13 Awesome Gifts for City Lovers & Data Geeks
With Thanksgiving coming so late in the game, not only is Giving Tuesday upon us, we are officially into the December holiday season - so that means we’re releasing our 4th annual holiday gift guide plus Giving Tuesday checklist bonus. This list is chock full of unique, awesome gifts, perfect for all the urban planners, data geeks and city-lovers - budding, amateur, or pro-level - in your life! And we’ve included six amazing, deserving orgs that you should donate to this Giving Tuesday and beyond! And finally, what’s the holidays without a free gift - we’re giving away a free demo of our software with a block of your choice. Find out more in the blog!
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7 Reasons We're Thankful for Place this Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! This is our FOURTH annual installment of our gratitude post - one of our favorite posts of the year where State of Place team members give thanks to special places - and people - in their lives. We also want to thank YOU all for trusting us to help you unlock the power of data to make it easier (and more cost effective) to plan, deliver, and invest in awesome places people love! We hope to help many more of you in 2020 and we welcome you to SHARE which PLACE you are grateful for below in the comments!! :)
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And on Dawn of the 8th Year, She Dared
On this our 8th anniversary of State of Place (or at least the concept behind it), we dare to be bold. And we must all dare to be bolder in order to usher in the power of data-driven placemaking to make inclusive, walkable, sustainable places that will help save our climate - and help us do right by the next generation and respond to Greta Thunberg’s passionate, outrage-fueled, indignantly-justified condemnation of our collective lack of action toward mitigating the climate crisis.
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Data-Driven Makeovers - A Street Plans & State of Place Love Affair!
Who doesn’t love a good before after makeover. And if you’re an urbanist, while you may secretly binge Queer Eye’s Fab Five, your love for street transformations is completely out in the open (although I’m equally vociferous about my love of both, haha!)! So what better time than the beginning of Summer to indulge yourself? Working with Street Plans, we chose an awesome mobility meets public art street re-do and Quantified it! Check out how this simple $150K project increased the State of Place of this once-drab block by nearly 30 points and achieved an over 20X ROI and why tactical urbanism meets data-driven citymaking is the key to achieving a truly fab street makeover!
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A Moveable Feast Indeed...One Year Later
Revisiting our tribute to Anthony Bourdain, the consummate Seeker and place-oholic, one year later: “Bourdain had a magical, hypnotizing ability to not just transcendently capture [the "intersection" between food, place, and people] but to exploit it to show us something deeper in ourselves, to inspire empathy for "the other," to connect us to communities far afield and familiar alike, to deliver unto us a sense of place(s), to embolden us to seek out and relish the unknown, to find joy in the simplicity of food - and the human experience.
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Uphill Both Ways...
Like many of you, I’ve been paying keen attention to any and all policies that touch upon sustainability, economics, and quality of life - yup, the Green New Deal in particular, which strikes all three cords. And while I meant to give you my take on the - oh no, it’s missing the tie between land use and transportation outcry - I thought my personal story about how these two factors - in addition to urban design, ahem, that’s missing too guys!! - would bring this home in a different way…perhaps in a more emotional - and hopefully politically expedient way - than simply adding my purely professional take to this already well-laid out critique.
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Data-Driven CityMaking: Evidence-Based Design for People Places
After a little 6-week hiatus, which we promise will end (with a roar) next week, we wanted to make sure we weren’t totally ghosting you and make sure you got your dose of all things placelover and datageek, so please spend the 20 minutes you would have spent with us over the past 6 weeks of blog posts with this seminal Ted-style talk on citymakers must incorporate a more data-driven approach to creating places ALL people love, that can make us happier, healthier, save our planet - and actually maximize the bang (ahem, return on investment) for the buck while at it. PLEASE enjoy! :)
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Mourning Place
Notre. Dame. On. Fire. How mourning the loss of place gives me hope for valuing place…
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To Place-Do or Place-Tell?
Last week, I had the honor giving a keynote on Data-Driven Citymaking at Nordic Place Branding Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. I have to say, this was the first conference on place branding I have ever attended. And it got me thinking, what comes first, the place doing or the place telling? Normally, the answer to this would-be riddle would be a no-brainer. Well, there’s nothing to brand if there’s not a place first, right? But after listening to the stories of several places that had previously not been on the map, successfully use place branding to create people-first places, I started to wonder…could you create a place, or at least put the forces in motion needed to do so, simply by telling its (authentic) story?
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Why "We" Need Place
Last November, while keynoting at the Proptech Norway conference, I met Ronen Journo from WeWork, a fellow keynoter (which was super cool, by the way!) who spoke about how the company was using data to inform their decisions “inside the building." As a data-driven citymaking champion, I was stoked. Well, yesterday, they announced they’d be tinkering with data and urban design - in some yet undisclosed way. So we’d thought we’d give We some concrete ideas for how to use data to create (and locate in) awesome places people love!
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Why "KISSing" Is a Matter of Life and Death
How many times do we have to be disappointed by citymaking's next "panacea" before we realize there will NEVER be a silver bullet answer to solving the beautiful, chaotic mess that is a city organism? This might seem odd for a "tech" company to say, but tech alone will NOT save cities - in fact, no one thing alone will save cities! Today, nearly a year after the devastating FIU pedestrian bridge collapse and the fatal Uber autonomous car crash, we revisit the need to "KISS" our way to better places and use tech as a means and not an end.
