Social Media

Meme Urbanism 101
They heard you like transit, so they put transit in your memes. (If you don't know what that means, read on.)

Cities and Surveillance
For six years, New Orleans police have been using a secret program that uses social media to locate violent criminals.

Rise of the Instagram City
Cities have become obsessed with going viral.

Nextdoor Looking to Expands its Influence on Local Politics
A decade into its history, the hyperlocal social media site Nextdoor is looking for feedback and hoping to expand its reach before the 2018 and 2020 elections.
Nextdoor, the Social Media Platform for Neighbors, Makes Changes to Reduce Racial Profiling
How Nextdoor responded to racial profiling on its platform should serve as an example to other forms of social media.

Scraping Social Media to Analyze Public Engagement
Planners are increasingly using social media for public engagement. How can you analyze what people are saying? NodeXL is an easy to use free tool for scraping and analyzing social media. I use this tool to report from the APA National Conference.

New Study Looks at the Mystery and Benefits of Food Truck Movements
The seemingly non-complex decisions on where food trucks park is examined in a new study that finds there's actually a lot more to it than just an empty curb.
Charrette: A Social Innovation Lab
When charrettes and public design workshops reach their most inclusive and transparent forms, do they become social innovation labs? Hazel Borys thinks so.
Study: Transit Agencies Should Respond to the Haters
Here's a counter-intuitive proposition for transit agencies: feed the Twitter trolls.

Nextdoor—the 'Facebook for Neighborhoods—Catching on with Investors and Users
As social media platforms evolve into specific niches, the Nextdoor platform is quickly expanding its online version of neighborhood-level interaction.

Friday Eye Candy: Maps Reveal Differences in How Locals and Tourists See the City
The cities that visitors see will always be different than the city that locals see. A new mapping project reveals the distinctions between the local perspective and the tourist perspective for 136 cities around the globe.

Advice for Students: When to Contact Faculty at a Different Institution
With social media and the internet generally making it easy to contact faculty across the globe students are tempted to do so. But when is it appropriate? The short answer is contact them if they request it.
Study Shows How Useful Twitter Data Can Be for Planners
The atlantalarry blog shares news of a study in the Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence journal that used gelocalized tweets to map out nightlife areas in Madrid, London, and Manhattan.
#BlackFridayParking Exposes that Empty Feeling
In the most recent iteration of the annual event, social media users around the country submitted images of empty parking lots in front of retail centers on the busiest shopping day of the year.
Using Social Media to Celebrate Historic Buildings
For almost as long as social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have been in existence, users have had a morbid fascination with examples of derelict and destroyed architecture. Social media, however, can be more celebratory of the past.
Friday Eye Candy: Everyday Everywhere
#Everydayeverywhere is an Instagram hashtag connecting ordinary photographs from all over the world, which Nicole Crowder covered recently for the Washington Post's photography blog, In Sight.
Hitchhiking as Transportation Solution
With 80 percent of our passenger capacity empty, Jenny O'Brien discusses the potential of hitchhiking apps as a transportation solution in a recent TEDxKC talk.
Denver's Social Media Campaign to Celebrate the City
The Denver Community Planning and Development department unrolled a new social media campaign this week utilizing #favoriteplacedenver to celebrate the city's unique characteristics.
Researchers Pull Social Media Data to Track Migration
The limitations (and inaccuracies) of traditional data sources like the U.S. Census are well known, so researchers are looking social media to gather the data necessary to draw conclusions about societal movements.

5 Innovative Tech Solutions for Civic Disengagement
Communities have a growing number of technological resources available to face the challenges posed by a growing population and a resource constrained world.
Pagination
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
Caltrans
Smith Gee Studio
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commissions
Salt Lake City
NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service