This project investigates forms of investment in residential property that began to emerge in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis, which have since morphed and firmly taken hold. Focused on Philadelphia, PA, the analysis traces the new geographies of real estate purchases made specifically by investors who do not intend to live in the homes they are buying.
Mapping the New Politics of Care is a visual journey through the inequities and vulnerabilities that define the American landscape, using different definitions to describe communities at risk, down to the county level. The project is also designed to show visitors how the areas that appear most at risk within each state shifts depending on how vulnerability is measured: from COVID-19 cases to unemployment rates, from COVID-19 deaths to formal metrics of health vulnerability such as Years of Potential Life Lost and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index.
An exhibit focusing on the urban origins of the term homophily, its formalization and proliferation through the algorithmic logics of online networks, and the risks we run when it becomes not just a descriptive model but a prescriptive rule for social life. On view at the Chicago Architecture Biennial September 18,2019 – January 5, 2020.
This project visualizes the U.S. Census through the lens of 1 person’s location data over the course of 3 years. It addresses the potential of self quantification in the personalization of public aggregate data. We are constantly viewed through data collected from us. However, despite the increasing nuance and sophistication of classification and categorization systems, the formalization of categories is always going to be playing catch up to how we can define ourselves. Is it possible that we can challenge the transactional nature of our current relationship with data by viewing aggregate data through the lens of self knowledge?
In Plain Sight presents anomalies in population distribution seen in nighttime satellite imagery of Earth and census grid counts produced by governments worldwide — revealing places with bright lights and no people and places with people and no lights—thus, challenging our assumptions about geographies of belonging and exclusion.
Conflict Urbanism: Language Ecologies explores the role that language plays in shaping urban space. Language interacts with its environment at multiple scales and with diverse media. As an ecology, language either dominates, or is vulnerable to its host environments. In this way it often makes conflict visible in urban settings.
Conflict Urbanism: Aleppo is a call for inquiry and a call to action. It is an open-source, interactive, data-rich map of the city of Aleppo, at the neighborhood scale. Users can navigate the city, with the aid of high resolution satellite imagery from before and during the current civil war. It is also an invitation to students and other collaborators to record and narrate urban damage in Aleppo — at the cultural, infrastructural, or neighborhood scale — and to present that research in case studies which will be added to the website over time.
On the eve of an historic and controversial peace agreement in Colombia we have launched an investigation into the spatial characteristics of the decades long conflict between multiple state and non-state actors in the country. We have provisionally titled this research Conflict Urbanism: Colombia. We analyze and visualize the documented aspects of the conflict in Colombia in order to put forward policy recommendations for the transitional justice and peacebuilding process.
