Category Archives: Institute

Engaging the Unengaged and Revitalizing Vacant Properties

On June 21, we’ll be collaborating on a “vacant properties” training project as part of the 2012 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference in New Orleans. It’s a great team, including Sarah Reginelli (a planner with the City of Albany, NY), Deenah Loeb (the executive director of the City Parks Association in Philadelphia), Jeff Debruyn (of the [...]

Also posted in Lab, Solutions | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Big Cities, Big Data

I’ve been really excited about the power of data to help us understand our cities and make better decisions. There have been some neat visualizations and infographics recently that demonstrate the power of visualizing big data.  One uses data collected from Twitter and another through GPS tracks of cabs in Manhattan.  Both are visually striking [...]

Also posted in Lab | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

PlaceMatters Blog Roundup: January 18, 2012

OpenIdeo is poised to announce the winner of their “restoring vibrancy to cities” crowdsourced challenge, winnowing down an initial list of 331 concepts to a short list of 20 finalists and now to a single winner. YPulse reports on Sesame Street’s new augmented reality app unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Civic Commons [...]

Also posted in Lab, Solutions | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Welcome Brad Barnett to the Team!

We are very excited to have someone new join our team here in Denver as our new Planning Analyst! We were immensely pleased with the caliber of the applicants to our GIS and Scenario Planning Analyst last fall, but Brad Barnett stood out even in such a strong field … he really impressed us and we [...]

Also posted in Lab, Solutions | Tagged | Leave a comment

Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Mobile, Social, and Local

Five trends I’m excited about for 2012: 1) Mobile Everything It’ll all be about mobile in 2012. Smartphone sales continue to grow, and consumers are increasingly shifting from PC-based web activity to using smartphones. Because of the pervasiveness of mobile devices and the growing sophistication of both native and HTML-based apps, many of the tools [...]

Also posted in Lab, Solutions | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Big Data, Collaborative Problem Solving

Big Data, Big Business 
Decision support systems that take massive data sets from multiple public and private entities and synthesize the data into valuable cross-discipline information for city and regional decision making is clearly becoming big business. Television, online, and magazine ads are populated with ads from IBM, Cisco, and Siemens, to name a few, [...]

Also posted in Lab, Solutions | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Better Data and Apps for Planners

This past year, we’ve seen the growth of community decision making tools around planning.  In my estimation, 2012 will continue this trend and bring more usable, integrated apps to the world of community decision making, giving planners and community leaders a broader and more efficient toolkit for engaging stakeholders in a decision-making process. In the [...]

Also posted in Lab | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment