|Talks|

The Pointillistic City

Visiting speaker
In-person
Past Talk
Dan O'Brien
Northeastern University Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice
Thu, Apr 17, 2025
5:30 PM UTC
Thu, Apr 17, 2025
5:30 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

The Pointillistic City extends the classic observation that “neighborhoods matter” for health and well-being, arguing that we need to pay more attention to the other geographic scales that we live at—including streets within neighborhoods and even properties within streets—and how they each affect us. This is analogous to a pointillistic painting, which is similarly organized into dots within objects and objects within a full image. This “pointillistic perspective” surfaces microspatial inequities, or disparities between people living in the same neighborhood, as a pressing and overlooked concern for our science, policy, and practice. The book illustrates this perspective through two civic research projects: one on the impact of problem properties on public safety; and the other on the pertinence of “urban heat islets” and other hyperlocal hazards to environmental justice. It ends with guidance for designing policies and practices that address microspatial inequities, with an emphasis on putting cutting-edge data in the hands communities.

About the speaker
Dr. Daniel T. O’Brien is a leader of the burgeoning field of “urban informatics”, which uses modern digital data to better understand and serve local communities. He is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), an inter-university center that is an international model for advancing place-based, civically-engaged research that leverages data to benefit local communities.
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Apr 17, 2025