CSR researchers and students participate in map-a-thon to assist with the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico featured by The New York Times: "A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico."

The Million Dollar Blocks project was featured in a recent article about countering bias in data driven journalism published by ProPublica. Author, Lena Groeger, describes the myriad ways that journalistic projects are (often unwittingly) biased from their outset as a result of design decisions made by their authors. She uses the Million Dollar Blocks project as an example of one way to counter such biases through choosing the right data sources and framing questions.

Laura Kurgan, Director Center for Spatial Research, was interviewed by Noah Chasin for the Winter 2017 issue of Bomb Magazine. The interview covers her work at the Center for Spatial Research and its antecedents in the work of the Spatial Information Design Lab.

Our article Access to Taxicabs for Unbanked Households: An Exploratory Analysis in New York City has been published in the Journal of Public Transportation. In this paper, we used multiple datasets to explore taxicab fare payments by neighborhood and examine how paid taxicab fares are associated with use of conventional banking services.

A call for applications. The Center for Spatial Research and the Dean of Humanities invite interested Columbia University faculty to participate in Mapping for the Urban Humanities: A Summer Institute. During the two-week Mellon-funded institute faculty will learn key skills in mapping, data visualization, and data collection that they can incorporate into their research and teaching. Space is limited. Interested faculty are encouraged to apply by January 27, 2017.

Conflict Urbanism: Colombia was named a winning entry of the CityVis Competition at the Habitat III conference in Quito. The competition was organized by University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany and the Future Earth Media Lab. We are thrilled to have been selected as a winner!

Laura Kurgan's 1994 installation at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, "You Are Here: Information Drift," was featured in The Atlantic in June 2016. Geoff Manaugh revisited this project in The Atlantic in light of new locative technologies.

Columbia University published a press release about the founding of the new Center for Spatial Research “Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are pleased to announce the creation of an interdisciplinary Center for Spatial Research. Directed by GSAPP Associate Professor Laura Kurgan, the Center will serve as a hub for urban research that links the humanities, architecture, and data science and will also sponsor a series of curricular initiatives built around new technologies of mapping, data visualization and data collection.”

Laura Kurgan was interviewed about the Million Dollar Blocks project for the PBS documentary "The Human Face of Big Data." The documentary aired nationally on February 24, 2016 and featured Kurgan speaking about our unique approach to mapping and data visualization and what these methods revealed about geographies of incarceration in the United States.

Al Jazeera's Ranjani Chakrabortty recently wrote an article about the impacts of incarceration on families and communities that drew on our Million Dollar Blocks project: "Each year, the U.S. spends $80 billion to incarcerate more than 2.4 million people. But when it comes to communities, the costs are even more staggering. A disproportionate number of inmates come from just a handful of neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. Brownsville [Brooklyn] has one of the highest concentrations of “million-dollar blocks” — places where the state is paying more than $1 million a year to incarcerate the residents of a single census block — in the country."