City of Bellevue selected as 2018-2019 UW Livable City Year partner

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The University of Washington Livable City Year program has selected the City of Bellevue to be the community partner for the 2018-2019 academic year.
The year-long partnership connects city staff with students and faculty who will collaborate on projects to advance the Bellevue City Council Vision Priorities, specifically around livability and sustainability.
In the upcoming year, city staff will work with University of Washington’s Livable City Year program participants on a variety of possible projects that range from trail-oriented development and urban forestry best practices to potential public/private partnerships and multi-family community outreach strategies. Projects encompass many of the council’s strategic target areas of Economic Development, Transportation and Mobility, High Quality Built and Natural Environment, Great Places You Want to Be, Achieving Human Potential, and High-Performance Government.
Continue reading at UW News
Originally posted on UW News
Giving Voice, Being Seen: Community Agency and Design Action in a Time of Climate Change, April 26

Climate change affects everyone, but it does not impact all communities equally. These differences may be most evident in the built environment and the shared spaces such as parks, streets, schools, homes, which we experience and move through daily.
In seeking to inspire more collaborative, inclusive and creative responses to climate change in the built environment, the interdisciplinary PhD in the Built Environment at UW is organizing a one-day symposium around the theme of “Giving Voice, Being Seen: Community Agency and Design Action in a Time of Climate Change.”
This symposium is a space for examining the intersections of climate change, urbanism, and environmental justice, and the ways in which diverse voices contribute to or are excluded from climate change conversations.
When: April 26, 9:30am-4:30pm
Where: Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center
Speakers include:
- Students in the Built Environment Interdisciplinary PhD program
- Terryl Ross, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, College of the Environment
- Sudha Nandagopal, Program Manager, Equity and Environment Initiative, Seattle Office of Environment and Sustainability
- Benjamin de la Peña, Deputy Director, Policy, Planning, Mobility, and Right of Way, Seattle Department of Transportation
- Thasa Way, Faculty Director, Urban@UW
- more to come!
This symposium is co-sponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture, Urban@UW, and the College of Built Environments.
Originally posted by Urban@UW
How social networks help perpetuate the ‘cycle of segregation’
Think about the last time you looked for a new apartment or house. Maybe you asked your friends or colleagues about where they lived. You thought about your route to work, or that neighborhood you always drive through on your way to your kid’s soccer practice. Many of these places were familiar to you, whether from an occasional visit or part of a daily routine. And if you’re like most people, you ultimately moved to a neighborhood you knew about first- or secondhand.
That decision helped, however unintentionally, to cement patterns of residential segregation, says Kyle Crowder, a University of Washington Professor in the Department of Sociology and co-author of “Cycle of Segregation,” published in January by the Russell Sage Foundation. In the book, Crowder and his co-author, Maria Krysan of the University of Illinois at Chicago, focus on Chicago neighborhoods, the opinions of residents and the past and present policies that shape the city — put simply, a city known for its white neighborhoods on the north side, and black neighborhoods on the south and west.
Chicago, Crowder and Krysan point out, has some characteristics particularly endemic to large, industrial metropolises that grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But relatively newer cities like Seattle don’t escape the economic, political and social forces that create and maintain segregation, Crowder said. Nor is addressing them an easy fix.
Continue reading at UW News
Originally posted on UW News by Kim Eckart
A Homeless Camp in Our Back Yard? Please, a University Says

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For months, 65 homeless people lived in tents they set up in a parking lot behind the Seattle Pacific University bookstore, with a row of portable toilets and layers of clothes to guard against the damp chill of winter. It was a homeless camp like so many that crop up along roads and ramshackle lots in some American cities, except that this one had been invited here by the university administration.
So Genny Deserley, 14, who became homeless with her mother, Krissy, last year when the rent on their apartment doubled, sometimes curled up in the university library or the student union with a book on rainy afternoons. And Emma Goehle, a Seattle Pacific sophomore studying global development and sociology, spent hours meeting with people in the tent city and conducting interviews for a university research project on homelessness.
Continue reading at the New York Times
Originally posted on the New York Times by Kirk Johnson
Reducing failed deliveries, truck parking time could improve downtown Seattle congestion

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In Amazon’s hometown, people turn to their computers to order everything from groceries to last-minute birthday presents to the odd toothbrush or medication forgotten from the store. If online shopping continues to grow at its current rate, there may be twice as many trucks delivering packages in Seattle’s city center within five years, a new report projects — and double the number of trucks looking for a parking space.
In the report, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab at the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center (SCTL) have analyzed solutions for alleviating urban congestion by making truck parking spaces more productive and reducing the growth of truck traffic.
“Seattle is the perfect laboratory to find better ways of managing commercial truck parking and delivering packages in urban settings,” said Anne Goodchild, SCTL director and UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “By testing data-driven solutions on our streets and in our buildings, we hope to reduce traffic in congested areas of the city as well as missed deliveries that frustrate consumers and retailers alike.”
Continue reading at UW News
Originally posted on UW News by Jennifer Langston
Do you have questions about transportation in Seattle? Here are a few answers

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Since The Seattle Times Traffic Lab launched a year ago, they’ve heard from scores of readers about getting around Here are a few:
Q: Do Uber and Lyft worsen Seattle’s traffic congestion?
A: A study in New York City said the growth of the app-based ride services could work against cities’ goals of unclogging streets and reducing vehicle emissions, as well as potentially undermining other transportation options, such as public transit and taxi services. Uber and Lyft dispute the New York report’s findings, pointing to the companies’ service of taking people to and from transit stations, for instance, and their support for proposals to grow public transportation.
According to University of Washington professor and traffic expert Mark Hallenbeck, Seattle’s dense neighborhoods have more at stake in terms of how the app-based services clog roads. People in those areas rely more on the companies compared with those in the suburbs — to evade parking hassles, for example. Read more.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times
Originally posted on The Seattle Times by Michelle Baruchman
What would a truly disabled-accessible city look like?

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To David Meere, a visually impaired man from Melbourne, among the various obstacles to life in cities is another that is less frequently discussed: fear. “The fear of not being able to navigate busy, cluttered and visually oriented environments is a major barrier to participation in normal life,” says Meere, 52, “be that going to the shops, going for a walk in the park, going to work, looking for work, or simply socialising.”
That’s what makes an innovative project at the city’s Southern Cross train station so important to him. A new “beacon navigation system” sends audio cues to users via their smartphones, providing directions, flagging escalator outages and otherwise transforming what previously a “no-go” area for Meere.
Take the hilly city of Seattle, where several neighbourhoods have no pavements at all, and many streets have a slope grade (or tilt) of 10% or even 20%. The University of Washington’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology has a solution: a map-based app allowing pedestrians with limited mobility to plan accessible routes. AccessMap enables users to enter a destination, and receive suggested routes depending on customised settings, such as limiting uphill or downhill inclines.
Continue reading on The Guardian
Originally posted on The Guardian by Saba Salman
Should Seattle declare war on parking to fight climate change?
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Make no mistake: The rising cost and declining amount of on-street parking downtown are part of a much bigger plan to reduce Seattle’s carbon footprint.University of Washington traffic engineer Mark Hallenbeck is adamant that Seattle should not go down the same road as Oslo. “Removing parking might have an environmental benefit, but the backlash from it might be so bad,” he said, that drivers will be up in arms, and they’ll punish elected officials for it.
But Hallenback admits there may be a case for phasing out on-street parking in parts of Seattle, if it means a better future with more options and more transit mobility. “Do I get bus lanes, bus rapid transit that actually moves and isn’t stuck?” he asks, “you’ll get way more people in the bus because people can zoom through the city on that bus.”
Continue reading at KUOW
Originally posted on KUOW by David Hyde
New book ‘City Unsilenced’ explores protest and public space

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Jeff Hou is a professor of landscape architecture and adjunct professor of urban design and planning in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. His research, teaching and practice focus on community design, design activism, cross-cultural learning and engaging marginalized communities in planning and design.
Hou has written extensively on the agency of citizens and communities in shaping built environments. His newest book is “City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy,” co-edited by Sabine Knierbein, associate professor for urban culture and public space at the Vienna University of Technology. The book examines the roles of public space in the rising number of protests around the world and as possibly a vestige of democracy.
Hou states, “with public space playing such an important role for freedom of speech and assembly and for holding institutions accountable to the public, the fight for public space is also a fight for democracy that protects equity and justice around the world.”
Hear from Hou in this interview with UW News.
Originally posted on UW News by Peter Kelley
Cities face a surge in online deliveries

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By the time veteran UPS driver Thomas “Tommy” Chu leaves work, he will have picked up and delivered hundreds of packages in New York City, making some 16 stops an hour as his company hurries to meet the online shopping rush. But what may be his most impressive feat of the day precedes that scramble: at precisely 10:02 am, Mr Chu snags a parking spot. This is no small victory in midtown Manhattan, where one survey found truck drivers can spend as long as 60 minutes circling for a space. Often, drivers simply give up and risk a ticket. “Most times, you have no choice. If there’s no parking, you have to double park,” Mr Chu says.
Double-parked trucks, red brake lights and cardboard boxes littering the sidewalk: this is what the growth of online shopping looks like on the ground in America’s largest city - and not just here. Parcel volumes surged almost 50% globally between 2014-2016, according to estimates from Pitney Bowes. They are on track to increase at rates of 17-28% annually up to 2021.
In the US, where the car has been king and the revival of dense city centres is relatively recent, discussions about how to handle the glut of online shipments were somewhat slower to start. But they’re happening now. “They’ve been forced to think more about it in cities because that’s where we see the coming together of these pressures in a real, urgent way,” says University of Washington Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Anne Goodchild, director of UW’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center.
Continue reading at BBC News
Originally posted on BBC News by Natalie Sherman
Can Seattle rezone away the racial divide in housing?

