Jennifer Minner

Associate Professor

Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University
 
Visualizing just places: the critical role of mapping technologies

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Geospatial and scenario planning tools, as well as other map-based visual media, play important roles in understanding the past, analyzing existing conditions, and exploring urban futures. Map-based tools are fundamental to planning scholarship and practice; they are used to explore, analyze, delineate, and regulate cities and regions. As visual media, maps have the capacity to draw together communities, shape public attention, and exercise power. This talk outlines the critical role of maps in revealing urban inequities and in finding collective ways of addressing them. Observations are derived from joint faculty-student research over the course of several years of teaching Cornell technology seminars, land use planning and preservation courses, and directing research efforts in the Just Places Lab. Central takeaways are about what is needed to create and employ analytical mapping tools and visual media to ignite public imagination around collective work toward building equitable cities.

 

Bio
Jennifer Minner is an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. She directs the Just Places Lab, a platform for multi-disciplinary research and creative action centered on igniting community imagination around ‘just places’ and the built environment.