everyday lives. Turning such raw data into knowledge can provide insights about how cities (and its citizens) operate. The goal of this class is to expose you to general methods that extract useful information from digital traces of human movement. It covers numerical methods to ascertain the structure inherent in daily activities within a population. Lectures are reinforced with case studies and exercises, using data sets from actual applications. At the same time, we will critique and analyze the limitations of such data-centric methodologies to foster a more productive—and human-centered—definition of mobility. Broadly, we question in what ways are current techniques of understanding human mobility failing to address questions of access, equity, and even pleasurability/sanity for those who have to move across the urban landscape? In what ways can digital data reveal patterns that may assist us in understanding the lived experience of mobility, and how can we leverage this information? In what ways do we evaluate and/or utilize (near) future solutions such as autonomy and distributed/networked mobility in the context of human-centrism? This course is not intended to be a transportation modeling class, but rather an application of data analysis, locative technology development, data visualization and communication, and interpretation by drawing from the context and challenges of urban mobility. It is for that reason this course addresses a multitude of contexts—from public transportation data from open data platforms to sensor-generated data on activities in a discrete location within the public realm. Through readings and discussions, we will contextualize the opportunities for future practice as well as the limitations of these quantitative processes. The course will question policy, and theorize new mechanisms for evaluating mobility, holistically. |
2019.fall 2018.fall |
Introductions to Urban Data and Informatics Show More
With the proliferation of digital data, new opportunities are being availed to measure, understand and propose changes to the communities in which we live, work, and play. This has led to a host of new terms and disciplines—urban science, big data, smart cities, civic technologies—that seek to understand the intersection of digital technologies and the human environment. These forces have created new opportunities for planners to make data actionable through analysis and visualization, as well as avenues for new types of practice, including startups and data advocacy. Furthermore, many of the most urgent problems facing cities—including those as a result of climate change—are problems known, presently, through their representations in the output of predictive models. These forces and challenges have placed an imperative for planners to develop the facilities to collect, analyze, and communicate (visually and textually) using these large and often-messy data sets. This Introduction to Urban Data and Informatics is intended to provide students an entrée into the technical, theoretical, and practice-based dimensions of data analysis in cities. The course is centered around technical lectures interspersed with guest presentations and class debates grouped into five topical categories—data acquisition, numerical analysis, spatialization, visualization and interaction, and civic technologies. Students will also have an opportunity to develop their project—based on their research question—that combines these technical aspects in a final analysis and visualization. Within the seminar and lecture sessions, we will discuss the policy and design questions around the creation of and use of urban data within the language of planning. 📸: Select work from 2019 can be found on the GSAPP website. |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lecturer in Urban Design and Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
2018.spring | Urban Design Seminar: Challenges + Entrants at Urbanism’s Edge Show More
In recent years, the practice of city design and development has become increasingly fractured and pluralized. The spatial practices that are traditionally ascribed to giving form to the city—those nominally of urban designers, city planners, architects, and real estate developers—have also been taken up by new entrants—startups, and technology companies, among others. At the same time, the spatial practitioners have responded and adapted to the radical technological, social, and environmental changes by seizing opportunities and adopting new practices at the frontier of urbanism, including, reciprocally, the development of new technologies and the creation of new mechanisms for participation. In this time of flux, what are the limits of disciplinary promiscuity, and what are the necessary models of collaboration, responsibility, and expertise? The Urban Design Seminar is intended to interrogate pressing issues in contemporary urban design through the examination of the work of innovative, leading practitioners in the professions of urban design, architecture, planning, and landscape. Projects and topics discussed will include the role of politics and agency in the advocacy of space, new models of development and ownership, emerging practices in the design of global cities, and design’s accommodation of global capital, and investment, among other topics. Students will be encouraged and required to propose agendas in the milieu of an evolving design practice that contributes to the discourse of the class. Connected with the 2018 City Design and Development Forum, the series aims to simultaneously focus on the outward gaze of architects, city planners, urban designers, real estate developers, and policymakers— that expands the purview of urban design practice—and the inward view of new entrants that are challenging the traditional methods by which cities are shaped. This series seeks to stimulate debate by presenting viewpoints of those who are practicing on opposite sides of the periphery and questions where the delineation between these practices exists. The lectures and panels of the Forum feature numerous public lectures by national or international practitioners, all of whom are prominent figures in the academic, public sector, and private sector realms of urban design. Each of these practitioners works at multiple scales, and their presentations will focus on the content and strategies of current work in their practice. |
2018.spring | MIT designX Entrepreneurship Workshop Show More