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For generations, Seattle was segregated through racist neighborhood covenants, deed restrictions, even banking policies designed to keep certain minorities out of largely white enclaves.Yet nearly 50 years after the landmark Fair Housing Act sought to reverse that legacy, the city remains strikingly separated along color lines.
A Seattle Times analysis shows that areas dedicated to single-family houses remain the city’s most exclusive havens. If you live in North Capitol Hill or Sunset Hill/Loyal Heights single-family zones, you have more than 100 white neighbors for every black one. Much of North Seattle, however, “remained in 2010 almost as exclusively white as it had been 50 years earlier,” according to the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Racist practices were not confined to single-family zones, the project noted, “they covered nearly all residential housing in the region.”
Continue reading at the Seattle Times
Originally posted on the Seattle Times by Justin Mayo and Bob Young
Developing ‘breakaway’ tsunami resistant buildings

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The best designs can also be the most surprising. A promising new concept for tsunami resistant buildings features breakaway walls and floors on lower levels that, when removed by forceful waves, strengthen the structure and better protect occupants seeking safety on higher floors.
Thanks to a $1 million National Science Foundation Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation grant, CEE faculty will be developing a new structural system to better protect communities during tsunamis. The research project, Vertical Evacuation Structures Subjected to Sequential Earthquake and Tsunami Loadings, will be led by professor and principal investigator Dawn Lehman and co-investigators Michael Motley, Charles Roeder and Pedro Arduino. The researchers bring together expertise in structural earthquake engineering, tsunami engineering and geotechnical earthquake engineering.
Continue reading at UW Civil and Environmental Engineering
Originally posted on UW Civil and Environmental Engineering
Urban@UW compiles Faculty Highlights Report for research, teaching and engagement on homelessness

As part of its recently launched Homelessess Research Initiative, Urban@UW has collaborated with faculty and staff across all three UW campuses to compile a broad-ranging selection of powerful and robust projects addressing homelessness from a research lens. Check out the Faculty Highlights Report to learn more about these efforts and the people behind them.
The Faculty Highlights Report was developed by Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative.
Earthquakes are inevitable but catastrophe is not
Written by University of Washington Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Marc Eberherd, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering associate professor Jeffery Berman, and Department of Human-Centered Design senior scientist Scott Miles.
Many older buildings provide vital, low-cost housing. But we must find a way to make these structures safer. It should not be acceptable to us to subject our fellow citizens to such hazardous conditions.
ONCE again we are reminded of the deadly potential of powerful earthquakes. We are confronted by images from Mexico of collapsed buildings, volunteers searching the rubble for survivors and parents facing their worst nightmare.
As earthquake engineers, we see the failure to address the well-known vulnerabilities of older, brick buildings (unreinforced masonry) and brittle reinforced concrete construction. These heavy and brittle older buildings lack the strength and details necessary to prevent collapse in large earthquakes. The images from Mexico also remind us of society’s responsibility to protect its most vulnerable members, including children and those without the economic resources to improve the safety of the buildings in which they live.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times
Originally posted on The Seattle Times by Marc Eberherd, Jeffery Berman, and Scott Miles
Microsoft backs Seattle-Vancouver high-speed rail study as Cascadia conference aims to deepen ties

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Pacific Northwest business and political leaders on both sides of the Canada-US border announced a series of agreements to strengthen relationships between Seattle, Portland, Vancouver B.C. and the surrounding areas.
The new partnerships, made ahead of the second Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle this week, focus on technology, economic development, education and transportation. Government officials, universities, companies and research institutions are participating in the effort, which is meant to bring together the regions that have a lot in common but are separated by an international border.
One of the most intriguing ideas that came out of last year’s conference was a vision to build high-speed trains that would travel between Seattle and Vancouver in less than an hour. That idea is still alive and well. Microsoft kicked in $50,000 to supplement the state of Washington’s $300,000 budget to study the plan.
Continue reading at GeekWire
Storefront Studio creates vision for downtown block

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Three graduate students and their professor from the University of Washington College of Built Environments spent much of this summer visiting Gig Harbor and creating a plan that could change and enhance an area in the downtown waterfront business district.
The Storefront Studio Project, as the endeavor is called, began in June when the students met with a group of about 50 business owners, residents, members of the Downtown Waterfront Alliance and others for a brainstorming session, led by UW Architecture Professor Jim Nicholls. The students took extensive notes as the group discussed issues they feel are important to the community and especially to the historic waterfront area.This is the second Storefront Studio Project the Waterfront Alliance has sponsored in Gig Harbor.
Continue reading at the Kitsap Sun
Originally posted on the Kitsap Sun by Charlee Glock-Jackson
College of Built Environments’ David de la Cruz partners with communities for environmental justice

David de la Cruz
David de la Cruz has a question about power. “When we think about toxic sites and where they’re placed in relation to where people live, who’s left out of making those decisions?” “Often,” he answers, “it’s the people who live there. It’s low-income communities, working-class communities and communities of color who don’t have a say. They’re the ones who have to deal with the consequences of living close to a grain mill facility that constantly sees truck traffic, or living close to a yard that has trains passing back and forth.”
And while these communities have some autonomy, he says, people are moving into areas that are already extensively polluted. There’s often no decision to be made — pollution is part of the package. Where you live affects how you live.
Continue Reading at UW Today
Originally posted on Washington.edu
‘Smart’ campuses invest in the Internet of Things

As campus executives start to develop their IoT strategies, it is not just CIOs who have to be involved. Sometimes, facilities groups have their own IT executives working on data pipelines from IoT devices. Chuck Benson, assistant director for IT in Facilities Services at the University of Washington, chairs a campuswide IoT risk mitigation task force.
Energy management is a great example of where IoT is having an impact, Benson said. With help from a federal grant, UW has made an effort to meter much of the campus. There are about 2,000 data points where power and building controls are sampled. “I work with our energy conservation managers making sure all the samples are coming through,” he said. Data flows into an aggregation point and from there to consumption for reports, dashboards or ongoing research.
Continue Reading at Campus Technology
Originally posted on Campus Technology by David Raths
Why Seattle is poised to be a leader in ‘smart city’ technology and regulations

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New technology is helping local government create “smarter” cities in a variety of ways, from adaptive traffic lights to open data platforms to advanced utility meters. But with innovation comes complication. Privacy, security, and equality challenges are inevitable when the public sector tries to implement technology with the help of private companies.
This was the subject of a roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) at the University of Washington on Wednesday in Seattle.
The hour-long meeting hosted by Urban@UW and UW eScience institute brought together key regional leaders from a variety of sectors: City of Seattle CTO Michael Mattmiller; Seattle Public Utilities CEO Mami Hara; Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt; Microsoft Government Solutions Manager Mike Geertsen and others — to talk about the role of government in establishing policies and processes that enable the modernization of cities.
Continue reading on GeekWire
Originally posted on Geekwire by Taylor Soper
Why Architects should care about public health

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Andrew Dannenberg, an Affiliate Professor at the School of Public Health and the College of Built Environments, writes about the importance of architects recognizing human health: while architects have long recognized the importance of human health —including physical, mental, and social well-being — as part of their mission, implementation sometimes reflects a spirit of compliance more than of aspiration. Design that is limited to preventing harm by meeting building codes and standards forfeits the full range of design possibilities that could enhance the health and quality of life of a building’s occupants and visitors. There are many major societal trends for which architects can contribute health-promoting improvements: obesity, housing and social inequities, an aging population, hazardous chemical exposures, urbanization, nature contact deficit, energy poverty, water shortages and excesses, natural disasters, and climate change.
Continue reading at the HuffingtonPost
Originally posted on The Huffington Post by Thomas Fisher and Andrew L. Dannenberg
UW gets federal money to boost early-warning system for West Coast earthquakes

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The U.S. Geological Survey has awarded $4.9 million to six universities and a nonprofit to help advance an early-warning system for earthquakes along the West Coast. The federal agency says the ShakeAlert system could give people seconds or up to a minute of warning before strong shaking begins. The University of Washington, Central Washington University and University of Oregon are among those receiving grants. Congress provided $10.2 million to the USGS earthquake hazards program earlier this year.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times
Originally posted on The Seattle Times by The Associated Press
Birds versus buildings: Rural structures pose greater relative threat than urban ones

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About one billion birds are killed every year when they unwittingly fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. Such collisions are the largest unintended human cause of bird deaths worldwide — and they are a serious concern for conservationists.
A new paper published in June in the journal Biological Conservation finds that, as one might suspect, smaller buildings cause fewer bird deaths than do bigger buildings. But the research team of about 60 — including three co-authors with the University of Washington — also found that larger buildings in rural areas pose a greater threat to birds than if those same-sized buildings were located in an urban area.
Continue reading on UW News
Originally published by Peter Kelley on UW News
There’s a map for that

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If you own a cell phone or a mobile device you’re likely creating data that could be mapped. “When you add a Yelp review or geotag a tweet you’re actually volunteering geographic information, you are mapping,” said UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Britta Ricker. Most of us use maps to determine our location, to find out how to get from point A to point B. Ricker, who teaches in the university’s master of science in geospatial technologies program, sees maps in a larger context. “This is a skill you can apply to everything,” she said.
Traditionally, only the most highly trained professionals had access to the geographic information systems [GIS] needed to create most maps. The development of smart phones in the late 2000s opened up a world of opportunity. “A lot more people have access to things like GPS and can contribute geographic information using their smart phones,” said Ricker.
The democratization of mapping has major implications for citizen science. “For a long time geographers were constrained by how many researchers we could hire and how much land could be traversed,” said Ricker. “We now have a larger, more diverse group of people with smart phones who can contribute their local observations and data.”
Continue reading on UW Tacoma News & Information
Originally posted on UW Tacoma News & Information by Eric Wilson-Edge
Does commercial zoning increase neighborhood crime?

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In the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump told The New York Times that America’s urban centers are some of the “most dangerous,” crime-filled places in the world. Even though experts were quick to point out that violent crime has actually declined in all but a handful of America’s largest cities and urban areas, the view of cities as dense, dirty, and dangerous and suburbs as spread out, pastoral, and safe has long pervaded American culture.
A new study published in the Journal of Urban Economics by Tate Twinam an Assistant Professor of applied economics at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences takes a detailed look at the connection between these neighborhood characteristics and urban crime in Chicago, a city that has witnessed a much-publicized recent rise in murder and violent crime. Crime has cost Chicago a great deal, as the study points out. In 2013, the city spent over $1.3 billion on policing; the costs of robberies set its citizens back another $500 million.
Continue reading on City Lab
Originally posted on City Lab by Richard Florida
As metro areas grow, whites move farther from the city center

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In the middle of the 20th century, cities began to change. The popularity of the automobile and the construction of interstate highways fueled the growth of suburbs, while discriminatory housing policies segregated neighborhoods and helped create the phenomenon of “white flight” away from downtowns.
Decades later, the average white person still lives farther from the city center than the average person of color, a University of Washington researcher says, even with the resurgence of downtown living in many communities and the increasing diversity of suburbs. In an era when the growth in the population of blacks, Latinos and Asians outpaces that of whites nationwide, a new study of who lives where provides insight into the geography of race.
Continue reading on UWToday
Originally posted on UW Today by Kim Eckart
As metro areas grow, whites move farther from the city center

CC0 Public Domain: Pixabay: SaddleRoad
In the middle of the 20th century, cities began to change. The popularity of the automobile and the construction of interstate highways fueled the growth of suburbs, while discriminatory housing policies segregated neighborhoods and helped create the phenomenon of “white flight” away from downtowns.
Decades later, the average white person still lives farther from the city center than the average person of color, a University of Washington researcher says, even with the resurgence of downtown living in many communities and the increasing diversity of suburbs. In an era when the growth in the population of blacks, Latinos and Asians outpaces that of whites nationwide, a new study of who lives where provides insight into the geography of race.
Continue reading on UWToday
Originally posted on UW Today by Kim Eckart
The biggest cliché in tech is hurting cities

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If you don’t live in Silicon Valley, chances are you live in its close relative: “the next Silicon Valley.” The label has been slapped with abandon on towns, cities, regions, or sometimes entire countries. All it takes is an uptick in job growth, an influx of startups, or a new coding bootcamp for the cliche to come roaring into headlines and motivational speeches.
In 2008, Margaret O’Mara developed an urge to chronicle this obsession. A Department of History professor at the University of Washington, she’d written a book several years earlier about the search for the next Silicon Valley. The moniker remained as omnipresent as ever, so she hired an undergraduate student to compile every Silicon Valley, Alley, Peak, Beach, Desert, Wadi, Bog, and more. Six weeks later, the student had to concede defeat: There were too many silicon somethings to track. “It’s become this global race. It’s a competitive thing, it’s a branding thing,” says O’Mara. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Look, we are just as forward-thinking and 21st century as everyone else.’”
Continue Reading on Wired
Originally posted on Wired by Miranda Katz
Partnership with CMMB launches new center on smart, connected communities