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Spicing Up Place
Hi all, Michelle, here - State of Place, COO. As some of you may know, last Fall, Mariela spiced up the Nordics - not once but twice, at the Oslo Urban Arena and Proptech Norway - sharing her unapologetically impassioned plea for more data-driven placemaking. Now that Scandinavia is thawing out just enough for her Miami-Cuban blood enough not to be totally frozen, she’s up for a double reprise this April! First, she’ll be one of the keynotes at the Nordic Place Branding conference in Stockholm on April 3rd and then she’ll be keynoting the Northwest conference in Alesund, Norway (where she’ll have the unenviable task of following Richard Florida, last year’s keynote!). So we’d thought we’d get your juices flowing by giving you a taste of Mariela’s Ted-style talk! We urge you to watch it in all its spicy glory!
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Putting "Smart" Mobility in its PLACE...
Two weeks ago, our CTO, Andy Likuski and I attended the MOVE Smart Mobility conference in London and got a chance to exhibit State of Place. Not only were we struck by the lack of pedestrian “mobility” of the conference location, we were also disheartened to see that we were only one of a handful (seriously like sixe) of the 207 companies represented focused on the citymaking part of the mobility equation. So I did a quick and dirty breakdown of (lack of ) urban design around the conference space and analyzed the exhibitors to understand the makeup of today’s Smart Mobility space. Bottom line, we need better and more urban design in and around Smart Mobility!
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The breakup heard 'round the world
It’s been one week since Amazon very publicly broke up - jilted even - with New York City. Now that initial sting is (maybe) worn off (a little), we’re here to give cities some gentle, empowering advice. Chin up cities! Resist the temptation to play the toxic dating game that is economic development meets corporate siting. Refuse these narcissistic would-be lovers. There’s a BETTER, simpler way that serves EVERYONE. Making places better…
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On Loving (and Hating) Places...
Happy Valentine’s Day! While most people are celebrating today by dishing out copious amounts of money on indulgent dinners and fanciful flowers, us city nerds and datageeks have a different kind of love on our minds today - PLACE love! This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re revisiting the phenomenon of the “anthropomorphic” love (or hate) we all experience with “place.” We explore my “feelings” toward three cities I’ve loved (and hated) before - Shanghai, New York, and Miami to help us understand what about place creates such strong emotions in us - and what we can do as citymakers to encourage more love for place!
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24 Things CityMakers Must Do Stat To Design for Our Lives!
Last week, we took our best stab at distilling the vastly important Smart Growth America, Dangerous by Design report into what we believe are the main takeaways, both in terms of the key evidence-based findings and the critical design and policy guidance that came out of the report. We also aimed to translate these directives into specific, actionable urban design recommendations that citymakers must - and can - start implementing STAT. But there was so much to dig into with respect to SGA’s findings that - lest we threatened your weekly productivity - we decided to save the “how to” section for this week (tell your boss, you’re welcome!). Together, we can go from Dangerous by Design to Safe by Design! Let’s do this thing. And, if you happen to be attending MOVE in London next week, please hit me and Andy (our CTO) up! We’ll be exhibiting in the Startup Village in booth P62 on Feb 12th and 13th! Hope to discuss how data, predictive analytics, and design can save lives - and make people happier and more prosperous!
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Safe by Design
Last week, Smart Growth America published their semi-annual Dangerous by Design report, highlighting the most perilous places to be a pedestrian in the US and calling for a variety of policy measures to help put an end to the 13 people whose lives are stolen every day because of fatal street design. Clearly, given our ongoing blog series, Design for our Lives, and our data-driven efforts to put teeth behind Vision Zero (and the like) programs over the course of the past 9 months, the report caught our attention. Accordingly, we culled through the report and pulled out not only the key stats all citymakers must have at their fingerprints about road safety - whether they are involved in a Vision Zero program or not - but also the critical design and policy measures that must be implemented immediately - literally as a matter of life and death - to go from dangerous by design to safe by design. And next week, we’ll distill these design and policy guidelines into specific, actionable urban design changes that all citymakers need to start implementing STAT (we were gonna do it this week, but we didn’t want to cut too much more into your important citymaking schedules! ;)). So without further ado, we present the top three findings of the Dangerous by Design report and the seven top design and policy recommendations that must be heeded to get Safer by Design.
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A Walk in Our Shoes (Ahem, Index)...
A couple of weeks ago, we ran across an article published in CNU’s Public Square entitled “Walkability indexes are flawed. Let's find a better method.” Naturally, as an urban data and predictive analytics software company - who produces a quality of place index that measures walkability among other “abilities”, ahem, the State of Place Index - this got our attention. While Mr. Steuteville, the author of the piece, makes some astute - and accurate - claims about indeces like Walk Score and the EPA’s National Walkability Index (NWI), we took a deeper dive into his arguments, lest we not throw out the baby with the bathwater. So, we humbly present to you a few ways in which the State of Place Index does indeed address many of the stated “flaws” outlined in the article and then underscore why Mr. Steuteville’s proposed solution alone - to focus on measuring walking - has key downsides that citymakers must consider. So let’s dig in before my datageeky heart bursts with joy (we love getting the opportunity to get geeky with it with pieces like these - so thanks Mr. Steuteville!).
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