Students work in entrepreneurial teams to advance innovative ideas, products, services, and firms oriented to design and the built environment. Lectures, demonstrations, and presentations are supplemented by workshop time, when teams interact individually with instructors and industry mentors, and by additional networking events and field trips. At the end of the term, teams pitch for support of their venture to outside investors, accelerators, companies, or cities. Instruction with Dennis Frenchman and Gilad Rosensweig. More information on designX can be found at https://designx.mit.edu. |
2017.fall | Introduction to Urban Design and Development Show More
This subject introduces graduate students to theories about how cities are formed and the practice of urban design and development, using US and international examples. The subject is organized into two parts: Part 1 analyses the Forces which act to shape and change cities. Starting with Boston as a reference, we will examine key forces affecting contemporary urban development: market economics, social forces, industrial production, the natural environment, public development, private development, and incentives to encourage good design. Finally, we will consider how cities define a vision for their future and how these are articulated in plans and proposals. Lectures will be supplemented by guest presentations, case studies, and field trips. Part 2 surveys key Models of physical form and social intervention that have been deployed to resolve competing forces acting on the city. The models reflect discrete languages of city-making. We will discuss the evolution of each model, practical consequences, and potentials for resolving emerging urban problems and opportunities. The models include Tradition, Art, Efficiency, Ecology, Security, Emotion, and Intelligence. The application of the models will be illustrated in historical and contemporary project cases from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the US. |
Instructor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
2015.spring, 2014.spring | Digital City Workshop Show More
The Digital Revolution is changing the way we live today as radically as the Industrial Revolution did almost two centuries ago. As urbanization accelerates across the world, digital media and information technologies hold huge potential for understanding, designing, and managing cities. Over the last few years, the Senseable City Lab has aimed to anticipate the needs and opportunities that now exist in our cities as they incorporate these new technologies into the built environment as research insights and new design solutions. This seminar looks at issues faced in three sites that are made available to the class by sponsors. Students will conduct and present background research, identify relevant questions, develop project ideas, and evolve them into a detailed set of digital technology and design scenarios. To capture the multi-disciplinary nature of such projects, students are challenged to draw on diverse fields for their proposals, such as city planning, architecture, engineering, computer science, and social science. Projects developed in the seminar will be personally evaluated and critiqued throughout the semester. The concepts discussed in the seminar will be evaluated and critiqued throughout the semester by fellow students, stakeholders, and guest experts. Co-instructed with Carlo Ratti. Guides summarizing the students’ work can be found at the Senseable City Lab. |
Teaching Assistant, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
2013.spring, 2012.spring | Digital City Workshop |
2010.fall | Introduction to Urban Design and Development |
Teaching Assistant Program in Art, Culture and Technology
2010.spring | Advanced Seminar in Networked Cultures and Participatory Media Show More
This hands-on project-based course explores the field of design for networked bodies in physical space. We will examine the ethical, aesthetic, and architectural challenges of actively engaging the dynamic information that defines our networked lives. We use design exercises to develop social interactions, communication devices, and sensory experiences that address critical issues in network culture and society. As groundwork for the projects, we will look at and discuss works of art that engage technology, networks, and performance for the purpose of collective action and urban activism. The ideological framing will draw from theories and practices in new media, cybernetics, information design, film, contemporary art, and fashion. The course is multidisciplinary in nature, combining aspects of theory, art, and technology. Students from various disciplines and backgrounds, including but not limited to art practice, media studies, computer science, design, architecture, and engineering, are welcome. While students are not required to have any specialized technical experience, students will be expected to conceptualize, design, and test projects in real-world or virtual scenarios. It is understood that students may produce a range of projects, from simple small-scale experiments to large-scale public projects depending on their skills and interests. Collaboration and group work are encouraged. In addition to formal documentation of projects, students will be required to do periodic readings and participate in online forums. In addition, students are expected to attend the ACT lectures on Monday nights at Bartos Theater. The lecture series is co-directed with Ute Meta Bauer, and Joan Jonas. Speakers include choreographers Xavier Le Roy and Constanza Macras, founder of “The Bread and Puppet Theater” Peter Schumann, video and performance artists Magda Fernandez and Catherine Sullivan, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, and philosopher Eva Meyer. Instructor: Amber Frid-Jimenez. Course photo gallery on Flickr. |
International Workshops
2012.03 | Co-Coordinator, Smart City Lab Workshop at IDAS, Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea. |
2012.spring | Program Track Tutor, Strelka Institute, Moscow. |
2011.06 | Studio Tutor, Archiprix 2011 Biennial Workshop, Cambridge/New York, USA. |
Invited design critic at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, University of Kansas, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, among others in course subjects in architectural design, urban design, data visualization and information design.