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China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting - Vision (CMMB) has awarded the University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering (UW EE) a $1.5 million gift to establish a new research center. The CMMB Vision-UW Center on Satellite Multimedia and Connected Vehicles will focus on the development of the next generation of smart cars and ubiquitous connectivity.
“UW EE is dedicated to the advancement of smart cities,” UW Department of Electrical Engineering Professor and Chair, and Urban@UW executive committee member, Radha Poovendran said. “This partnership with CMMB further advances this mission and will foster impact on a global level.”
Continue reading here
Originally posted on the UW Department of Electrical Engineering
What the bond between homeless people and their pets demonstrates about compassion
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A video camera captures an interview with a man named Spirit, who relaxes in an outdoor plaza on a sunny afternoon. Of his nearby service dogs, Kyya and Miniaga, he says, “They mean everything to me, and I mean everything to them.”In another video, three sweater-clad dogs scamper around a Los Angeles park, while their companion, Judie, tells their backstory. And in still another clip, Myra races her spaniel mix, Prince, down a neighborhood street.
The images have an every-person quality — a collection of random pet owners, explaining why they love their dogs. And that’s part of the point of the series: The people featured are homeless, and a focus on their relationships “humanizes” a population that is often neglected or shunned, according to University of Washington Department of Geography professor Vicky Lawson.
Lawson and her colleague, Wesleyan University postdoctoral researcher Katie Gillespie, studied these videos from the multimedia project My Dog is My Home, created by the New York-based nonprofit of the same name, and wrote about its essential themes for the journal Gender, Place and Culture. Their article, published online June 14, is a call to action, not only for services for homeless people and animals, but also for new understandings of them.
Continue reading at UW Today
Originally posted on UW Today by Kim Eckart
American poverty is moving to the suburbs

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In his inaugural address, US president Donald Trump listed out the problems he saw in a declining America. At the top of his list: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.” It was not the first time Trump had spoken of urban poverty. “Our inner cities are a disaster,” Trump said in the third presidential debate of 2016. “You get shot walking to the store. They have no education. They have no jobs.”In addition to their racist undertones, Trump’s statements promote a dangerous misrepresentation of the geography of poverty in the United States.
Over the last several decades, US poverty has increasingly spread to the suburbs. In 1990, the majority of poverty in the 100 largest US metro areas was found in urban areas. But recent research by the political scientist Scott Allard at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. shows that, in absolute numbers, this no longer holds true. The University of Washington professor estimates that there are 17 million people living in poverty in the suburbs of the US’s big cities—4 million more than in cities themselves.
Continue reading at Quartz
Drone vs. truck deliveries: Which creates less carbon pollution?

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Delivering packages with drones can reduce carbon dioxide emissions in certain circumstances as compared to truck deliveries, a new study from University of Washington transportation engineers finds. In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Transportation Research Part D, researchers found that drones tend to have carbon dioxide emissions advantages over trucks when the drones don’t have to fly very far to their destinations or when a delivery route has few recipients.
Trucks — which can offer environmental benefits by carrying everything from clothes to appliances to furniture in a single trip — become a more climate-friendly alternative when a delivery route has many stops or is farther away from a central warehouse. For small, light packages — a bottle of medicine or a kid’s bathing suit — drones compete especially well. But the carbon benefits erode as the weight of a package increases, since these unmanned aerial vehicles have to use additional energy to stay aloft with a heavy load.
“Flight is so much more energy-intensive — getting yourself airborne takes a huge amount of effort. So I initially thought there was no way drones could compete with trucks on carbon dioxide emissions,” said senior author Anne Goodchild, a UW associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, who also directs the UW Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center. “In the end, I was amazed at how energy-efficient drones are in some contexts. Trucks compete better on heavier loads, but for really light packages, drones are awesome.”
Continue reading at UW Today
Originally posted on UW Today by Jennifer Langston
Urban Scholar Highlight: Christopher Meek
Christopher Meek
Christopher Meek is a faculty member in University of Washington’s Department of Architecture and a director in the Integrated Design Lab in the Center for Integrated Design, located in the Bullitt Center. He teaches during the school year and the rest of his time is focused on research on high-performance buildings. We sat down with him to learn more about his work.
Urban@UW: What are your current research interests and how do you see them relating to urban issues and cities?
Meek: The Integrated Design Lab (IDL), focuses on three primary activities. One is research: we’re studying high performance buildings, how they perform out in the field, and creating tools for people to be able to better build them. The second facet is technical assistance and project-based research: engaging with design teams that are trying to innovate in their practice, around energy efficiency, high performance buildings, health-design, daylighting, and providing technical simulation support to help them better make those decisions within their firm. The third thing we do is professional education. We partner with the American Institute of Architects and we’ve done three significant projects in the Puget Sound region that are now pilots for national programs. One is called AIA +2030 Professional Series, teaching people how to design energy-efficient buildings to meet the 2030 Challenge. The second one, which is on a national rollout, is called Getting To Zero. It presents technical, financial and practice opportunities and barriers to the widespread adoption of net-zero-energy buildings. And the third is Materials Matter, which presents current scientific knowledge of the impact of materials on environmental health, on human health and on life-cycle assessment to make better decisions in buildings. Materials Matter was a collaboration with IDL, the Carbon Leadership Forum (led by Prof. Kate Simonen) in the Department of Architecture and the Health Products Declaration Collaborative.
Urban@UW: What specific urban challenges do you see your work addressing?
Meek: In a big picture sense, buildings are responsible for about 40% of the carbon emissions in the US, so pushing for net-zero-energy buildings and low-energy, high-performance buildings contributes to reduction of carbon emissions. They also create higher-quality, healthier places for people to live. I’m interested in health design, and inter-relationships: buildings that support the circadian rhythm through a strong connection to the outside, that have healthy indoor environmental quality through natural ventilation by using climate and ecosystem as a resource—rather than trying to hold those out and use energy for purely mechanical systems.
Urban@UW: What led you to this area of study?
Meek: I started my career in New Orleans, and I worked on a lot of historic buildings and I just fell in love with them. The more that I looked at them and understood them, the more that I realized that many of the aspects that drew me to them, their proportions and relationships were about providing light or allowing fresh air to come through the buildings, to really integrate and connect with the neighborhood and the landscape. Originally in my undergraduate work I was really interested in solar architecture and environmentally sustainable architecture. When I came to UW I met Professor Emeritus Joel Loveland and I started working with him on issues of daylighting and energy efficiency, and I have just taken it from there. I love engaging with practitioners and hearing their ideas and learning what their concerns are, and then bringing those concerns to my teaching and my research—so that it feeds back and then, hopefully in a small way, elevates the practice here.
Urban@UW: Speaking on that, who do you normally work with, who is in your network or who would you like to work with in the future at UW?
Meek: We have a great team at IDL. Every day I work with Heather Burpee, Michael Gilbride, Deborah Sigler, and Tina Dilegge at IDL. Heather Burpee and I work together on virtually everything our lab does, we run the labs operations and get grants. Michael Gilbride does a lot of our simulation work and manages our GSAs. I also work with Rob Peña and Kate. I really enjoy working students; we have between five and ten graduate students in our lab at any given time. I’ve also worked a little bit with Thaisa Way; through Urban@UW she’s helped me connect to a university in China and meet some faculty over there. Our lab has signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate with a similar lab at Tsinghua University in Beijing. As far as others, I’m excited to make more connections amongst the faculty in CBE and in the broader university. I recently met Prof. Peter Kahn, an environmental psychologist with some really interesting ideas. I need to be pro-active to engage with others at UW since being off-campus most of the time can sometimes be a little isolating.
Urban@UW: Earlier you spoke about going out into the field to see how buildings perform, what do you think is the role of data in enhancing the user experience?
Meek: I think it’s really important, because data can be a good way of understanding how a building is performing operationally in terms of heating and cooling, lighting, ventilation. It can also help us better understand what makes people happy in buildings, or what makes them healthy or makes them more satisfied or more productive. That’s a huge opportunity and I’d love to have more resources to pursue that because it’s expensive.
Urban@UW: What kinds of new data sources can you use in high-performance buildings and other energy efficiency projects?
Meek: Our lab is in the Bullitt Center and it’s pretty heavily instrumented, with devices that track energy use by either device or by pieces of equipment or by circuit. That is a great resource for us; it’s become the basis of a number of research papers we’ve written and projects we’ve done. I think as a demonstration building it provides good evidence for people who want to follow in its path, or ideally exceed it’s performance.
Urban@UW: How integral do you think the role of industry is for understanding and impacting the future of a city?
Meek: It’s huge: if you look at EPA statistics from over 20 years ago the average North American spends 90% of their time indoors. The built environment, cities but especially building interiors, are our new habitat. As building designers, owners, and developers we now have a role in defining the physical setting that basically all human life takes place in. Buildings are large and the way they inhabit the cityscape and the way they interface with the natural world and other things that are really important to us as a species… I think it’s almost impossible to overstate the power of buildings and the urban fabric to impact our lives.
Urban@UW: What do you see coming up next for you?
Meek: Our lab operates on research dollars, I put in proposals all the time, and the ones that succeed forms our research activity. But I know we’re going to be focusing on a project with the City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment: they are implementing a policy to tune up buildings every four years. I would also like to do much more in the quantification of occupant impacts, productivity, health outcomes, and behavior change in high-performance buildings. More evidence about the impact that buildings can have in terms of health and productivity. Finding innovative ways to engage with practice is valuable for me as a teacher and researcher, getting feedback from people out on the field who are addressing these problems, understanding what their challenges are and finding ways to incorporate those challenges into my research and teaching and to then again feed back into practice through students that are better attuned to the needs of practice. Understanding what people are doing in practice helps me sharpen my research focus.
Urban@UW: What is on your reading list these days?
Meek: I think reading about the possible good in the world and the possible bad in the world helps take the limits off what I see as possibilities, so I get inspired by fiction. I read a lot of academic papers, so when I have time to read for myself I want to look into the window of people who spend their time imagining things.
Urban@UW: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Meek: I think that if we get to a point where we can truly understand, quantify, and demonstrate the impacts of buildings on our society for social good, architects will never run out of work. Because I think it’s so impactful what we do and the better we can understand that the better we can promote the value that our profession can bring to society.
Written by Shahd Al Baz, Urban@UW Communications Assistant
Cities Seek Deliverance From the E-Commerce Boom
CCA 3.0: Dwight Burdette: Wikimedia commons
With a major increase in residential deliveries, new urban delivery challenges have also arrived. That’s due in part to the failures of urban planning and the nature of the trucking business. While matters of public policy like public transit, bike lanes, and walkability fall within the purview of planning boards and municipal departments of transportation, freight has always been a purely private-sector enterprise. That means cities don’t even have reliable data on the number of delivery trucks coursing through their streets. “Metro planning organizations do regular data collection on personal travel. We don’t have that equivalent for freight, and we don’t have good, metropolitan-scale data about goods movement. Surprise surprise, we don’t understand it very well,” says Anne Goodchild, director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Recently, the center launched UW’s Urban Freight Lab, a new partnership between the university, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and private-sector delivery companies (including UPS). Founded in the fall, the lab’s job is to begin collecting some of that data. So far, Goodchild and a team of students are measuring dwell time (how long a delivery vehicle has to remain on the street) and failed deliveries (when a driver shows up somewhere to deliver a package but can’t because the recipient isn’t home and a signature is required). It’s the sort of data Seattle hopes to incorporate into an urban goods delivery strategy, one of the cornerstones of a “freight master plan” the city adopted last year.
Continue reading at CityLab
Originally posted by Andrew Zaleski on CityLab
Toward greener construction: UW professor collab sets markers for carbon across life of buildings

digifly840: pixabay: CC-0 Public Domain
A University of Washington-led research group has taken an important step toward measuring — and ultimately reducing — the global carbon footprint of building construction and long-term maintenance.
The Carbon Leadership Forum is a collaborative effort among academics and industry professionals based in the UW’s College of Built Environments that studies reducing carbon emissions over a building’s entire period of use, or life cycle.
There is growing recognition in the building industry of the need to track carbon emissions across a building’s full life cycle, said Kate Simonen, architect, structural engineer and UW Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, who leads the carbon forum. But she said industry professionals need better information and guidance on how to implement low-carbon method in practice.
Continue reading at UW Today
Originally posted on UW Today by Peter Kelley
Bellevue, Renton Among Top 100 U.S Cities for Livability

