ENV 819b () / 2024-2025

Measuring and Visualizing Urban Environments

Credits: 3 Spring 2025: Time and location TBA

Cities are central to addressing some of the most pressing sustainability challenges of our time. Access to data is transforming how we study them, offering new opportunities to make data actionable for policy through analysis and visualization. This course explores a series of urban sustainability challenges, focusing on how innovative data sources and tools can be harnessed to address them. Through hands-on workshops, students will explore and analyze urban data from sources such as street networks, sensors, drones, images, and GPS data. The course emphasizes environmental challenges, including the interplay between the built environment, vegetation, and heat, and the influence of urban policies on climate resilience. It also delves into societal concerns like equitable access to services and socioeconomic segregation in cities. Students will learn to effectively collect, analyze, and visualize large spatial datasets, gaining practical skills in spatial analysis, computer vision, network analysis, and more. The course concludes with a final project, allowing students to apply their skills to urban problems.