Geography and Planning News
Congratulations to the 2020 GP Student Award Winners!
Congratulations to the four Geography and Planning students who won awards in the Spring of 2020: Cody Arana - AICP Outstanding Student Award, Luis Roldan - Paul D. Marr Memorial Award for Excellence in Planning, Elizabeth Hayes - David Mark Prize in Geography: graduate award, and Zachary Perry - David Mark Prize in Geography: undergraduate award. The awards are described below.
AICP Outstanding Student Award: Cody Arana
The MRP Program faculty at the University at Albany recommended Mr. Cody Arana for this prestigious award.
Candidates must meet the award criteria of academic achievement, leadership, commitment to planning as a career, and community service.
Assistant Professor Coddington Wins Research Award
Geography and Planning Assistant Professor Kate Coddington won the 2020 Virginie Mamadouh Outstanding Research Award from the Political Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers for her paper "The slow violence of life without cash: borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the U.K. and Australia."
Professor Narins talk at USC U.S.-China Institute about Belt and Road Initiative
Geography and Planning Professor Tom Narins gave a talk on April 23, 2020 (via Zoom) at the USC U.S.-China Institute on how the Belt and Road Initiative illustrates ways that sovereignty works that conventional international relations fail to account for.
Historical and conventional international relations frameworks describe the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics, a break from China’s longstanding reticence towards foreign entanglements. As a result, there seems to be a contradiction between China simultaneously defending its own territorial sovereignty while also being engaged in various projects (including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) that point in other directions.
Assistant Professor Rui Li Uses GIS to Reconstruct 1877 Tragedy at Albany Rural Cemetery
Geography and Planning Assistant Professor Rui Li and former adjunct Kurt Swartz used Geographic Information Systems and spatial analysis to create A GIS Supported Reconstruction of an 1877 Tragedy for the Albany Rural Cemetery. Watch the video.
AVAIL ‘Visualization Wizardry’ Produces Data Source to Aid Region's Nonprofits
When a consortium of leading Capital Region community groups went looking for a clear and accessible platform to help nonprofit social-service organizations get the local statistical profiles they needed, they had no problem visualizing where to turn.
Albany Visualization and Informatics Lab Cited for Work on MitigateNY
The Albany Visualization and Informatics Lab (AVAIL), a data science and planning laboratory at the University at Albany directed by Geography and Planning associate professor Catherine Lawson, partnered with the NYS Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to transform the state’s hazard mitigation plan from a static, linear, 2,000-page document into a living, data-forward, nonproprietary, web-based planning platform called MitigateNY.
MRP Studio Receives APA Award
Students received award for Saratoga Springs Natural Resource Inventory project (L to R: Mark Castiglione, MRP Alumni, Marcia Kees, instructor, Karthik Soundara Rajan, MRP student).
A Geographer Explores a More Humane Path to Border Enforcement
There is no more contentious issue globally among national political parties and the general public than border enforcement, centering today on construction of physical barriers, militarization of border zones and arrests of illegal immigrants.
But Kate Coddington, assistant professor of Geography & Planning, and a colleague from the University of Arizona are examining the effectiveness of a less expensive and less controversial method of regulating transnational migration: the public information campaign, or PIC.