Category: College of Architecture and Urban Studies

Designing, Planning, and Managing Resilient Cities

To what disruptions must cities be resilient? How can cities, as complex systems, be resilient? Building a capacity for resilience might be a daunting task when one considers the multitude of components, processes, and interactions that take place within and beyond a city’s physical, logical (e.g. legal), and virtual (cyberspace) boundaries. Planning for resilience to […]

Designing and Planning for Smart(er) Cities – Practicing Planner

You can find my article on smart cities in the current issue of Practicing Planner. Abstract: Within the past 24 months the concept of smart (and intelligent) cities has been become popular in the media. For instance, Scientific American ran a special issue on smart cities (September 2011). Industry players such as IBM and Siemens have specific […]

Recent Visit to IIT-Kanpur – A Summary

Ralph Hall has provided a nice summary of our recent visit to IIT Kanpur. I enjoyed my time in Kanpur and look forward to seeing this partnership flourish. To read more about the trip, please click here.

Conference on Community Resilience – Davos, Switzerland

I am headed to Davos for the 3rd Annual Conference on Community Resilience. I am co-chairing the conference along with John R. Harrald and Jim Bohland, both from Virginia Tech. This conference was organized while I was a Director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. I will chair a session on Citizen Engagement & […]

Getting Serious About Resilience in Planning – in Planetizen

I co-authored an article for Planetizen with three students (Trevor Flanery, Jaimy Alex, and Eric Park) who were working at the Metropolitan Institute this summer. Resilience is a term much bandied about these days in the planning and development professions. Buildings, plans, economies and even cities are expected to be resilient to unforeseen externalities in a world of […]

Designing Resilient Cities

This diagram was prepared for a paper on designing resilient cities. Got thoughts? Please send me an email. 

What is a Smart City?

Within the past 18 months the concept of smart (and intelligent) cities has been become popular in the media. For instance, Scientific American ran a special issue on smart cities. Industry players (e.g. IBM, Siemens, etc) have specific programs and practices dedicated to advancing the cause of building smart cities. Government agencies are dedicating resources […]

Intelligence and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Programs: The Achilles Heel

Kristen Lau (University of Oxford) and I have a paper accepted for publication in Intelligence and National Security. Kristen was my graduate student at the University of Washington and is now pursuing a doctoral degree at Oxford. We began studying information management failures associated with nuclear non-proliferation efforts in 2009. We presented an early version of the paper at  the Centre […]

Presenting at the NSF Workshop on Participatory Challenge Platforms with a Public Intent

I had a wonderful time exchanging ideas with policy makers, researchers, practitioners, and even students at the NSF Workshop on Participatory Challenge Platforms with a Public Intent put on by the Center for Policy Informatics at Arizona State University. My formal remarks during the workshop drew on research results from our study of Challenge.gov. Since […]