Emily Talen
Biographic Data
| ID | 281797 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emily Talen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emily |
| FAMILY NAME | Talen |
| SIGNATURE | TALEN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5539-9512 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 362 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Normative neighborhoods: Does theory match perception
The Walkable Accessibility Score (WAS): A spatially granular open-source measure of walkability for the continental US from 1997 to 2019
This paper describes a straightforward method for calculating an open-source Walkable Accessibility Score (WAS) that measures walkability at the block group scale based on walking distance to business establishments, schools, and parks. Exploratory analysis of the WAS reveals high concentrations of walkable accessibility in the centres of the densest and/or largest cities. Our optimised specification ( decay = 0.008, upper = 800, k = 30) performs…
The uneven geography of historic preservation: A neighborhood typology for equity planning in Chicago
Historic preservation and equity goals often conflict in urban neighborhoods, creating policy dilemmas where heritage conservation may either support or undermine community stability and affordable housing. This article addresses three questions: How do preservation-equity dynamics vary across different urban contexts? What neighborhood types emerge when areas are clustered by preservation and market conditions? What context-specific strategies m…
Reading Significance: Using AI to Study Historic Recognition
The National Register of Historic Places (NR) is a structured artifact of meaning-making that encodes disciplinary values linking architectural and cultural significance to wealth and stylistic distinction. In doing so, it systematically underrepresents vernacular, working-class, and the built environments of racially and ethnically marginalized communities. This paper uses artificial intelligence (AI) to examine how that meaning is constructed. …
Who speaks for the neighborhood? Natural language processing of redevelopment debates in Chicago
How would AI define neighborhood boundaries? A comparison with human-crowdsourced data
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has started to be considered a cost-efficient alternative for geospatial and urban surveys, but there remains a critical need to evaluate how closely AI-generated outputs align with human responses. This paper compares responses from ChatGPT and residents in defining neighborhood boundaries, a long-standing challenge in urban studies with no single correct answer and typically relies on input from resident …
Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World
Revisiting public open space and physical activity: What we know, what we still don't, and emerging issues—A decade later
Density where it should be
From Small to Mega: Evaluating Urban Scale
Scale is a significant although understudied dimension of cities. To better understand scale and flesh out the range of issues and debates involved in its conception, we conducted thirty-three in-depth interviews with a wide range of urban actors: developers, planners, policymakers, leaders of non-profit community organizations, and scholars. We wanted to know how contemporary urban actors in the U.S. conceive of scale as a factor in development?…
Street design preference: An on-line survey
This paper is a methodological and empirical contribution that reports on the results of an innovative on-line survey of streetscape preference. The ratings of experts and non-experts were compared to gauge the reliability of preference for views about streetscape quality. The goal was to evaluate the degree to which a set of streetscape design characteristics were similar among experts and non-experts and what dimensions of streetscape quality h…
What would the RPAA do
The legacy and vision of the RPAA is very familiar to us: a diverse group of talented urban reformers wanted to restructure social and economic systems to create decentralized, interconnected clusters of contained settlements in the form of garden cities protected by open space, with healthy, nearby industry providing ample employment opportunities. Regions would be linked by geography, culture, and climatic unity. The problem of great cities wou…
Who can walk? An analysis of public amenity access in America’s ten largest cities
How uneven is the proximity to public amenities like libraries and schools among racial groups, or children and older people? This paper uses a catchment area approach to evaluate walkable proximity to four common public amenities (parks, libraries, schools, and transit stops), looking at four racial categories and a set of variables that one might reasonably expect proximity to be related to (e.g., population density). For each of the 10 largest…
The Scale of Urbanism
While scale is an essential factor in discussions about sustainable cities, there is no common understanding of what scale is or how it should be measured. This paper sheds light on the issue of scale by suggesting how it might be measured and evaluated. My purpose is to offer both a methodological and empirical contribution to the understanding of scale, using Chicago as a case study. Using historical Sanborn maps, I first investigate scale chan…
Response to ‘the existential crisis of traditional shopping streets: The sun model and the place attraction paradigm’ by Matthew Carmona, University College London
Tracking sixty years of income diversity within neighborhoods: The case of Chicago, 1950-2010
The socio-economic context of form-based codes
Rethinking neighbourhoods
The COVID-19 pandemic has restricted the movements of millions of people around the world, causing our social and physical worlds to shrink. This enforced time spent in vicinity of our own homes offers us the opportunity to reflect on what we cherish and what we might wish to change about our own neighbourhoods. In this Viewpoint, we consider the effects of the pandemic on urban planning and design, and argue for an active commitment to creating …
City cents: Tracking the spatial imprint of urban public expenditures
Streetlife: Urban Retail Dynamics and Prospects
Big yellow taxi
What is the value of ‘main street’? Framing and testing the arguments
How walkable is Walker’s paradise
This article tests the extent to which a measure of walkable access is a good proxy for the quality of the walking environment. Based on existing findings on inequalities of walkability, we ask whether this relation varies between neighborhoods with low and high incomes. Walk Score is used to measure walkable access while the State of Place Index is applied to synthesize the qualitative urban form dimensions collected as part of the Irvine Minnes…
Urban Design in a New Age of Immigration
Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation
Sense of Community and Neighbourhood Form: An Assessment of the Social Doctrine of New Urbanism
New urbanism, an umbrella term which encompasses 'neotraditional development' as well as 'traditional neighbourhood design', lives by an unswerving belief in the ability of the built environment to create a 'sense of community'. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the social doctrine of new urbanism can be successfully supported or at least integrated with the social science literature which deals with the question of community formati…
Assessing Spatial Equity: An Evaluation of Measures of Accessibility to Public Playgrounds
Geographical and political research on urban service delivery-who benefits and why-has proliferated during the past two decades. Overall, this literature is not characterized by a particular attention to the importance of method in drawing conclusions about spatial equity based on empirical studies. Specifically, there has been scant interest in the effect of geographic methodology on assessing the relationship between access and socioeconomic ch…
The Social Equity of Urban Service Distribution: An Exploration of Park Access in Pueblo, Colorado, and Macon, Georgia
The degree to which urban resources are distributed equitably is a research question that continues to be debated. While research dealing with urban service delivery has proliferated during the last 20 years, few studies have directly linked the spatial distribution of facilities (in the form of accessibility measures) with the spatial distribution of population subgroups in an effort to assess equity issues. In part, this may be caused by the me…
Beyond Relativism: Reclaiming the Search for Good City Form
This article argues that the search for a theory of good city form should be given a more prominent place in planning theory alongside theories of planning as a process. The professional practice of city and regional planning requires well-validated, durable criteria for successful outcomes. Fortunately, many recent developments in philosophy, science, political theory, and the arts challenge the postmodern relativism that has deflected attention…
After the Plans: Methods to Evaluate the Implementation Success of Plans
In light of the continuing and ever-stronger attacks on the legitimacy of the planning profession, planning scholars have recently been calling for quantitative studies that support the notion that planning matters. What is needed are methodologies that can be used by planners to assess the degree of impact their plans have had on actual urban development and, perhaps more important, on the achievement of planning goals. Such methods would differ…
Legalizing Smart Growth: An Empirical Study of Land Use Regulation in Illinois
