About

MEDEA UrbanIntel is a blog devoted to urban analytics and planning, with a focus on Japan.

We write on three topic areas:

1. Urban analytics.

This burgeoning field applies quantitative methods to thinking about the modern city. We employ a “data-first” approach to covering urban trends in Tokyo and Japan as a whole. The numbers themselves inform our hypotheses about how our urban arrangements work and will evolve. We strive to document demographic, economic, and social trends with style and brevity, bridging the gaps between blogging, journalism and academia. Above all, we commit to our readers a shared journey into the numbers and patterns driving our cities.

2. Regional revitalization.

We take an expansive definition of planning, one that includes both urban and regional, in order to make all places a better place to live. With that aim we document regional revitalization – the movement to reinvigorate rural and peri-urban places across Japan – through an analytic lens. UrbanIntel is only as good as our quantitative understanding of both the urban and the regional.

3. Urbanism.

Numbers alone do not tell the whole story. We also explore urbanism – the lived experience of urban life – to provide context to the ways residents interact with (and across) cities. If urban analytics is about aggregating individuals into data points to be compared, then urbanism is the humanizing element – the reminder that cities are not merely numbers, but primarily venues for meaningful human experiences. We explore how these individual-level experiences are reflected in larger data patterns.

Last updated: 01/31/21