urban planning

An AI drawing of a cite with buildings organized in circles.

Using AI to Design Cities

Mark Altaweel

Researchers now are trying to use artificial intelligence techniques, including deep reinforcement learning, to design more efficient and sustainable urban spaces.

Hiker walking along a narrow trail in Canyonlands National Park.

What are Desire Paths?

Elizabeth Borneman

Desire paths (also known as social trails) form when people or animals consistently take direct routes instead of using designated paths.

Image of central Melbourne in 2016. Photo: the International Space Station.

These Cities are the Most Unaffordable Places to Buy a House in the World

Caitlin Dempsey

Urban Reform Institute and Frontier Centre for Public Policy evaluated housing markets for 92 metropolitan areas in eight countries to see how affordable they area.

A view of a suburban subdivision being developed in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Image: USGS, public domain.

What are 15-Minute Cities?

Elizabeth Borneman

What if you could get from home to your job to the grocery store to the park, all in 15 minutes?

An Urban Centre is defined as: all cells with a local population density of at least 1,500 people/km2 or with a local built-up area share of at least 0.50, and clustered in a 4-connectivity object of at least 50,000 people or all cells resulting from 3x3 median filtering or by gap filling < 15 km2 (median filtering and gap filling applied to cluster of cells that met the previous logics).

Improving Urban Decision Making with Open Earth Observations

GIS Contributor

Steven Ramage, Head of External Relations, Group on Earth Observations (GEO), outlines innovative partnerships and activities GEO has been working on globally using open Earth data, GIS, and cloud technologies.

Cabins in this ski resort are only listed by numbers, causing confusion among tourists and emergency responders. Source: Knut Røsrud / NRK

With Only Numbers and No Street Names, This Norwegian Town is Confusing Tourists

Caitlin Dempsey

A Norwegian municipality decided to only give the chalets in a development numbers with no corresponding street names.  

What is Necrotecture?

Caitlin Dempsey

Necrotecture is an urban planning coined termed by Rowland Atkinson to describe the "dead residential space" created by a high density of mostly vacant residential dwellings.

Free Urban Planning GIS Book and Exercises

Caitlin Dempsey

An open access book focusing on the use of GIS in sustainable urban planning and management includes six chapters containing exercises and GIS data.

Using GIS to Study Gentrification

Mark Altaweel

Amid US gentrification trends, municipalities are increasingly using GIS to study its impacts.

Review | A History of the Future

G.T. Dempsey

The History of Future presents a survey of the history of futuristic predictions from the nineteenth century on through the first two-thirds of the twentieth, in the English-speaking world

UK housing construction volume.

Visualizing the Impact of Gentrification

Liam Oakwood

Graphic designer Herwig Scherabon has developed a book visualizing the impacts of gentrification in a number of cities in the United States and United Kingdom. Combining public access data and research with crisp visuals, Scherabon illustrates the spatial distribution of gentrification and examines the different issues at play.

Urban sprawl in Milton, Ontario, Canada. Photo: Suburban developments in Milton, Ontario by SimonP, under license CC BY-SA 3.0, MediaWiki Commons, 2009.

Defining Urban Sprawl

Elizabeth Borneman

The urban sprawl concept caused researchers to dive into figuring out what city in the world is the biggest based on the size of its urban sprawl.

Sub-surface Mapping and Subterranean Data Representation

Olivia Harne

ArcGIS Online advances sub-surface mapping with 3D options, enhancing design, accessibility, and customization for urban planning and transportation.

Using GIS in Government Guides

Liam Oakwood

Here are two guides for using GIS in government.

View of a section of Berkeley, California from the Fast 3D City Model Generation, Christian Früh.

Automatic Acquisition of 3D City Models

SBL

This concept paper on the automatic acquisition of 3D city models was written by Venugopalan Nair who is the Senior Manager of Geo Spatial Services at SBL.

A picture of open water at a sewage treatment plant.

Tracking Populations Using Sewage

Elizabeth Borneman

Scientists and researchers have recently begun tracking the populations of cities in the United States using the amount of sewage produced.

Songdo is a new South Korean "smart city" build from scratch on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land. Map from Songdo IBD.

How to Build a Smart City in Twenty Steps

Elizabeth Borneman

Lessons learned from urban planning projects around the world have been summarized into a short, 20-step do-it-yourself guide to building a Smart City.

GIS is commonly used in urban planning to assists with land use planning and development zoning maps. Zoning map from the City of Cambridge, MA.

GIS in Urban Planning

GIS Contributor

Frank Stafford, a graduate of Cambridge University with a background in Civil Engineering writes about why GIS is being used in Urban Planning.

Willow Oak in City Park. Photo: USGS, public domain.

When Streets Have No Trees

Caitlin Dempsey

The presence of trees in cities yields multiple benefits.

The Urban Observatory Uses GIS to Seek to Better Understand Cities

Rebecca Maxwell

The Urban Observatory is a live museum that allows access to a large amount of data about major cities around the world. The observatory allows users to compare and contrast a wide variety of GIS data covering areas such as water distribution, power grids, street networks, population density, public transit, and open public spaces.

What is Geodesign?

Caitlin Dempsey

Recent progress with the use of technology to analyse data from various sorts to a very fine level of granularity ...