Research

In the Brookings Institute's pulse check on the nation's clean economy, researchers found that most of the country's clean economy jobs and recent growth were held in the largest metropolitan areas.

July 14, 2011 - The Brookings Institute

Who's the happiest and healthiest of them all? The New York Times posts an interactive map of the national Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.

March 16, 2011 - New York Times

Will digital communications make cities obsolete, or can online connections actually complement the face-to-face interactions and the cities that support them?

March 1, 2011 - New York Times

In coming weeks doctoral applications in planning are due. Why apply? For professional planners, a PhD sometimes sounds interesting compared with doing a regular job in a municipality. Some designers remember studio professors who seemed to float into class, unprepared, for a few hours per week. Compared with the ups and downs of private design practice, this can seem quite appealing. Of course, some people genuinely like studying and research, want to make a contribution in that area, and have a flair for teaching.

January 5, 2011 - Ann Forsyth

In a field such as planning that is rich with quantifiable data, why there so little focus on evidence rather than opinion?, wonders researcher Martin Laplante.

November 1, 2010 - Martin Laplante

Perceptions about the amount of time transit trips take have been found to fall significantly when people actually take transit, according to a new report.

October 2, 2010 - KALW

New report details park spending, facilities, use, and trends

September 14, 2010 - 2010 City Park Facts

The UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies has issued a report questioning ridership projections on the $43+ billion, 800 mile, voter-approved California High Speed Rail project. Cambridge Systematics defends their numbers.

July 5, 2010 - San Francisco Chronicle

A new study ranks the U.S. states by residents' happiness. From Louisiana (#1) to New York (#51), the happiest people tend to live in sunny, outdoorsy states with strong quality of life measures.

February 9, 2010 - USA Today

Terrorized by the literature is the title of a chapter of Howard Becker’s excellent book, Writing for Social Scientists (1986, Chicago). Whether through terror or misunderstanding, the literature review is one of the areas that students in planning find most confusing. While I have dealt with the literature review briefly in my blog on writing proposals, the tips below provide more detailed advice on how to compose a literature review and how to find important literature in the age of information overload. 

December 20, 2008 - Ann Forsyth

The controversial theory that social and physical disorder is a cause of neighborhood crime has been successfully demonstrated with a series of six experiments.

November 27, 2008 - The Economist

In January I explored what kind of exit paper or project students of planning should prepare, why they should write such papers, and when. This month I turn to the proposal, examining key issues any proposal writer needs to consider. As I outline below, the parts of the proposal are fairly standard. However, three areas typically trip up students working on exit projects: identifying the audience(s), framing the question, and reviewing the literature.

February 29, 2008 - Ann Forsyth

My December blog dealt with key problems faced by those heading for an end-of-school-year graduation—completing a proposal, choosing methods, starting to write, and dealing with formatting. This month I step back and ask some bigger questions: what kind of exit paper or project you should prepare, why, and when?

January 30, 2008 - Ann Forsyth

For students facing the end of their masters programs, an individual exit project, paper, or thesis is often part of the final semester. Over the years I’ve watched many very competent students struggle with this process and delay graduation for years because they could not complete their thesis or project “book”. Over the following months I am going to focus on the various parts of the process of writing these documents—from literature reviews and research questions to time management and creating informative illustrations. To help those currently near the end, in this entry I focus on key trouble spots for those a few months from graduation.

December 31, 2007 - Ann Forsyth

Online versions of journals have made quick inroads at universities. However, subscriptions are expensive and those outside universities seldom have access. A new generation of open access journals is making planning research accessible beyond the campus. Some examples illustrate the range of material now available. Some are fully accessible and some are partially open to non-subscribers:

November 29, 2007 - Ann Forsyth

How useful is planning scholarship to planners in practice? Thirty years ago, the author of a British study of information use by planners found, "The journal is not a source of major importance to the planner in practice, though this statement must be taken to reflect inadequate privision and inadequate timeing for reading" (White, 1974). Perspectives differ, but at least some of the problem has been the difficulty of finding relevant scholarship at the moment it is needed. I believe that these difficulties have greatly reduced in the past few years, and that we are on the verge of an unprecedently increase in the use of scholarship in practice fueled by online bibliographic searching and retrieval. From both the scholar's and the practitioner's perspectives, this change will have substantial effects.

March 9, 2007 - Bruce Stiftel