Huebi: Wikimedia commons: Public Domain
Watch as King 5 News brings in Branden Born to shed light on the weighting mechanisms employed by a survey recently published on livability.com which ranked Renton and Bellevue among their top 100 cities for livability.
Watch the whole clip on iQmediacorp.com
Originally published by King 5 News
Growing Up in the University District

Andrew Hopkins: Flickr: CC BY-SA 2.0
Vikram Jandhyala sees Seattle’s University District evolving into an “innovation district” — a place where public and private sectors work together to develop socially beneficial technologies. Think Silicon Valley, where Stanford University faculty and students launch new companies or work on their new technologies with existing tech giants.
As the University of Washington’s vice president for innovation strategies and head of the UW CoMotion program, which pairs the research resources of the university with the business resources of the private sector, Jandhyala has already been pushing to make that vision come to life.
“CoMotion’s role is to be a hub, an innovation hub where we can get all these ideas out from the university into the community,” Jandhyala explains.
Continue reading at Seattle Business Mag
Originally posted on Seattle Business Mag by Patrick Marshall and Leslie Helm
As Central District gets whiter, new barriers to health care
Last week while lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were gnashing their teeth over what health insurance in the U.S. should look like, patients and providers in King County were wrestling with some of the same challenges they faced before the Affordable Care Act was in place.
In 2014, students in King County who are black, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaskan Native were twice as likely not to have had a yearly dental check-up.
Allison M Cole from the UW School of Medicine shares insights on this.
Continue reading at KUOW.
Originally posted on KUOW news by Patricia Murphy
First UW Livable City Year project reports delivered to the City of Auburn

Image Credit: UW Livable City Year
Teams of University of Washington students have been working throughout this academic year on livability and sustainability projects in the City of Auburn. The yearlong Livable City Year partnership has given students a chance to work on real-world challenges identified by Auburn, while providing Auburn with tens of thousands of hours of study and student work.
Livable City Year connects UW faculty with projects based in Auburn, which are then incorporated into their classes. The program started this year, partnering with Auburn for the 2016-2017 year. This fall marked the first quarter for the program, when students in seven courses tackled 10 separate projects. The final reports from these projects are now complete.
“The very first Livable City Year projects were a success due to the hard work of our students and faculty, along with crucial guidance from Auburn city staff. It’s been an exciting process of co-creation,” said Livable City Year faculty co-director Branden Born of the Department of Urban Design and Planning. “The student teams working on these projects have worked to provide real benefits for the residents of Auburn, while also gaining real-world experience and a connection to the community.”
Students in Livable City Year courses spend at least one quarter working on a specific project identified as a need by Auburn. The student teams work with Auburn staff and community stakeholders as they conduct research and work on the projects.
Fall projects included assessments of Auburn’s work in reducing homelessness among the community, educational strategies to reduce pet waste and improper household items in wastewater, cultural city mapping, city values outreach, work on community place-making, and more.
“The projects that these students have taken on are at the core of many of our city’s major initiatives,” Auburn mayor Nancy Backus said. “Their work and dedication through the Livable City Year program has helped us make major strides forward in areas that are critical to the health, safety and happiness of our residents.”
After the quarter’s research work is completed, a student or student team works with Livable City Year’s editor and graphic designer to prepare a final report for the city, including any recommendations or possible future steps. By having several coordinated student teams across disciplines working on various projects, the Livable City Year program provides the City of Auburn with ways to enhance sustainability and livability elements within existing and future projects and programs.
The UW’s Livable City Year program is led by faculty directors Branden Born with the Department of Urban Design and Planning and Jennifer Otten with the School of Public Health, in collaboration with UW Sustainability, Urban@UW and the Association of Washington Cities, and with foundational support from the College of Built Environments and Undergraduate Academic Affairs.
While the fall project teams have completed their reports, this winter students have been working on projects including reducing food waste in school cafeterias; researching the costs, challenges and benefits of low-impact development stormwater technology; and better connecting Auburn’s residents socially, culturally, and economically.
Senior Ariel Delos Santos was one of the students in Born’s fall class which looked at connectivity and community place-making in Auburn.
“Working with the LCY program brought a novel component to our educational experience. Instead of a standard classroom setting where our homework is only seen by the professor, our final products were intimately tied to the city and its community members - which greatly motivated us to do more work and be more attentive to those who will be affected,” said Delos Santos, a senior double major in Community, Environment & Planning and Aquatic Fishery & Sciences. “As a student, I loved how closely I was able to work with my peers regularly and the camaraderie that we built. I definitely learned how to maintain professional relationships, accountability, communication, and my natural role in team settings.”
For more information, contact Born at bborn@uw.edu or 206-543-4975; LCY program manager Jennifer Davison at jnfrdvsn@uw.edu or 206-240-6903; and Jenna Leonard, Auburn’s climate and sustainability practice leader, at jleonard@auburnwa.gov or 253-804-5092.
This story was written by UW Livable City Year
How future superstorms could overwhelm today’s wastewater infrastructure

Image Credit: Robert Lawton - CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
The current Seattle rainstorm, and many like it this year, are overwhelming our city’s wastewater pipes, and some sewage may be dumping into the Puget Sound as we speak. But even in a normal year, King County dumps about 800 million gallons of raw sewage into its waterways. That’s because, when it rains too much in too short a time, “pipes start to flow too full,” School of Public Health professor Scott Meschke says, “and so they start to back up. And, in order to prevent that, you have the overflow. If you didn’t have the [overflow], it would go into people’s basements, or out their toilets.” And with greater probability for extreme weather, this phenomenon will increase, as Guillaume Mauger with UW’s Climate Impacts Group explains.
Read more at OPB.
This story was originally published on OPB.com by Eilís O’Neill.
New report on driverless cars highlights potential challenges, solutions for Seattle’s roads

Credit: SounderBruce [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Over the next decade, driverless vehicles will make their way along Seattle roadways, possibly bringing relief to one of the most congested cities in the United States. Or, according to a new report out of the University of Washington, they could make things worse. UW’s Tech Policy Lab has partnered with Challenge Seattle to develop this research.
Read more in Geekwire.
Originally published on GeekWire by Jillian Stampher
Universities establish joint center to use data for social good in Cascadia region

University of British Columbia, left, and University of Washington, right, have formed the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative with the help of Microsoft.
In an expansion of regional cooperation, the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington today announced the establishment of the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative to use data to help cities and communities address challenges from traffic to homelessness. The largest industry-funded research partnership between UBC and the UW, the collaborative will bring faculty, students and community stakeholders together to solve problems, and is made possible thanks to a $1-million gift from Microsoft.
“Thanks to this generous gift from Microsoft, our two universities are poised to help transform the Cascadia region into a technological hub comparable to Silicon Valley and Boston,” said Professor Santa J. Ono, President of the University of British Columbia. “This new partnership transcends borders and strives to unleash our collective brain power, to bring about economic growth that enriches the lives of Canadians and Americans as well as urban communities throughout the world.”
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to use data to help our communities make decisions, and as a result improve people’s lives and well-being. That commitment to the public good is at the core of the mission of our two universities, and we’re grateful to Microsoft for making a community-minded contribution that will spark a range of collaborations,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce.
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View the complete story on UW News or find out more from the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative Website.
Originally published on UW News by Michelle Ma.
New route-finding map lets Seattle pedestrians avoid hills, construction, accessibility barriers
Transportation routing services primarily designed for people in cars don’t give pedestrians, parents pushing bulky strollers or people in wheelchairs much information about how to easily navigate a neighborhood using sidewalks.
On Wednesday AccessMap – a University of Washington project spearheaded by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology — launched a new online travel planner offering customizable suggestions for people who need accessible or pedestrian-friendly routes when getting from point A to B in Seattle.
Join AccessMap on their map-a-thon event on February 19th!
Learn more about this new resource at UW Today.
Originally published on UW Today by Jennifer Langston
Big data and human services workshop resources
On January 17-18 Urban@UW, UW eScience Institute, the City of Seattle, and the MetroLab Network hosted a workshop on big data and human services. Check out the presentations and videos of our conversations at MetroLab’s workshop materials page.
Urban@UW hosted this workshop
Big data to help human services: Topic of UW, City of Seattle event Jan. 17

Flickr, Marco Antonio Torres, CC BY-SA
Using big data to address human services ― including health, foster care and the challenges of homelessness ― will be the focus of a workshop next week at Seattle City Hall hosted by the University of Washington and City of Seattle along with MetroLab Network, a recent White House initiative to improve cities through university-city partnerships.
The event begins on Jan. 17 with remarks from UW President Ana Mari Cauce, Seattle Deputy Mayor Kate Joncas, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire. Trish Millines Dziko, founder and director of the Technology Access Foundation, will address how to mentor the next generation of leaders.
In the afternoon, representatives from Microsoft, the City of Chicago and several academic institutions will discuss how data science can be incorporated into more efficient and effective urban human services.
MetroLab Network, which launched in fall 2015 as part of the White House Smart Cities Initiative, includes more than 40 university-city partnerships that will focus on the research, development and deployment of projects that offer technologically and analytically based solutions to challenges facing urban areas. Over the next year, MetroLab members will develop solutions in four areas, called “labs”: water and green infrastructure; sensors; traffic and transportation; and big data and human services.The Seattle-UW partnership is one of the founding members of MetroLab and will focus in part on pairing academic researchers with city leaders to address homelessness issues as well as transportation. Next week’s event will also include a day of workshops for researchers and human services experts to make connections on existing projects and identify priorities for the partnership.
Work will continue after the meeting as MetroLab members focus on opportunities for collaborative research and scalable projects. The workshop will also consider which tools and materials ― data-sharing standards, white papers, software ― would be broadly beneficial to city-university efforts. Urban@UW, the UW’s eScience Institute and Urbanalytics are several university groups that will play a large role in the partnership.
The water and green infrastructure lab kicked off in October 2016 with a workshop in Washington, D.C., and the other labs will begin work in 2017.
General registration is now closed, but those still interested in attending can email katy.getsie@metrolabnetwork.org. Members of the media should RSVP to program coordinator Jess Hamilton at jesshami@uw.edu.
Originally published by UW Today and Michelle Ma
Big Data and Human Services: A Brief Annotated Reading List

