Invited Speaker

Subhrajit Guhathakurta

Leveraging GeoSpatial Technologies in Planning for Sustainable Urban Futures

The physical and natural environments as well as human behavior are largely determined by spatial particularities. Where we live, work and play, how far and with what mode we choose to travel reveal a lot about our backgrounds, attitudes, and cultures. This talk will be about understanding these connections between human behavior and characteristics of place. I will discuss several projects where geospatial technologies are applied to predict where people live and their potential travel patterns. I will then explore how such spatial patterns of human behavior leads to impacts on urban sustainability. Along the way I will illustrate our efforts to develop some novel modeling and visualization tools to monitor and communicate indicators of human well-being, health and quality of life.

Biography

Subhrajit Guhathakurta is Director of the Center for Geographic Information Systems (CGIS) and Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was previously Associate Director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University (ASU) and among the founding faculty members of ASU's School of Sustainability. Professor Guhathakurta was instrumental in developing the Urban Modeling and Simulation Lab in ASU's College of Design. He continues to serve as the lead member of several research centers at ASU including the Decision Center for a Desert City, and the project on Sustainable Urban Systems, Technologies, and Infrastructure (SUSTaIn). He is currently a Co-Editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, which is the flagship journal for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). Prof. Guhathakurta was recognized as Senior Sustainability Scientist (2010) and selected as Exemplary Faculty at College of Design (2006), both at ASU. He was awarded the Mercator Professorship by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German National Science Foundation) in 2007. In 1999, he received the Chester Rapkin Award for the best article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Urban Spatial Analysis at University College London, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, and at the Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. More recently, he held the German National Science Foundation (DFG) Mercator Guest professorship at Technische Universitat Kaiserslautern, Germany.