Spring Course: 11.524, Spatial Statistics Workshop

I’m teaching 11.524: Spatial Statistics Workshop at MIT DUSP this spring. It is an ‘H4’ class, meaning it takes place in the second half of the semester, starting April 5. Course description is as follows:

The broad availability of spatial data on and in cities means that planners can paint pictures of both ‘what is where’ and ‘what was where, when’ with an unprecedented level of detail. However, ‘where’ questions often produce more questions than answers. Maps are evocative, but they are unable to answer questions that are crucially important to planners: how are phenomena interrelated, clustered, and interdependent? Spatial statistics offer one analytical approach for getting at these complex questions that are often key to understanding urban environments.

Even as these methods enhance the analytical repertoire of urban planners, we must remember that methods don’t come from nowhere; they cannot can be fully divorced from the conditions of their emergence. Even methods are placed; they come from somewhere. As such, we will be digging into the history of spatial statistics methods and approaches, producing biographies of our methods.