Placemaking Week

Environmental quality standards such as LEED, WELL, and BREEAM are increasingly popular. However, we still lack a universally-accepted, global standard for quality of place. To date, the most popular such measure has been Walk Score, but it does not account for the "experience" of a walk, making it an unreliable measure of urban design features known to impact walkability. Alternatively, existing "micro-scale" walkability measures are limited by their time-intensive data collection. State of Place has been working to balance the need for micro-scale urban design data with the ability to rapidly scale this data globally, with the aim of working towards establishing an international standard of walkability and quality of place. We developed a proprietary algorithm to aggregate 290+ urban design features into the State of Place Index, a score from 0-100, amassing over 2M data points across over 200 cities worldwide, but until recently its proliferation was limited due to the continuing manual nature of the data collection.

This session will combine an "in-classroom" and "on-site" presentation to:
1) Take participants on a "Walk and Talk" session that will showcase the objective, micro-scale data that measures quality of place (now being automated) in a real setting near the conference (this is the on-site part).
2) Reconvene (this is the in-classroom part) to show how that micro-scale data is aggregated into the State of Place Index
3) Relay how Artificial Intelligence, namely Visual Machine Learning (VML) techniques, have been applied to automate the collection of this kind of micro-scale data, using New York City as an example
4) Seek input from the participants on micro-scale data being collected, on our roadmap for tying State of Place to other triple-bottom line benefits that matter to placemakers, and the viability of adopting a universal standard of walkability and quality of place.