On January 17-18th 2017, the Metrolab workshop on Big Data and Human Services hosted by City of Seattle, MetroLab Network, and the University of Washington will convene experts from local government and universities to discuss common challenges and propose collaborative, data-driven solutions to human service issues. Urban@UW has compiled a brief reading list to help contextualize the conversation:
Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government
The combination of civic and public entities leveraging data for increased efficiency and novel applications. These new approaches create occasionally contested territory where calls for transparency and openness are met with deep concerns over privacy and security. Calo, et al, engaged in “cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system” using Seattle, WA as a case study for future possibilities.
Trish Dziko is fighting inequality in tech, one student at a time
Crosscut offers a profile of Trish Dziko, co-founder of University of Washington’s Technology Access Foundation, looking at the impacts of her career in technology and working to collapse gaps in gender and race in the world of technology.
Interview: Justin Erlich on gaining insights from open data
A podcast, produced by The Department of Better Technology, which assists governments in enhanced software delivery systems and platforms, interviews Justin Erlich of UC Berkeley and Special Assistant Attorney General to the California Department of Justice, discuss Kamala Harris’s OpenJustice platform and the implications of open data for justice transparency issues.
NYC’s Amen Ra Mashariki on Putting Analytics, Open Data to Use to Improve City Operations
Amen Ra Mashariki, Chief Analytics Officer in New York City’s Office of Data and Analytics, is interviewed by GovTech Magazine about New York City’s data explorations and impacts on businesses, efficiencies, and potential evolutions.
Interfacing Urban Intelligence
Shannon Mattern, associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, offers a critical perspective on possibilities for smart cities through a discrete focus on how citizens might physically interact with these systems.
Structured Open Urban Data: Understanding the Landscape
Barbosa et al. explore the emergence of open urban data initiatives across North America. An analysis of over 9,000 open data sets considers data integration opportunities and data quality issues associated with this new approach to public information.
Building an Urban Data Science Summer Program at the University of Washington eScience Institute
This paper describes the inaugural offering of the eScience Institutes Data Science for Social Good program, modeled after the University of Chicago program of the same name. Writers reflect on the process of organizing and structuring a program that brings together students and practitioners with varying backgrounds and experiences to design, develop, and deploy new solutions to high-impact problems in the Seattle Metro Area.
Big Data Could Help Some of the 200,000 NYC Households That Get Eviction Notices This Year
NextCity highlights benefits and important considerations in regard to tools developed by nonprofit data analytics firm SumAll, which uses data to help social workers decide where to focus their efforts.
Will Data Change the Face of our Cities?
City of Chicago Chief Data Officer, Tom Schenk Jr., opines in Open Resource Magazine that similar to start-ups and large companies, cities are poised to leverage big data - from Twitter to the Array of Things, to improve efficiency of their services.
In 2015, the Metrolab Network was announced as a part of the Obama Administration’s new “Smart Cities” Initiative to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services.
The University of Washington is supporting the MetroLab workshop on Big Data and Human Services though the collaborative efforts of the eScience Institute, Urbanalytics Studio and Urban@UW.
New wood technology may offer hope for struggling timber
John Redfield watches with pride as his son moves a laser-guided precision saw the size of a semi-truck wheel into place over a massive panel of wood.
Redfield’s fingers are scarred from a lifetime of cutting wood and now, after decades of decline in the logging business, he has new hope that his son, too, can make a career shaping the timber felled in southern Oregon’s forests.
That’s because Redfield and his son work at D.R. Johnson Lumber Co., one of two U.S. timber mills making a new wood product that’s the buzz of the construction industry. It’s called cross-laminated timber, or CLT, and it’s made like it sounds: rafts of 2-by-4 beams aligned in perpendicular layers, then glued — or laminated — together like a giant sandwich.
The resulting panels are lighter and less energy-intensive than concrete and steel and much faster to assemble on-site than regular timber, proponents say. Because the grain in each layer is at a right angle to the one below and above it, there’s a counter-tension built into the panels that supporters say makes them strong enough to build even the tallest skyscrapers.
Continue reading at the Business Insider
Originally written by the Gillian Flaccus and Phuong Le in the Business Insider
Seattle to Portland in 15 minutes? UW students competing to build 700 mph hyperloop

Flickr, Kevin Krejci, CC-BY-2.0
Imagine a transportation system that could move you from place to place faster than a jet plane, without ever leaving the ground — a system that could take you from Seattle to Portland in just 15 minutes.
In a chilly warehouse near Lake Union, a group of University of Washington students is trying to solve some of the engineering puzzles tied to inventor Elon Musk’s dream of a hyperloop, a theoretical new form of travel.
They’re among the 30 finalists in a collegiate competition to build a hyperloop pod — a capsule for carrying passengers in the tubes envisioned by Musk, of SpaceX and Tesla.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times
Originally posted at The Seattle Times by Kathrine Long
UW professor: Seattle exposed to most ‘chronically high noise levels’ of any city in US

Wikimedia, Joe Mabel, CC-BY-SA-3.0
How Seattle’s development is impacting your health and, more specifically, your ears is not something being taken into account by city leaders, according to a University of Washington professor. And changing an ordinance that mutes construction’s noise pollution to match other cities from around the country might be a potent elixir, he says.
Eliot Brenowitz, a professor of psychology and biology at UW, co-authored a piece for Crosscut that says Seattle residents are “being exposed to some of the most chronically high noise levels from construction of any city in the nation.” And while he is concerned, he told KIRO Radio’s Jason and Burns that the title of the Crosscut piece, “Seattle’s construction noise is out of control — and deadly,” is not what he had in mind.
Continue reading at KIRO7
Originally posted at KIRO7 by Eric Mandel
Livable City Year releases RFP, invites cities to partner for 2017-8 academic year

The University of Washington’s Livable City Year initiative is now accepting proposals from cities, counties, special districts and regional partnerships to partner with during the 2017-2018 academic year.
UW Livable City Year (UW LCY) connects University of Washington faculty and students with a municipal partner for a full academic year to work on projects fostering livability. The municipal partner will
identify a selection of projects in their community that could be addressed by UW LCY courses. Areas of focus include environmental sustainability, economic viability, population health, and social equity, inclusion and access.
The full details can be found in the Request for Proposals document. Proposals must be submitted by Feb. 15, 2017.
Read more in the Livable City Year’s announcement.
Urban@UW is a foundational supporter of Livable City Year. This article was originally shared on the Livable City Year website, written by Daimon Eklund.
Welcoming the residents of Tent City 3

Wikimedia, Joe Mabel, CC-BY-SA-3.0
Winter is approaching, and with it the need for shelter for our neighbors who find themselves without permanent housing only grows.
Earlier this year, at the request of the Tent City Collective – a group of students, alumni and Tent City 3 residents – our University engaged in a public process to assess whether we should host Tent City 3 for 90 days during the winter quarter. As a result of your feedback, and thanks to the work of students, faculty and staff, in June it was announced that the UW will indeed host TC3.
Continue reading at President Cauce’s blog.
Originally posted at UW President Cauce’s blog.
Techstars Teams with Amazon for Alexa Startup Accelerator in Seattle
Wikimedia, ABsCatLib, CC BY-SA 4.0
Alexa, what’s the epicenter of innovation in speech as the new user interface?
A good case can be made for Seattle, following an announcement today from Techstars and Amazon.
Techstars, a top-tier startup accelerator with locations around the world and a major presence in Seattle since 2010, will begin a second program here next year in partnership with Amazon’s Alexa Fund. The aim is to attract and support “early-stage companies advancing the state-of-the-art in voice-powered technologies, interfaces and applications, with a focus on Alexa domains such as connected home, wearables and hearables, enterprise, communication devices, connected car and health and wellness,” writes Techstars’ executive director Cody Simms in a blog post.
Amazon launched the $100 million Alexa Fund in mid-2015 to back companies pushing the frontiers of voice technology and to support an ecosystem around Alexa, the intelligence that powers voice-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo. The fund has backed 22 companies so far, according to a blog post by Douglas Booms, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide corporate development.
Continue reading at Xconomy
Originally published by Xconomy and Benjamin Romano
To Californians: The Hours You Spend in Traffic May Soon Be Used to Generate Electricity

WikiMedia Commons and Clashmaker
LOS ANGELES, CA - If you’re a Los Angeles native, resident or even visitor, you will probably cringe at the combination of “LA” and “rush hour.” Sitting in LA traffic is an excruciatingly painful task, and not just because of the hours you spend putting pressure on your lower back. If your brakes aren’t screeching because of the driver who just cut you off, then you’re probably yelling about the bumper-to-bumper deadlock.
Truth be told, traffic is infuriating, exhausting and unproductive. However, the California Energy Commission (CEC) has announced its plans to change the latter of the three.
In a new pilot program, the CEC invested $2 million to study whether or not piezoelectric crystals, which would be installed under the asphalt, can be used to turn some of the most congested freeways in the country into a useful alternative resource.
Continue reading at The Huffington Post
Originally published by Huffington Post & Jennifer Schwab
October Recap: Urban Transporation, Health, and Justice

Compiled by Urban@UW.
October has seen a lot of research and engagement surrounding urban design, health, and transportation from University of Washington’s urban scholars and practitioners. Here at Urban@UW we’ve kicked off our Livable City Year program, reflected on our first full year of work and collaborations, and are planning for our symposium on Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change (November 7-8).
- The Livable City Year Program is in its first year of operation. Partnering university courses, students, and instructors with a city, this year Livable City Year is working with the City of Auburn to collaboratively generate ideas, analysis and potential solutions to advance urban livability and sustainability.
- Urban@UW turned 1! Our Director Thaisa Way penned a letter reflecting on our mission, accomplishments, and next steps for Urban@UW to further collaborate with communities, cities, and researchers to collectively advance urban thinking and problem-solving.
- The College of Engineering has opened a new lab working with the City of Seattle through support from UW, Costco, Nordstrom, and UPS. The Urban Freight Lab is uses analytics to generate potential solutions as transportation infrastructure and delivery systems become stressed by increasingly heavy use.
- The Department of Urban Planning’s Anne Vernez Moudon and Andrew Dannenberg—who is also a professor in the School of Public Health—and a team of other researchers co-authored an urban design series published by The Lancet. Their research looked at transportation, design and human health.
- The Department of Electrical Engineering’s Baosen Zhang and Lillian Ratliff are working with the City of Seattle, Vanderbilt University, and the City of Nashville to utilize user input and smart devices to develop new ways of thinking about the efficacy of multi-modal transportation.
- In advance of our symposium and Jacqui Patterson’s Walker-Ames-endowed lecture, we have compiled a reading list of her work, including some brief pieces and some more substantial reports on climate justice.
Urban@UW compiles monthly recaps highlighting the urban research happening across the University of Washington.
UW EE Faculty to Tackle Urban Mobility

Flickr and Benson Kua
For urban roadways, traffic-choked streets have become synonymous with the weekday commute. Over the decades, strategic conversations between city officials, engineers and policy makers have sought to lessen congestion and provide increased transportation options. However, as cities continue to develop and populations increase, the results of years of conversation cannot materialize fast enough. On the thrumming streets of Seattle and Nashville, the consumer becomes a key player on urban transportation initiatives.
The project, which is a collaboration between the University of Washington, City of Seattle, Vanderbilt University and the City of Nashville, tackles urban transportation congestion by engaging the individual user through the use of smart devices. The three-year, proof-of-concept project has received a collaborative National Science Foundation (NSF) US Ignite Grant.
Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor Baosen Zhang is the Principal Investigator on the project and Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor Lillian Ratliff is the Co-Principal Investigator. The University of Washington leads the multimodal transit project, collaborating with Vanderbilt University and the Cities of Nashville and Seattle to test the research.
The project utilizes smart devices due to their proliferation in the urban commuter space. The commuters, therefore, become active agents in a shared economy. Currently available applications for multimodal transport solutions focus on individual users and their local perspectives. This current application does not accurately represent an overall solution. Although there is large-scale data being collected by both municipalities and users, neither group has the resources to develop real-time analytics and controls.
“No one has done this type of collaborating and computing before,” Ratliff said. “It not only focuses on commuters as a whole, but it also looks at two socioeconomically diverse cities – Seattle and Nashville.”
Continue reading at the UW Department of Electrical Engineering.
(Originally published by UW Department of Electrical Engineering.)
Cars vs health: UW’s Moudon, Dannenberg contribute to Lancet series on urban planning, public health

