We're excited to announce the launch of our very own research think tank: the Urban Data Geeks (UDG) Lab!

We quizzed hundreds of City-Makers from all around the world about their habits & preferences in the city-making process. Here's what they had to say...

Take the quiz to reveal what type of City-Maker you are...

Season's Greetings from the State of Place Team! We hope that you're enjoying time with your family and friends. But, if Santa missed the mark this year, we'd love to make up for it by re-gifting (yes, it's ok!) our most popular post...

This is the third installment of our Suburban Mom series by our COO, Michelle Drouse Woodhouse, about placemaking and the State of Suburban Places. In the first two installments, Michelle reflected back on her very urban, spontaneous life sans-kids, and then discussed her renewed appreciation of the importance of mobility, inclusivity, and choice with the introduction of her two daughters and her move to the suburbs of Detroit. In this next installment, Michelle builds upon our Technical Product Manager Alli's observations about the role of malls in placemaking and shares how she's getting into the holiday “place” spirit...at the mall...

With less than two weeks left before Christmas, we thought we’d reprise last year’s epic trip to one of Houston’s largest malls and take the pulse of America’s seemingly dying pastime. This year, our Technical Product Manager got in on the “fun.” Read about her recent visit to one of the DC area’s megamalls - Tysons Corner Center - with her 2 and 4 year old in tow. You’ll be surprised at what she discovered! 

We're kicking off December with a stellar Gift Guide for all those urban planners, data geeks and map lovers in your life! Our team members have revealed their top picks for the holiday season, which are guaranteed to WOW your loved ones...

Things are heating up over here! Our team has been diligently working on a super-secret (beta) interactive heat map, and today we're unveiling it...

During this time of year, we're thankful for so many things, but being a group of city-lovers, we want to give a special shout-out to all of the cities that we're grateful for...

Tomorrow is a big day for us! We have our CTO Andy Likuski and our CEO Mariela Alfonzo pitching in San Francisco and Switzerland...

Blake Roberts, one of our Ambassadors, recently spoke with our CMO Anna about his planning background and why he's advocating for more data-driven, evidence-based planning (via State of Place, of course). Flag him down any time to chat about Cali planning and State of Place! And scroll down to find out how to become one of our ambassadors.

Q&A with CTO Andy Likuski about presenting at Workplace Innovation Summit in SF!

Unless you've been on a social media diet, if you're a place-lover or city-nerd, you kinda sorta now last week was D-Day for cities vying for some Amazon love...and boy are cities chomping at the bit - 238 to be exact - all over, not only those in the U.S., but also plenty of contenders from our lovely neighbors to the north, Canada. Clearly, the media's been abuzz with who will win over Amazon's heart (ahem, second headquarters). No doubt, the promise of 50K jobs and $5B+ of investment is a big part of why cities - of all shapes, sizes, and inclinations - are chomping at the bit to lure the likes of Amazon - talk about a debutante! So we decided to run a State of Place analysis on one of the front-runners, Denver, vs. one of the underdogs, Detroit. So who will win - David or Goliath?

Hello IDAers, Winnipegers, place lovers! I am SOOO bummed not to be joining you in person this year - especially after actually winning the IDA raffle for a free conference ticket! But not to worry as - one, our CTO, Andy Likuski will be your resident place-loving data-geek and two, we are reprising last year's better-know-your-IDA-conference-host-city blog series where we use State of Place to do a deep-dive on the lucky city's urban design assets and needs (based on over 290 built environment features - think Walk Score on steroids). IDA 2016 brought you a piece the Atlanta Beltline's walkability. This year, we stepped it up a bit and played a little game of SimCity to assess just what would be the impact - place-wise and money-wise - if the (infamous) intersection of Portage and Main in Downtown Winnipeg were to indeed be reopened to pedestrians. Check out our analysis below! 

Yes, yes, I know. It's the third time's a charm...but one, I'm Cuban (technically Cuban-American but I grew up in Miami so that makes me pretty much Cuban and explains why I suck at American idioms... apparently, Italian cousins are not the same thing as Irish twins, but I digress); and two, second time is technically a more accurate (and you know how we feel about precise data at State of Place!) way to describe this video reprisal (below) of my amazingly received keynote at the WALK21 Conference last fall, which we're presenting today (just happened across it on YouTube - yay! - while I was googling myself over Memorial Day weekend...no lie) in lieu of a written blog this week.

3 Cities. 5 Presentations. Dozens of Demos! That's been life for the past 3 weeks for Mariela, our Founder and CEO! You'd think she would be tired but she's caught a bad case of Keynote-itis and is keen (sorry, that's a lot of alliteration!) to keep it going. So we're doing three days of 30-minute demos! If you want to find out why the New Cities Foundation just named her an Associate Fellow for Placemaking (yeah, that did just happen!) or better yet, want to learn how to quickly quell those pesky naysayers that have been holding back your placemaking and walkability plans AND decrease your consulting costs to boot, plan to spend some QT with Mariela next week! She'll show you how to use data to "fight the good fight" and reduce your consulting costs to boot!