There is widespread agreement that metropolitan growth should be channeled into compact, walkable developments. New growth should include diverse housing types and mixed land uses and support pedestrian access and public transit. This article investigates how local government regulation has responded to this trend. Local development regulation is empirically examined by analyzing how much “smart growth” policies are implemented at the local level…
School, Community, and Spatial Equity: An Empirical Investigation of Access to Elementary Schools in West Virginia
To date, only a handful of studies have empirically investigated the relationship between school locations and their constituencies—i.e., the accessibility of schools. This article makes a contribution by presenting an in-depth case study of school accessibility in three counties in West Virginia. The study utilizes an extensive dataset of distances between students and eighty-four elementary school locations. The study examines whether or not th…
Affordability in New Urbanist Development: Principle, Practice, and Strategy
This article investigates the question of social diversity by assessing affordability in New Urbanist developments. The article begins with a review of the principle of social mixing—specifically income mix—and how it is linked to physical planning and design. An assessment is made of the ways in which planning and design are enlisted in the effort to produce and support social mix, focusing especially on the goal of “affordability by design.” Th…
The Utopianism of Children: An Empirical Study of Children's Neighborhood Design Preferences
Little is known about the environmental preferences of children. While planners have taught children about planning, relatively little academic research has been conducted on what children can teach the discipline about planning. This paper summarizes the results of a survey of the planning preferences of 248 children in kindergarten through second grade. The content analysis revealed a preference for land use variety and for places associated wi…
Where Do Planners Belong? Assessing the Relationship between Planning and Design in American Universities
This article assesses the performance of U.S. planning programs relative to their administrative location in design versus nondesign units. We use both archival data to compare program rankings between design and nondesign units and a survey of a random sample of faculty (108 at 61 accredited programs). The archival data show a higher publication performance of programs in nondesign units. The survey finds that faculty respondents from nondesign …
The Context of Diversity: A Study of Six Chicago Neighbourhoods
Depending on how diversity is defined, every city has at least some neighbourhoods that are diverse, despite the enduring reality that American cities tend to be highly segregated. This paper investigates six socially diverse neighbourhoods in Chicago from the perspective of the residents who live there. The specific focus is on the interaction between residents and physical form, spatial pattern, and the location and function of civic institutio…
New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of Post-Katrina Rebuilding in Mississippi
In October 2005, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) was enlisted to produce rebuilding plans for eleven towns along the Mississippi Gulf Coast that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The plans they produced are microcosms of New Urbanist social doctrine: an accessible public realm, neighborhoods that are socially diverse, and walkable access to life's daily needs—design principles that are essentially aimed at promoting social equity.…
New Urbanism and the Culture of Criticism
Opinions about new urbanism have polarized. From the academy, analysts have generally nurtured a vigorous contempt for new urbanism, while planning practitioners view it simply as the most recent articulation of a reoccurring planning theme: simple clusters of housing, retail space, and offices within a quarter-mile walking radius of a transit system. In this paper, I argue that while there is much to discredit in current applications of new urba…
City cents: Tracking the spatial imprint of urban public expenditures
Housing Demolition during Urban Renewal
While there continues to be much assessment of the enduring, largely negative legacy of urban renewal, there has been very little quantified, nationwide analysis at the neighborhood level. This paper contributes to the literature on urban renewal by investigating one dimension of mid–20th century urban change: housing demolition. During the middle decades of the 20th century, government–backed demolition occurred under a variety of housing and tr…
What is the value of ‘main street’? Framing and testing the arguments
Response to “Commentary: Is Urban Design Still Urban Planning?”