WikiMedia Commons and Minesweeper
Automobiles — and the planning and infrastructure to support them — are making our cities sick, says an international group of researchers now publishing a three-part series in the British medical journal The Lancet.
University of Washington professors Anne Vernez Moudon and Andrew Dannenberg are co-authors of the first of this series that explores these connections and suggests several planning alternatives for better health.
The Lancet published the series on Sept. 23 and launched it that day during an event at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Titled, “Urban Design, Transport and Health,” the series involved researchers in several nations and fields.
Moudon is a professor emerita of urban design and planning and architecture in the UW College of Built Environments. Dannenberg is an affiliate professor of environmental and occupational health in the School of Public Health and in urban design and planning.
“Most of the negative consequences of city planning policies on health are related to the high priority given to motor vehicles in land-use and transportation planning,” said Moudon. “City planning policies supporting urban individual car travel directly and indirectly influence such risk exposures as traffic, air pollution, noise, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, personal safety and social isolation.”
Moudon is second author and Dannenberg a co-author on the first of the three papers, titled “City Planning and Population Health: A Global Challenge.” Billie Giles-Corti and Mark Stevenson of the University of Melbourne are lead authors of the series, and Corti is lead on this paper, together with several international experts in public health and transportation planning as co-authors. Over two years, the team reviewed 20 years of literature as well as their own research on the health impacts of city planning through transportation mode choice in cities.
The verdict of their lead article: Automobiles are central to the problem of urban planning and human health.
Individualized motor travel in cities is the “root cause,” Moudon and fellow authors write, “of increases in exposures to sedentarism, environmental pollution, social isolation and unhealthy diets, which lead to various types of injury and disease outcomes.”
The lead paper suggests eight major interventions that city and transportation planning can employ to make cities more “compact” and promote health.
At the local urban design level, these ideas include walkable and bikable environments, shorter distances to common daily destinations, mixing housing with commercial developments and services and making common destinations more readily available to citizens. Parking demand would be managed by reducing its availability and increasing its cost.
“Together, these interventions will create healthier and more sustainable, compact cities,” the authors write, “that reduce the environmental, social and behavioral risk factors that affect lifestyle choices, levels of environmental pollution, noise and crime.”
Stevenson is the lead author on the second paper, which focuses on the links between land use, transport and health benefits in compact cities. The third paper, whose lead author is James Sallis of the University of California, San Diego, looks at using science to guide city planning policy and practice for healthy and sustainable cities.
Overall, the series quantifies the health gains that could be achieved if cities incentivize a shift from private car use to cycling and walking, and promote a city model in which employment and amenities — including public transportation — are within walking distance.
Series author Giles-Corti placed the multinational research into historic and global perspective, noting that with world population heading to 50 billion by 2050 — and three-quarters of people to be living in cities — city planning must be part of a comprehensive solution to adverse health outcomes.
“City planning was key to cutting infectious disease outbreaks in the 19th century through improved sanitation, housing and separating residential and industrial areas,” Giles-Corti said. “Today, there is a real opportunity for city planning to reduce non-communicable diseases and road trauma and to promote health and wellbeing more broadly.”
Other co-authors on the first paper in the series are from the University of California, San Diego; Washington University in St. Louis; Pontifical Catholic University of Parana and Federal University of Parana, in Brazil; Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia; the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia; and the Australian Catholic University, Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute and Swinburne University of Technology, all of Melbourne, Australia.
Funders for the paper authors included Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council and Centre for Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities, the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, the Hospitals Contribution Fund of Australia, VicHealth, as well as the U.S. National Institute of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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For more information, contact Moudon at 206-276-3133 or moudon@uw.edu or Dannenberg at 404-272-3978 or adannen@uw.edu.
The series is available at http://www.thelancet.com/series/urban-design.
(Originally published by UW News and Peter Kelley.)
New Seattle freight lab tackles urban delivery congestion

Wikimedia Commons and Axisadman
SEATTLE (AP) — In this city where residents can get practically anything delivered to their doorsteps — often within hours — trucks, bikes, cars and buses regularly jostle for space on Seattle’s streets.
The rise in e-commerce and on-demand delivery has put increasing pressure on fast-growing cities like Seattle to rethink how they manage traffic congestion, as well as curbs, sidewalks, parking and other infrastructure.
On Wednesday, the city of Seattle teamed up with the University of Washington to improve how goods are delivered in the city — solutions they hope can be used in other cities across the country.
Seattle pledged $285,000 over the next three years to the UW’s new Urban Freight Lab, which will test more efficient methods to deliver goods that are ordered online and delivered to large residential or retail and commercial buildings. Costco, Nordstrom and UPS are also founding members.
Continue reading at the Associated Press.
Originally published by the Associated Press and Phuong Le
UW student project taps ORCA cards, unlocks data trove

Wikimedia Commons and SounderBruce
Students in a UW summer fellowship program called Data Science for Social Good work to coax valuable information from overlooked data, and one potential upshot might be improved bus service.
If you’re a regular bus rider, you might think that the area’s transit agencies use the information from your ORCA card to learn which buses are most crowded during rush hour, and to fine-tune the area’s routes.
You would be wrong.
Turns out none of the area’s transit agencies have ever made significant use of the trove of data from ORCA cards — the prepaid, plastic cards used to pay for more than 60 percent of all rides on the area’s nine regional transit systems.
So this summer, a team of Ph.D. students took 21 million ORCA-card readings and wrangled the data into a form that can be used to discover where, and when, we go when we ride the bus.
Continue reading at The Seattle Times.
(Originally published by The Seattle Times and Katherine Long.)
New book ‘Cities that Think Like Planets’ imagines urban regions resilient to change

Wikimedia Commons and Gindelis
Marina Alberti is a professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, which is part of the University of Washington College of Built Environments. Alberti directs the college’s Urban Ecology Research Laboratory and the Graduate School’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in urban design and planning.
She answered some questions about her new book, “Cities that Think Like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems,” which was published in July by University of Washington Press.
This book seems a summing-up of elements of your career so far — including your views on the powerful effect of humans on ecosystems — as well as the work of many others. How long was this book in the making and how did it come about?
M.A.: I have been curious, since my early days as a student, about the role of imagination in scientific thinking. I believe that scientific progress is achieved through the discipline of observing and listening — without judgment — to both what it is and what can be. The book begins by imagining the future.
The way we think about the future has significant implications for the choices we make in the present — the strategies we devise to address new emergent problems. Imagine New York City — or London or Beijing or Ho Chi Minh City, or Seattle. Our present decisions as citizens and as planners will depend on whether we envision a future that follows the current trajectory of development, characterized by continuing growth; or one that predicts crossed thresholds, tipping points, and irreversible regime shifts triggered by climate change; or whether we imagine that we will be able to adapt to climate change by investing in green energy and infrastructure.
And how would our decisions differ, if we could imagine our city able to reinvent itself by redefining its relationships with natural processes?
I suggest that by navigating through time, we can uncover our biases about what we know and challenge the too-often-implied notion that scientific discovery has reached its end or that we’ve exhausted our capacity to learn. I propose that we can learn from the future. And more importantly, we can learn by asking what it is that we are unable to imagine.
What do you mean by “navigating through time” in this context?
M.A.: You do not need to travel very far in time to uncover the bias that past observations can place on our predictions. Current climate variables are very well outside the historical variability. Humans are changing the environment outside the range of values and conditions that Earth’s ecosystems have experienced throughout their evolution. And our past experience can also limit our imagination. Imagine you were among the first Seattle dwellers. Could have you imagined the current trajectories of urban growth?
The emergence of a new urban science that aims to uncover universal rules of how cities work and the remarkable availability of real time data and new sensors are key to envisioning such transformation. But science and data answer questions we are able to formulate. To build sustainable, resilient cities requires that we both refine our predictions and expand our imagination. Expanding the imagination is what made Einstein envision gravitational waves one hundred years before they were detected.
Your notion of “thinking like a planet” builds on ecologist Aldo Leopold’s idea to expand the scale of land conservation by “thinking like a mountain.” How have you built on that, and what does it mean, briefly, for a city to “think like a planet”?
M.A.: I suggest that we need a new ethic: to “build cities that think like planets,” so that we might face the challenge of cities in the context of planetary change. For Aldo Leopold, “thinking like a mountain” meant expanding the spatial and temporal scales of land conservation by incorporating a mountain’s dynamics. I suggest that we need to build on Hirsch and Norton’s idea of “thinking like a planet” (“Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future,” 2012, MIT Press) to expand the time and space dimensions of urban design and planning to the planetary scale.
Cities that think like planets are cities:
- where humans are key players in nature’s game
- where humans bio-cooperate with, not simply bio-mimic, natural processes
- that operate on planetary spatial and time scales
- that rely on “wise” citizens, not simply smart technologies
You depict a hypothetical city planner saying it’s helpful to imagine varied futures, even knowing none will come true: “As we prepare our city for every collectively imagined scenario, we shape ourselves into a resilient city able to withstand whatever our ultimate reality delivers.” What role might human creativity and ingenuity play in preparing cities to meet the future?
M.A.: Cities are where innovation has historically occurred. The key role that cities have played in the development of science and technology and in the generation of inventions and innovations — intellectual and material, cultural and political, institutional and organizational — has been well documented by scholars in a diversity of disciplines.
While rapid urbanization accelerates and expands human impacts on the global ecosystem, it is the close interactions of diverse peoples that make cities the epicenter of both social transformation and technological innovation. Yet innovation is tightly linked to the capacity of urbanizing regions to adapt and evolve in a changing environment. For human civilization to achieve its full potential, it is essential to place technological innovation and social transformation in the context of local and global environmental change.
“If we are to think like a planet, we must deal with scales and events that are far removed from the everyday human experience,” you write. This implies “expanding the scale of design and planning” from decades to centuries, and from a human scale to considering ecologies of whole regions. Do examples already exist of this type of long-term, unfettered planning?
M.A.: Throughout history, people in societies faced with the prospect of deforestation or other environmental changes have successfully engaged in long-term thinking. Consider, for example, the Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors, New Guinea highlanders and 16th-century German landowners or, more recently, the Chinese efforts at reforestation and their bans on logging of native forests.
Many European countries and the United States have dramatically reduced their air pollution while increasing their use of energy and their combustion of fossil fuels. Humans have the intellectual and moral capacity to do even more when they tune in to challenging problems and engage in solving them.
Several Northern European cities have adopted successful strategies to cut greenhouse gases, combining these strategies with innovative approaches that allow the cities to adapt to the inevitable consequences of climate change.
One example is the Copenhagen 2025 Climate Plan, which lays out a path for Copenhagen to become the world’s first carbon neutral city through efficient zero-carbon mobility and building. They’re building a subway that will place metro stations within 650 yards of 85 percent of the city’s residents. Nearly three-quarters of Copenhagen’s emissions reductions will be realized as people transition to less carbon-intensive ways to produce heat and electricity: biomass, wind, geothermal and solar. Copenhagen is also one of the first cities to adopt a climate adaptation plan that will reduce vulnerability to the extreme storms and rising seas expected over the next century.
The Netherlands, also, is exploring ways to allow people to live with the inevitable floods. Strategies include floating communities and adaptive beach protections that take advantage of natural processes. New York is setting an example for long-term planning too, by combining adaptation and transformation strategies into plans for building a resilient city.
What do you think cities that “think like planets” will look like?
M.A.: Although I have ventured to pose this question in the book, I do not attempt to provide an answer. In fact, no single individual can. The answer resides in the collective imagination and evolving behaviors of peoples of diverse cultures who inhabit the vast array of regions across the planet. Humanity has the capacity to think in the long term.
A city that thinks like a planet is not built on previously set design solutions or planning strategies. Nor can we assume that the best solution would work equally well across the world, regardless of place and time. Instead, such a city must be built on principles that expand its drawing board and on collaborative actions to include planetary processes and scales that integrate humanity into the evolution of Earth.
Such a view acknowledges the history of the planet in every element or building block of the urban fabric — from the skyscraper to the sidewalk, from a backyard to the central park, from residential side streets to mega-highways.
It is a view that is curious about understanding who we are and about taking advantage of novel patterns, processes and feedbacks that emerge from human and natural interactions.
It is a city grounded in the here and the now and simultaneously in the different temporal and spatial scales of human and natural processes that govern the Earth. A city that thinks like a planet is simultaneously resilient and ready to change.
For more information about “Cities that Think Like Planets,” contact Alberti at malberti@uw.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @ma003.
(Originally published by Peter Kelley and UW News.)
Uneven: Mobility, Sidewalks, and Maps (including a map-a-thon!)

