A Table of Contents for the UT Newsletter
Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 284
Happy solar new year, dear reader. We’re starting things off in 2026 by providing a partial table of contents for this newsletter. Drafting such a thing was a nice way for us to look back at how our thinking has evolved and is evolving, and to help us think about what’s next in our exploration of the intellectual and professional questions of urban technology. This quarter we will continue with interviews from the field, further efforts to define urban tech, and postcards from beautiful places.
TOC below!
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation are being harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this 90 sec. explainer video.
🔖 Table of Contents
Over the summer, Joshua, a senior in UT who also currently runs the student-led Instagram account, and Charlie did the yeoman’s work of tagging all of our newsletter issues over the years. Thanks to that effort, we can now present some groupings of posts that offer a good cross section of how we think about urban technology.
#AECO (13 issues) - The acronym stands for Architecture-Engineering-Construction-Operations and captures the full lifespan of the built environment. While this term is more used in a professional or economic context, we’ve starting using it here to refer to the work of making and managing the built world. These posts are generally about how AECO is getting all mixed up thanks to ongoing digital transformation in the sector.
#AI (9 issues) - Hard to avoid writing about this topic at this time. Trying to stay sane and hype free.
#Cities Intensive (17 issues) - A core tenet of our curriculum is that you must learn about cities by visiting them, so we created the cities intensive and spread opportunities across the curriculum to get on a bus and go see the world. These posts are some of my personal favorites.
#Civic Technology (5 issues) - There is almost nothing in urban technology that is solely a private sector or solely a public sector concern. Whether projects are executed in public private partnership or there’s a regulatory function overseeing what’s occurring in urban space, a civic ethos is critical to the humanistic way that we approach UT.
#Community Engagement (4 issues) - If there’s one area I am optimistic about the opportunity for technology to enhance, it would be community engagement. As we grow our research efforts, I am hoping to see experimental approaches to community engagement that uses tech to tell stories in richer ways, synthesize and sort feedback, and generally enable deeper listening.
#Data Governance (6 issues) - Still bracingly hard to get right after all these years of tech growth in general, civic technology, and the rise of data science.
#Design (9 issues) - … is the way that we teach students to invent possibilities—technical, cultural, political, social, and economic—that did not exist before. We have a unique and still emerging approach to teaching design so lots of ongoing thoughts here.
#Faculty Interviews (20 issues) - This is a great place to start if you want to understand the people and passions behind our urban technology degree program.
#Infrastructure (12 issues) - Connected infrastructure means digital infrastructure; which means a whole new crop of interfaces to infrastructure; which means a whole new set of decisions and behaviors are being afforded. UX is getting a whole lot more important.
#Industry Interviews (19 issues) - So it’s not entirely industry—we also interview academics and even the Lieutenant Governor—but having these conversations is one of the ways we stay current.
#On the Road (17 issues) - Generally these are stories reported from trips to places like Copenhagen, Oslo, Al Ula, and New York.
#Program Updates (21 issues) - Meta issues that describe the building of our humble little degree program. As Joshua poetically described it while reading through all of these, “it was like watching the weeds come out of a garden” from beginning to current day. That’s progress!
#Prototyping (7 issues) - We prototype to know how products/services/systems behave in the world, and how people behave around those things behaving.
#Sustainability (7 issues) - “What’s the thing you want to be working on for 50 years?” is a question I sometimes ask students. Sustainability is a good answer as far as I’m concerned. See also: Climate.
#UT Curriculum (34 issues) - These are often describing why or how we teach certain ideas and perspectives. This is inside baseball for sure, but maybe you like baseball?
#What is Urban Technology? (13 issues) - The very first issue started with this question and we’ve kept asking it in earnest, every year at least once. One of the things I’m hoping to do this semester 🤞 is to turn the question into a set of lectures with a definitive answer. A student said to me (paraphrasing), “shouldn’t you have an answer to this question?” And we do. Many answers!
Further tags: Architecture, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Vehicles, Data Visualization, Design Fiction, Economic Development, Feedback Loops, Foresight, Interaction Design, Land Use, Mobility and Transportation, Platform Urbanism, Smart Cities.
🌍 Favorite Cities
Regular readers of the newsletter will know that we try to ask everyone we interview about their favorite city and why. Here’s the current leaderboard based on 45 answers and counting:
These weeks: Building is filling back up. Finalizing our winter lecture series. Planning for a trip to CA in a few months. Working on UT++. Cold out, but not as cold as it could be!