State of Place’s Origin Story

While State of Place was established in 2017 as a software company, its history and origins date back over two decades, when our Founder, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo began her Ph.D work at UC Irvine in 2001. Mariela sought a Ph.D. in urban planning, focused on the relationship between urban design and behavior, as she aimed to quantify how the built environment influenced people’s perceptions, feelings, and choices, and in turn, how that translated into value, broadly defined to include social, economic, environmental and health value. Based on her lived experiences growing up in the low-middle income suburbs of Miami, Mariela felt first-hand how living in divested communities could impact all aspects of quality of life. While the exponential power of place to shape our everyday lives was painfully evident to her, what she didn’t understand was, why, in light of that, where we not investing in better urban design and community-scale infrastructure.

Through her academic work, Mariela worked to produce empirical evidence that quantified the value of the built environment so as to better advocate for more livable, equitable, and sustainable places. In 2001, she began work assessing the impact of California’s Safe Route to School program, using a limited measure of the built environment. In 2003, she had the opportunity to work on a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation via the Active Living Research program that aimed to create an objective audit tool by which to measure the quality of the built environment, specifically so that researchers could test their hypotheses about the links between urban design, physical activity, and overall health. This work led to the development of the Irvine Minnesota Inventory (IMI), a peer-reviewed comprehensive, objective walkability audit tool widely used by researchers. Now, while the tool was designed primarily for academics, practitioners were also interested in assessing the quality of the built environments of their communities, however the tool lacked an analytical framework - meaning, it didn’t offer any guidance for how to use the data being collected using the tool. As Mariela was using the tool in her own research, guided by her groundbreaking conceptual model she published in 2005 called "The Hierarchy of Walking Needs," she developed an algorithm to aggregate the IMI data into an easy to understand score, which could be used in research and practice - this score would ultimately become the State of Place Index (which pre-dated Walk Score).

Meanwhile, Mariela established an urban design-behavior consulting firm called Urban Imprint in 2005, while she was still in grad school, which focused on translating existing and custom research on the links between the built environment and health - broadly defined to include physical, mental, social, community, environmental, and fiscal health - into evidence-based design and development solutions. Subsequently, in 2007, while a Postdoctoral Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, she began working with Chris Leinberger and the Brookings Institution to quantify the economic value of urban design. In 2012, now a Research Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, she co-authored “Walk this Way,” which tied the State of Place Index to real estate premiums and social equity. It was while conducting this work that Mariela first realized that State of Place could be offered as a stand-alone tech-enabled tool to help citymakers not only diagnose the quality of the built environment but also quantify the value of improving it.

Subsequently, Mariela immersed herself in the world of urbantech and venture-backed entrepreneurship at NYU. She began focusing on customer development and working closely with a handful of very early State of Place customers to begin to inform a product roadmap for what State of Place might look like as software. After a few years of intimately working with her pioneering customers, in 2016, Mariela received a grant from the highly competitive Small Business Research program via the National Science Foundation, which funded the initial development of the State of Place software platform, ultimately launched in 2017. Since then, her team has helped over 45 citymakers use data to create more just, thriving places more effectively, efficiently, and inclusively. State of Place has worked across the public and private sectors in the US, Europe, and Asia, ranging from rural, suburban, and urban communities, with planning, transportation, community and economic development, sustainability, innovation, and public safety departments, on a variety of projects and processes, including comprehensive, master, and area plans, pedestrian, bicycle, and transit plans, rezoning, community engagement, capital improvement planning, and more.