Jake Stimpson flickr.com/photos/128539140@N03/
Much has been said about sidewalks as theaters of urban life. Productive democratic friction between strangers is one of the hallmarks of good city building, yet this vision of a grandly equitable platform for urban life is not without flaws. Sidewalks may appear to be benign slabs of concrete or brick, but as platforms for daily life they are inextricably bound to the politics of urban areas. In rapidly growing cities such as Seattle, these challenges can often come to the forefront.
Our conception of sidewalks is being expanded by the integration of a variety of transportation right of ways, parklets, as well as café and restaurant seating. As we seek to inject green spaces, bike corridors, and social business facades into confined spaces between buildings and streets the politicality of sidewalks becomes more legible.
The spatial density of sidewalks isn’t just an issue of integrating various right of ways, there are also very real implications for personal mobility.
When faced with navigational questions most of us are quick to ask a passerby, or perhaps more likely now, to pull out a phone and open an app. However, this solution relies on having a cellphone and is woefully inadequate for people with limited mobility. Perhaps you’ve confronted the flaw in this reflex in your own adventures across town, or when helping a relative or friend with an assistive device, or even when riding your bike. Suddenly you find yourself having to pay very close attention to surface conditions and curb cut availability. Inadequate pedestrian and navigational infrastructure can be a nuisance to anyone, but for people with mobility limitations or low vision these conditions can not only be extremely frustrating, but hazardous.
This Sunday the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology and the OpenSidewalks team, from the UW eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program are hosting a map-a-thon to start to addressing these issues. Maps and data collected by Seattle community members will be integrated the open source, OpenStreetMap platform in order to enable more robust sidewalk information, and navigational assistance for those with limited mobility. The map-a-thon will be held:
Sunday, August 7th
12-4pm
Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering
Room 305 (CSE 305)

The event does not require people to have any experience in data collection, GIS, or coding. OpenSidewalks and Taskar representatives will guide you through some quick tutorials, and you are encouraged to bring your phone, a laptop and mouse if you have one, but there is ample opportunity for field mapping, using an old-fashioned pen and paper as well. Not to mention there’s free pizza and refreshments AND this is child friendly event.
This sort of civic engagement with our public space is essential, particularly in a city like Seattle. Our combination of wet winters, along with a mix of soft sandy soils and heavy glacial till can lead to sidewalks heaving and becoming uneven over time. Bike lanes have been used as parking zones, and seemingly ubiquitous construction often results in sidewalk closures or revisions that are not always easily navigable.
In light of the city’s ongoing development there has been frustration and concern as to who has priority in these pubic right of ways, and who is being affected. Sidewalk closures and rerouting present challenges to any pedestrian, and these issues are amplified for people with low vision and mobility restrictions. Seattle Weekly quoted Jacob Struiksma, a blind resident of the Roosevelt neighborhood, about the numerous challenges, delays, and general unpredictability created by widespread construction projects.
The integrity of sidewalks is not only a matter of temporary inconvenience, the Weekly also indicated it can curb people’s transportation preferences, shrinking walking range to what is explicitly known and immediate. Closures and alterations are necessary aspects of developing cities and this complex relationship highlights one of the reasons collaborations like that of the OpenSidewalks project, King County Metro, and the broader community are so important.

Those in poorer neighborhoods often face sustained complications in regards to pedestrian infrastructure. Governing magazine covered this issue in depth in 2014, finding that poorer areas have approximately double the pedestrian fatality rates of wealthier areas. This problem is created by a perfect storm of structural inequality patterns where more disenfranchised areas of a city often have: poorly maintained infrastructure, less transportation options, and are frequently either bounded or divided by major roads or highways. Further compounding these infrastructural conditions, residents in such neighborhoods are often the ones who depend most on walking and public transportation. The lingering effects of disinvestment and redlining unfortunately manifest in mobility issues for minority or disenfranchised communities. The Washington Post interviewed Kate Lowe, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about her study of New Orleans sidewalks. Lowe looked at the continuity of sidewalks between bus stops in neighborhoods and found that areas with low poverty rates, particularly white communities, were most likely to have continuous sidewalks. Those with high poverty rates were most likely to have intermittent sidewalk coverage.
Correlations between SAT scores or college acceptance rates and zip codes demonstrated strong correlations between citizen well-being and location, and as it turns out even the conditions of our sidewalks can be found to indicate inequities across urban space.
The need for both better information about access and pedestrian mobility is necessary as we attempt to transition from a completely car-centric culture to a city embracing multi-modal, equitable transportation systems. But cognizance of sidewalks’ importance for mobility across different communities may unfortunately remain an issue and illustrates that urban environmental justice concerns even seemingly benign sidewalks.
Written by Andrew Prindle, Urban@UW Communications Coordinator
Midsummer in Full Swing, A July Recap

A collage of July’s news banners.
While we are in the midst of a beautiful summer, things at the University of Washington and at Urban@UW are moving right along. We’ve seen some original writing, research, and even a podcast come out of community covering topics from marine noise pollution to data science and minimum wage to police reforms.
- The eScience Institute hosts Data Science for Social Good program looking at how data can be leveraged pressing urban topics.
- The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation contributed to a study of the healthiest cities.
- UW researchers are compiling health data on gunshot victims to better understand American gun violence.
- Technology, whose origins began at CoMotion, is helping to dampen the noise from marine pile driving.
- Urban@UW published a story about alleyways and looked at some work the Green Futures Lab has done on the topic in Seattle.
- A UW study looked at the connections between perceived threats from police officers and black men as predictors for supporting police reform.
- Jeff Shulman, associate professor at the Foster School, launched his podcast focusing on Seattle’s recent surge in growth.
- The Evans School, School of Social Work, and School of Public Health are continuing to examine the the economic impacts of Seattle’s $15/hour minimum wage.
Urban@UW compiles monthly recaps highlighting the urban research happening across the University of Washington.
New Tech Could Restore Some Quiet To Noisy Oceans

Jill Fine & Wikimedia Commons
Forty feet below the surface of Puget Sound, a marbled murrelet dives for its catch. The water is cold, dark — and incredibly noisy. A ping-ping-ping emanates from the shore over second-long intervals and continues on for the next several hours, sending a series of pressure waves through the ocean. For the endangered bird, these sounds could result in anything from a disturbing annoyance to internal injuries or even death.
The pings come from installing marine piles, concrete or steel pipes that are driven into the sediments to hold up piers or other platforms over the sea. Piles are ubiquitous in waterfront cities like Seattle. In the early 2000s, however, researchers began to realize there was a connection between installing piles and the dead fish that turned up floating on the water when they did it: the pile-driving noise was so loud, it was literally killing the surrounding marine life.
But now there might be a better way to put the piles in. Seattle-based Marine Construction Technologies, a spinoff of the University of Washington’s CoMotion startup program, says it has developed a much quieter pile-driving system that could help save aquatic animals’ hearing — and lives.
Continue reading at OPB FM
(Originally published by OPB FM & Samantha Larson)
Data Science for Social Good 2016

This summer we are thrilled to be supporting the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program.
Modeled after similar programs at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech, with elements from eScience’s own Data Science Incubator, sixteen DSSG Student Fellows have been working with academic researchers, data scientists, and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects. This year’s projects specifically focus on Urban Science, aiming to understand and extract valuable, actionable information out of data from urban environments across topic areas including public health, sustainable urban planning, education, transportation, and social justice.
Topics being addressed this summer include a community based approach to improving accessible pedestrian way-finding, mining online data for early identification of unsafe food products, enhanced transit system operations and planning, and tool development for effective poverty estimation. For more information on the work being done this summer check out the DSSG project descriptions.
Now entering their 5th week, students with backgrounds ranging from applied math and data visualization to international relations and landscape architecture, are not only learning new approaches to data challenges, but interdisciplinary collaboration. Student fellows have been exploring new data science tools, as well as a broad range of ethical considerations with support from the Human Centered Data Science Lab. Read more about the fellows, and their reflections on the program as it moves forward on the DSSG blog.
Reading List for Edgar Pieterse Visit 4/12

Portrait Courtesy of African Centre for Cities
In anticipation of Edgar Pieterse’s visit we thought you might enjoy a video lecture and in-depth examination to get a feel for Pieterse’s research and thinking.
- How can we transcend slum urbanism in Africa? – Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town - This short video delivered by Edgar Pieterse and UN-Habitat offers a very accessible overview of African urbanism and places these ideas in the context of urban theory and history. http://unhabitat.org/how-can-we-transcend-slum-urbanism-in-africa-edgar-pieterse-university-of-cape-town/
- High Wire Acts: Knowledge Imperatives of Southern Urbanisms - The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism offers us a more involved and critical look at the conditions and challenges of urbanism in Africa. This piece deftly explores theory and the challenges presented by emerging cities in the global South. http://jwtc.org.za/salon_volume_5/edgar_pieterse.htm
About Edgar Pieterse Professor Pieterse holds the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy and is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. ACC is emerging as the preeminent interdisciplinary urban research centre on the African continent. He previously served as Special Advisor to the Premier of the Western Cape Provincial Government in South Africa and directed a number of urban policy think tanks before his brief time in government. He is consulting editor for Cityscapes—an international biannual magazine on urbanism in the global South. His most recent co-edited books are: African Cities Reader III: Land, Property & Value (Chimurenga, 2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution (Zed, 2014) and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (Jacana, 2013). Edgar is also on the Advisory Boards of: Indian Institute for Human Settlements, LSE Cities, the Gauteng City-region Observatory, Open Society Foundation of South Africa, among others. He has recently been appointed as co-lead author of the Urban Chapter for the International Panel on Social Progress. He serves as Chairperson of the Panel of Experts support the Integrated Development Framework of South Africa. More information at www.africancentreforcities.net.
2016 Urban Studies Forum: Alternative Visions of Livability Choices, Costs and Consequences