Revisiting public open space and physical activity: What we know, what we still don't, and emerging issues—A decade later
The Scale of Urbanism
While scale is an essential factor in discussions about sustainable cities, there is no common understanding of what scale is or how it should be measured. This paper sheds light on the issue of scale by suggesting how it might be measured and evaluated. My purpose is to offer both a methodological and empirical contribution to the understanding of scale, using Chicago as a case study. Using historical Sanborn maps, I first investigate scale chan…
Tracking sixty years of income diversity within neighborhoods: The case of Chicago, 1950-2010
Urban Design in a New Age of Immigration
Prospects for walkable, mixed-income neighborhoods: Insights from U.S. developers
Human vs. Nature Duality in Metropolitan Planning
Finding an appropriate framework for the integration of humans and "nature" is a subject that has engaged scholars in various disciplines for centuries. Most often, human environments like cities are viewed in striking contrast to the natural world, and this duality has implications for metropolitan planning practice. This paper summarizes the issue of human vs. nature duality as it relates to planning at the urban or metropolitan scale. We find …
Do Plans Get Implemented? A Review of Evaluation in Planning
The planning community has shown a curious lack of interest in developing methods to evaluate how successfully plans are implemented. Evaluation in planning has centered primarily on methods of comparing the impacts of alternative proposed plans. The methodological problems with evaluating implementation success are many, but they are not insurmountable. A typology of planning evaluation is offered here. The need to establish a separate, distinct…
After the Plans: Methods to Evaluate the Implementation Success of Plans
In light of the continuing and ever-stronger attacks on the legitimacy of the planning profession, planning scholars have recently been calling for quantitative studies that support the notion that planning matters. What is needed are methodologies that can be used by planners to assess the degree of impact their plans have had on actual urban development and, perhaps more important, on the achievement of planning goals. Such methods would differ…
The Social Equity of Urban Service Distribution: An Exploration of Park Access in Pueblo, Colorado, and Macon, Georgia
The degree to which urban resources are distributed equitably is a research question that continues to be debated. While research dealing with urban service delivery has proliferated during the last 20 years, few studies have directly linked the spatial distribution of facilities (in the form of accessibility measures) with the spatial distribution of population subgroups in an effort to assess equity issues. In part, this may be caused by the me…
Visualizing Fairness: Equity Maps for Planners
The achievement of equity in the distribution of public resources is a goal of paramount importance to planners. Equitable distribution entails locating resources or facilities so that as many different spatially defined social groups as possible benefit—i. e. have access. For planning purposes, what is of paramount importance is that planners and also their constituents understand what distributional principles underlie any geographic arrangemen…
Assessing Spatial Equity: An Evaluation of Measures of Accessibility to Public Playgrounds
Geographical and political research on urban service delivery-who benefits and why-has proliferated during the past two decades. Overall, this literature is not characterized by a particular attention to the importance of method in drawing conclusions about spatial equity based on empirical studies. Specifically, there has been scant interest in the effect of geographic methodology on assessing the relationship between access and socioeconomic ch…
The Utopianism of Children: An Empirical Study of Children's Neighborhood Design Preferences
Little is known about the environmental preferences of children. While planners have taught children about planning, relatively little academic research has been conducted on what children can teach the discipline about planning. This paper summarizes the results of a survey of the planning preferences of 248 children in kindergarten through second grade. The content analysis revealed a preference for land use variety and for places associated wi…
Sense of Community and Neighbourhood Form: An Assessment of the Social Doctrine of New Urbanism
New urbanism, an umbrella term which encompasses 'neotraditional development' as well as 'traditional neighbourhood design', lives by an unswerving belief in the ability of the built environment to create a 'sense of community'. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the social doctrine of new urbanism can be successfully supported or at least integrated with the social science literature which deals with the question of community formati…
Bottom-Up GIS: A New Tool for Individual and Group Expression in Participatory Planning
While the integration of GIS in the planning process is becoming more commonplace for efficient description of basic facts, it has not been widely used by planners for the incorporation of local knowledge. This article describes a new approach, termed “Bottom-Up GIS” (BUGIS), in which GIS is placed in the realm of expression and used as a means of expression. The advantage of using GIS in participatory planning activities is that it provides spat…
Planning Expenditures and Wealth
New Urbanism and the Culture of Criticism
Opinions about new urbanism have polarized. From the academy, analysts have generally nurtured a vigorous contempt for new urbanism, while planning practitioners view it simply as the most recent articulation of a reoccurring planning theme: simple clusters of housing, retail space, and offices within a quarter-mile walking radius of a transit system. In this paper, I argue that while there is much to discredit in current applications of new urba…
