Category: Uncategorized
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A Mock City Council from the Mayor’s Perspective
Today’s class was the final course for the semester. We participated in a mock city council meeting centered around approving or disapproving a proposal to annex and rezone some residential lots for a planned mixed use development to include affordable residential space and commercial retail space. The mock meeting was an interesting exercise in understanding,…
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Urban Mapping Tools or How I learned to Love StreetMix
Today’s class we explored several different programs for to generate graphics useful for the planning profession. Expanding upon last week’s class we had a discussion of GIS programs in particular the the ESRI software suite including ArcGIS Pro, Urban Footprint, CityCAD, and various graphic tools (GIMP, InDesign, Photoshop). One program we discussed was SketchUp as…
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A Discussion of Visual Data and Representations
Today we dove into an exploration of visual data, everything from photographs to graphs and charts to mapping making with QGIS. We opened class with an interesting discussion of how data can be represented in various charts and in particular combining variables to communicate correlations. Charles Minard’s graphing of Napoleon’s march across Europe was held…
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Learning How to Communicate
I really enjoyed this week’s class discussions of plans and communications as we reviewed the articles Reading Through A Plan and General Plan Evaluation Criteria: An Approach to Making Better Plans from the Journal of the American Planning Association and The Three Laws of Professional Communication from the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Diving into…
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Understanding Data Collection and Analysis
The name of the game for this week’s class was data gathering and analysis. We covered polling and surveys. I feel like this really started to scratch the surface of planning efforts as understanding how to collect and manage data to provide usable insights is key to the profession. We discussed methods for conducting surveys…
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A Second Outing
For today’s class we learned about various tools to help with writing, idea generation/organization, and data collection. The tools we explored included Grammarly, Zotero, Miro, Scrivener, PolicyMap, and ESRI ArcGIS Business Analyst. While each application has its niche use I can foresee getting the most out of the Zotero as it is an application to…
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My First Post – A Steep Learning Experience
Today I had my first experience messing around with coding. While installing python was quite easy, the next steps to get jupyter notebook installed were quite frustrating. While a classmate was able to help me figure it out, the documentation in the various instructions did not make it clear that the installation script had to…