February 25, 2016
8:30am to 1:30pm
William W. Philip Hall
1918 Pacific Avenue
Tacoma Washington 98402
For a city or a suburb to be livable, we assume certain characteristics and experiences. What are these and how do we define a livable place? Is there an agreement on what defines livability? The 2016 Urban Studies Forum will focus on these questions and what they might mean to the South Sound. In two separate panel discussions, we will focus on both the built environment dimensions of livability, as well as cultural and sociopolitical processes that produce them. Our panelists will debate various aspects of urban form, governance, social equity, and cultural productions that shape our perceptions of ‘livability.’
New! Urban Map Gallery

We’ve created a new urban map gallery to explore how other people and organizations are studying and visualizing data. The gallery features seven cities facing different social, economic, and geographic issues. This curation is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather provide insight and inspiration. Maps included track everything from sound to subway pathogens.
Monthly Wrap up January 2016

It’s been a great start to 2016.
UW Alumni association and History Department put together a woderful history lecture series: Excavating Seattle’s histories: Peoples, politics, and place check out details and videos here>
The CBE also hosted a number of great speakers and events including SUSTAINING JAPAN: 3.11 FIVE YEARS ON lecture and panel discussion with Hitoshi Abe
Smart city leaders from around the world gathered at UW’s Seattle campus for a two-day workshop called the “NSF Visioning Workshop on Smart and Connected Communities Research and Education”
UW’s school of Oceanography is giving Google a run for it’s money when it comes to mapping the sea floor in the Puget Sound region. Learn more about the project using new multibeam sonar technology here >
SDOT‘s new DR 10-2015 goes into effect to protect pedestrians, but in general there is room for improvement in our country’s sidewalks. Read about obstacles for visually challenged pedestrians in Seattle here> and the inequality of sidewalks here>
Everyone is trying to explain what makes Seattle a hotbed of innovation from the Seattle Times and UW scholars to Microsoft representative Brad Smith at the World Economic forum.
Seattle’s public transportation system expanded with the launch of the First Hill Streetcar, and an unexpectedly under budget extension of the light rail.
Last but not least our neighborhood, Seattle’s Udistrict, enjoyed the top spot in Redfin’s Top 24 Affordable and Balanced Mix Neighborhoods Ranked by Walk Score and GreatSchools Score (followed by six other Seattle neighborhoods in the top 20!).
Looking Forward to: Future of Seattle, Panel Discussion, 2/10

Wed. Feb. 10, 2016 7:30 p.m.
Kane Hall 130, UW Campus
Moderator: Enrique Cerna
Panelists: David Rolf, Trish Millines Dziko, Ruby Love and Eric Carlson
The 2016 History Lecture Series focuses on Seattle’s fascinating history; complete the experience with a lively discussion of Seattle’s future. KCTS9’s Enrique Cerna leads a panel featuring nationally-recognized labor leader David Rolf, Technology Access Foundation founder and education advocate Trish Millines Dziko, social benefit entrepreneur Ruby Loveand sustainable development innovator Eric Carlson, ’70, ’76, to discuss the big questions: What will Seattle look like in 20 years? Can we keep this city vibrant and livable? Will the things that people love about Seattle today still be here? What does the future have in store for the Emerald City?
Presented by the UW Alumni Association and Office of External affairs
What motivates people to walk and bike? It varies by income

Lower- and middle-income King County residents who live in denser neighborhoods — with stores, libraries and other destinations within easy reach — are more likely to walk or bike, according to new University of Washington research.
But neighborhood density didn’t motivate higher-income residents to leave their cars at home, the transportation engineers found. Of the environmental factors they studied, the only one that significantly influenced how frequently that group walked or biked was how attractive they found their neighborhoods to be.
Dimensions of “attractiveness” that motivated the higher-income group included seeing other people when they walk in their neighborhoods, the attractiveness of buildings and homes and having interesting things to look at.
Read the complete story on UW Today>
UW initiative aims to tackle city, region’s most pressing urban issues

When Thaisa Way put a call out last spring to see if University of Washington faculty members working on urban issues wanted to join forces, she wasn’t sure what the response would be.
“There were a lot of people who said, ‘You’re not going to get anyone to show up,‘” said Way, a UW associate professor of landscape architecture.
But more than 80 people representing 12 of the UW’s colleges and schools turned up to the gathering, held on a Monday afternoon at the tail end of the quarter. The meeting launched the creation of Urban@UW, an interdisciplinary effort that has been incubating for more than three years to bring together UW researchers, Seattle officials and citizens to collaborate on the most pressing issues facing a rapidly growing city and region.
There are more than 200 UW faculty members working on urban topics, Way said, from geographers using GIS technology to address the complexities of homelessness to data scientists working on transportation challenges to teams of researchers working on food access and Seattle’s minimum wage.
Faculty members, particularly younger ones, are increasingly motivated by a desire for their work to have a real-world impact, Way said, and urban issues present a significant and compelling opportunity to make a difference in their own backyard, as well as around the globe.
“I think the generation of faculty who have come into the university in the past decade want to be part of a larger effort,” said Way, Urban@UW’s executive director. “Urban issues are a very visceral, very present challenge and a remarkable opportunity. That’s the fantastic thing about cities — they’re both our problem and our answer.”
Urban@UW will hold its kickoff event from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. this Thursday, Oct. 29, at theSamuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center. The keynote speaker is Nathan Connolly, an associate professor at New York University who studies race, housing and poverty.
UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray will discuss the new MetroLab Network, a partnership between the city and university spearheaded by UW’s eScience Institute and Urban@UW. The collaboration, part of the White House’s new Smart Citiesinitiative, will focus on infrastructure, service delivery to citizens, democratic governance and increased civic participation and data-driven policymaking.
Following the presentations, more than 90 faculty members, city and county decision-makers and local stakeholders will brainstorm ideas for collaborative projects in six areas: disaster preparedness and response, food and economic disparity, housing and poverty, climate change and environmental justice, growth and transportation, and the MetroLab Network. Each topic will have a UW faculty lead and a designated community member going forward.
The goal, Urban@UW Program Manager Jen Davison said, is to develop pilot projects that will be launched over the coming year and supported by Urban@UW, anything from a series of conversations to a small-scale research project.
“We don’t want to be too prescriptive for what they come up with,” Davison said. “We want these projects to be driven by the needs of the community and the capacities of our researchers and teachers.”
Other universities have launched urban-focused initiatives, but Way said they tend to be more narrowly focused and involve fewer departments. Seattle is an ideal city for the effort, she said — small enough to be nimble but large enough to have big-city problems, a place where bold thinking and ambition thrive.
“We’ve got this creative, innovative community that can help us think about what it takes to do something differently,” Way said. “We have this wonderful opportunity to think across disciplines in a lot of different worlds and practices.”
The effort will take a holistic approach, Way said, with the goal of fostering well-being and opportunity for all Seattle residents.
“These problems are multifaceted, and that means cities can’t address housing without addressing where schools are, without addressing transportation, without addressing employment,” she said.
Urban@UW received funding for three years from the UW Office of Research and is working in partnership with CoMotion, the UW’s innovation incubator, as well as with UW’s eScience Institute. Its headquarters are in Startup Hall, just off campus, and Davison is its sole employee.
Way envisions Urban@UW becoming a hub that the mayor of Bellingham or an NGO in Bogota could tap into for expertise on a range of issues, and where urban scholars might come from around the world to build and gain knowledge that can be applied in other cities.
“We want to be able to show that we can be a resource for more than Seattle,” she said. “I hope we can continue to build these partnerships so that in ten years, we’re an internationally recognized center for innovative urban research and practice.”
UW students address urban issues, pitch innovative solutions at NextSeattle Workshop

How does a city grow? As more and more people are moving to urban centers throughout the world, what will the modern city look like? How will we ensure that all of its residents, rich or poor, are able to access public goods and services? And for all the creative energy that a city harnesses in one place, how will we make sure that no one is shunted to its margins, left to fall through the cracks?
These are just some of the questions students began to tackle at NextSeattle, an intensive four-day workshop sponsored by CoMotion, Urban@UW, Undergraduate Academic Affairs, and the UW eScience Institute. The workshop was at its core an academic course in which students “engaged a breadth of disciplines and practices as they explored how to work with diverse communities to foster a more inclusive, equitable and healthy city,” said Thaisa Way, the lead faculty and director of Urban@UW.
PNNL Hosting 4th Workshop on Next-Generation Analytics for the Future Power Grid

Designing Healthy Cities by Andrew Dannenberg
Presented at the June 1st Urban@UW Launch
CoSSar presented by Scott Miles
Presented at June 1st Urban@UW Launch Meeting
UW Professor Outlines Key Factors in Puget Sound’s Transportation Future
Mark Hallenbeck, director of the University of Washington’s Washington State Transportation Center and a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been studying Northwest transit for years. Looking to the future he has identified the following key considerations that will play important roles in shaping the regions transportation:
- Growth will be inward, not outward
- We have no option but to encourage public transit
- Demographic changes present a challenge and opportunity
- Economic growth is both the cause of many problems, and a big reason they need fixing
- Tech innovation is a wild card
eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good Projects Announced

eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good Projects Announced Bringing together data scientists to work on focused, collaborative projects designed to impact public policy. This Summer teams will be looking at:
Assessing Community Well-Being Through Open Data and Social Media - providing neighborhood communities with a better understanding of the factors that impact their well-being. http://thirdplacetechnologies.com/
King County Metro Paratransit - an on-demand public transportation program that provides a vital link to mobility for people with disabilities who are unable to use traditional fixed route services, picking up passengers at or near their doorstep and delivering them to their specified destination. http://metro.kingcounty.gov/tops/accessible/programs/access.html
Open Sidewalk Graph for Accessible Trip Planning is an information challenge to design an open source software toolkit and set of algorithms to help those with limited mobility plan a commute. http://www.geekwire.com/2015/app-that-helps-people-in-wheelchairs-plan-travel-routes-wins-first-place-at-civic-hackathon/
Predictors of Permanent Housing for Homeless Families in King, Snohomish, & Pierce County’s mission is to make homelessness rare, brief, and one time. http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2015/02/Better-Data-to-Reduce-Homelessness#.VWdwjFxVhBd
UW team “Hackcessible” wins Hack The Commute Competition

UW team wins City of Seattle sponsored Hack the Commute with a web-based map that helps those
Hackcessible Access Map (in beta) >
High speed battery charging for smart grids.
SCL (Michael Pesin) and UW Electrical Engineering (Daniel Kirtchner). Develop new energy storage technologies that facilitate variable energy output, which more closely mirrors how electricity is used in modern grid scenarios.
Ken Smith: Going Beyond the Metrics
In case you missed it. Ken Smith’s lecture, a part of the UW Landscape Architecture Lecture Series on May 14th 2015.
The lecture focuses on ideas and craft in creating contemporary landscapes particularly at a larger scale. A number of new or recent projects are discussed as case studies. It addresses issues of scale, infrastructure and sustainability in the urban context.
Be boundless
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