For more than a decade, I have been pay attention to new developments in technology, art and their intersections in my spare time. With the rapid development of information technology, various types of urban-related data have seen a “blowout”. Many planners have taken action and made many attempts in the fields of urban data collection, cleaning, analysis, visualization and application. The purpose of opening this blog is, on the one hand, to urge myself to continue to work in the field of quantitative urban research and record my gains; on the other hand, I also hope to make friends with people who share the same interests, exchange ideas and learn from each other, so as to help and inspire those who come after. Due to time and energy limitations, I will try to keep the blog update frequency to about one article per week.
Tag Cloud of Fengtai District 13th Five-Year Plan
China’s urbanization in the past decade has been characterized by high speed and large scale, which often makes foreign scholars dumbfounded. In this era, as an urban planning practitioner, I have been running around in various cities, helping local governments to resolve the contradictions between the demands of leapfrog development and various policy norms and constraints, seeking a balance between the interests of the government, the market, and citizens, and constantly learning new concepts such as harmonious society and ecological civilization, and concretizing and spatializing the high-level concepts in urban planning practice. It is very fulfilling, very tiring, and I always feel that something is missing.
When I was a collage student, as a science and engineering guy who liked to draw, I thought architecture was a perfect combination of art and technology, and I ended up entering the major of urban planning and design by accident. At the beginning of my career, my drawing performance could barely be called “art”; as my years of work increased, I basically stopped drawing, and spent all day buried in Word and PowerPoint, which should be the specialty of liberal arts students. I finally realized what a senior once said: “If urban planning is an art, it can only be the art of ‘communication’ and ‘balance’.” At the same time, I have always believed that urban planning is not a science, but a practical behavior of policy making. The formulation of urban policies must be based on in-depth research on the laws of urban development. “Urban research” itself is a multidisciplinary scientific field that can and must be studied using scientific methods.
Don’t forget your original intention. For more than a decade, I have been paying attention to new developments in science and technology, art and their intersections. With the rapid development of information technology, various types of urban-related data have seen a “blowout”. Many planners have taken action and made many attempts in the fields of urban data collection, cleaning, analysis, application and display. However, compared with the growth rate of information technology and urban data, the response of planners has been a bit slow. I have also made some scattered attempts in the process of working on the project, but due to the constraints of various factors such as work progress and energy input, most of them have not been in-depth, and there is no time to organize them systematically.
I finally understood what I was “missing” – doing what I really like. Solving this problem requires some appropriate “transformation”. As long as I am determined, the rest is to overcome difficulties and find appropriate methods.
The purpose of opening this blog is, on the one hand, to urge myself to continue to work in the field of quantitative urban research and record my achievements; on the other hand, I also hope to make friends with people who share the same interests, exchange ideas and learn from each other, and provide help and inspiration to those who come after me. Due to time and energy limitations, I will try to keep the blog update frequency to about one article per week.
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