Type: Lab
In spring semester 2021, Visualizing Cities Lab fellows formed teams to develop a series of workshops centered on tools and approaches to examining the ways cities are visualized.
Mapping in "R"
March 16, 2021
The R programming language is an increasingly popular tool for manipulating and visualizing geographic data. One valueable resource for this data is IPUMS NHGIS (IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System), a database that provides Census shapefiles. In this workshop, we provide an overview of the Census data available through NHGIS. Then, we showcase maps that we have created from this data and give participants the opportunity to manipulate one of these maps in R.
Andrew Carr, Daniel Block, Georgie Stammer, Vaneesha Patel
Planning for Interventions
March 23, 2021
To mention Urban Studies is to elicit a cannon of names: Rossi, Le Corbusier, Jacobs. Yet like any academic field, those names only tell half the story and often one of privileged positionality. In this workshop, the audience will take on the role of a city planning board. Three extent sites with their names obscured will be presented as proposals. In breakout rooms, teams will decide to pass or decline the motion to build. These choices will then be problematized based upon various interventions and real reaction to the various projects, with selected works for further inquiry if interested.
Bryan Rusch, Charlie Colasurdo, Brandon Li
Imagining Cities: New Orleans
March 30, 2021
Every city exists in innumerable versions as each person experiences it differently and each person imagines it differently. New Orleans is a city rich in history, legends, dreams, and contradictions and in this workshop, we will present imagined versions of New Orleans that draw from its illustrious music and food, its atmospheric literature, and its particular iconography of death, mystery, and magic.
Anvita Budhraja, Alana Hyman, Elena Rivera
Cold War City
April 6, 2021
This workshop focuses on how Cold War culture in the Korean Peninsula was visualized in the urban setting, paying particular attention to urban typologies such as landscape and architecture. Taking urban visuality as a vantage point, the workshop delves into the correlation between state ideology and urban planning.
Yiming Cai, Christina Wang, Deepthi Chandra
Visualizing Health Infrastructure and Disease
April 13, 2021
The workshop will focus on the use of historical archives to develop data structures and formats for Digital Humanities (DH). We will examine two datasets: the Gateshead British Cholera papers from 1831 and the Rubenstein Library's dataset of the outbreak of cholera in Havana in 1833. The Cuban dataset contains important information including the number of dead, gender, ethnicity, status, and some even provide geostatistical localization. We will learn how to transcribe historical information into a readable format. Tableau will be used for analysis and data visualization in DH.
Ninel Valderrama Negrón, Riya Mohan, Keena Gao
Building a Lexicon for Contemporary Global South Cities
April 20, 2021
The Global South--where many of the world's largest cities now lie--poses a number of challenges to the disciplinary conventions and historical narratives of urbanism. Participants int he workshop will interact with images and cartographies from selected Global South cities to hypothesize terms for spatial research in zones characterized by informality, urban-rural hybridity, and uneven modernization.
Ian Erickson-Kery, Ian Acriche, Ayesham Khan