School, Community, and Spatial Equity: An Empirical Investigation of Access to Elementary Schools in West Virginia
To date, only a handful of studies have empirically investigated the relationship between school locations and their constituencies—i.e., the accessibility of schools. This article makes a contribution by presenting an in-depth case study of school accessibility in three counties in West Virginia. The study utilizes an extensive dataset of distances between students and eighty-four elementary school locations. The study examines whether or not th…
Theoretical approaches to the promotion of physical activity
The social goals of new urbanism
New Urbanism is most often appraised in terms of its physical design, while analysis of its social goals is limited to unsubstantiated claims about New Urbanists’ desire to engage in social engineering. This article presents the results of an evaluation of the explicit, stated link between the physical planning proposals of New Urbanism and three types of social goals: community, social equity, and the common good. The analysis is based on the Ch…
Pedestrian Access as a Measure of Urban Quality
(2002). Pedestrian Access as a Measure of Urban Quality. Planning Practice & Research: Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 257-278
Beyond Relativism: Reclaiming the Search for Good City Form
This article argues that the search for a theory of good city form should be given a more prominent place in planning theory alongside theories of planning as a process. The professional practice of city and regional planning requires well-validated, durable criteria for successful outcomes. Fortunately, many recent developments in philosophy, science, political theory, and the arts challenge the postmodern relativism that has deflected attention…
Neighborhoods as Service Providers: A Methodology for Evaluating Pedestrian Access
Research on neighborhoods is dominated by a focus on the social aspects of neighborhood life. The ability of neighborhoods to function as service providers is a critical and understudied aspect of neighborhood research. This paper offers a methodological contribution of the analysis of neighborhoods as service providers. Provision of services is defined in terms of accessibility, or the spatial proximities between residents and the facilities. Be…
Legalizing Smart Growth: An Empirical Study of Land Use Regulation in Illinois
There is widespread agreement that metropolitan growth should be channeled into compact, walkable developments. New growth should include diverse housing types and mixed land uses and support pedestrian access and public transit. This article investigates how local government regulation has responded to this trend. Local development regulation is empirically examined by analyzing how much “smart growth” policies are implemented at the local level…
Human vs. Nature Duality in Metropolitan Planning
Finding an appropriate framework for the integration of humans and "nature" is a subject that has engaged scholars in various disciplines for centuries. Most often, human environments like cities are viewed in striking contrast to the natural world, and this duality has implications for metropolitan planning practice. This paper summarizes the issue of human vs. nature duality as it relates to planning at the urban or metropolitan scale. We find …
Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments , revised edition. Mark Roseland ; Cities and the Creative Class . Richard Florida ; An Alliance of Women: Immigration and …
New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of Post-Katrina Rebuilding in Mississippi
In October 2005, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) was enlisted to produce rebuilding plans for eleven towns along the Mississippi Gulf Coast that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The plans they produced are microcosms of New Urbanist social doctrine: an accessible public realm, neighborhoods that are socially diverse, and walkable access to life's daily needs—design principles that are essentially aimed at promoting social equity.…
Chester Rapkin Award for the Best Article in Volume 27: “Coming of Age in Mississippi”
Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighbourhoods
Affordability in New Urbanist Development: Principle, Practice, and Strategy
This article investigates the question of social diversity by assessing affordability in New Urbanist developments. The article begins with a review of the principle of social mixing—specifically income mix—and how it is linked to physical planning and design. An assessment is made of the ways in which planning and design are enlisted in the effort to produce and support social mix, focusing especially on the goal of “affordability by design.” Th…
The Context of Diversity: A Study of Six Chicago Neighbourhoods
Depending on how diversity is defined, every city has at least some neighbourhoods that are diverse, despite the enduring reality that American cities tend to be highly segregated. This paper investigates six socially diverse neighbourhoods in Chicago from the perspective of the residents who live there. The specific focus is on the interaction between residents and physical form, spatial pattern, and the location and function of civic institutio…
Response to “Commentary: Is Urban Design Still Urban Planning?”
Geography (31 works) · Political science (29 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Urban Transport and Accessibility (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (17 works) · Engineering (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Business (14 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (13 works)