Research Seminar Series: Urban High-Technology Zones with Dr. Ahoura Zandiatashbar, San Jose State University

NYU CUSP is pleased to host our annual Research Seminar Series, featuring leading voices in the growing field of urban informatics. The seminars will examine real-world challenges facing cities and urban environments around the world, with topics ranging from citizen and social sciences to smart infrastructure.

Urban High-Technology Zones

Urban High-Technology Zones offer essential planning insights for our increasingly high-tech economy and society, looking at the role the built environment plays, the policy factors that contribute to their formation and growth, quality-of-life impacts of high-tech clusters on their surrounding communities, and economic geography. Using a combination of advanced geospatial data-driven techniques with evidence-based insights, this talk provides quantitative measures on high-tech cluster’s social, environmental, and economic impacts. While findings are drawn from cities in the US, the research, spatial analyses, methodology, conclusions, and literature reviews are generalizable to cities around the world. The audience will find numerous insights and guidance on the role high-tech clusters play in how cities reach their economic growth and social equity goals, making it a useful resource for academic research and policy guidance.

About the Speaker

Dr. Zandi(atashbar) is an Urban and Regional Planning Assistant Professor and Co-Founder/Co-Director of the Spatial Analytics and Visualization Institute (SAVI), and the Founder of the MS GISc program at San José State University (SJSU) where his research focuses on micro-level analysis of U.S. high-tech zones and the role of urban form in the equitable robust knowledge economy and healthy communities. Dr. Zandi has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and a book, Urban High-Tech Zones. He is the winner of People’s Choice Best Research Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the First Place Award from the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the 2015 Campus RainWorks Challenge.

How to Attend

NYU CUSP Research Seminars are only open to faculty, students, and staff at NYU – they are not open to the public at this time. This event will be held in-person, but we are now offering hybrid access to attendees! If you'd like to attend virtually, check the bottom of your confirmation email for the Zoom link.