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Urban Studies Commons™

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Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

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Selected Works

Articles 1 - 18 of 18

Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies

Community-Focused Problem-Solving With Operations Research And Analytics, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Jan 2019

Community-Focused Problem-Solving With Operations Research And Analytics, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

In these days of ‘analytics’, ‘big data’ and ‘smart cities’, many of us are aware of the importance of data and quantitative analytic methods for program design, implementation and evaluation. Less commonly-understood are specific tools and methods for community-based interventions in which the problem to be solved is unclear, and the ways in which data of many different kinds can be used to develop interventions that represent best-possible uses of organization and community resources. Moreover, it is also less commonly-understood how to put communities, and community members, near the center of problem-solving and decision-making.

Examples of challenging problems include: How …

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Community Operational Research: A Survey Of The Discipline, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Gerald Midgley, Jason D. Wright, George Chichirau Sep 2018

Community Operational Research: A Survey Of The Discipline, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Gerald Midgley, Jason D. Wright, George Chichirau

Michael P. Johnson

Community operational research (COR) is an extension of multiple OR/MS traditions to support participatory research, localized impact and social change. It applies critical thinking, evidence-based policy analysis, community participation and decision modeling to local interventions. It emphasizes the needs, voices and values of disadvantaged and marginalized populations. It rests on a foundation of meaningful engagement with communities. This presentation summarizes a multi-year effort to assemble cutting-edge research in COR in a special issue of European Journal of Operational Research available August 2018. We review principles for community OR, describe the breadth and diversity of the field through the experience of …

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Emerging Trends And New Frontiers In Community Operational Research, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Gerald Midgley, George Chichirau Jul 2018

Emerging Trends And New Frontiers In Community Operational Research, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Gerald Midgley, George Chichirau

Michael P. Johnson

Community operational research (Community OR), and its disciplinary relation, community-based operations research, has an increasingly high profile within multiple domains that benefit from empirical and analytic approaches to problem solving. These domains are primarily concentrated within nonprofit services and local development. However, there are many other disciplinary and application areas for which novel applications and extensions of COR could generate valuable insights. This paper identifies a number of these, distinguishing between ‘emerging trends’ (mostly in well-studied areas of operations research, management science and analytics) and ‘new frontiers’, which can be found in traditions not commonly oriented towards empirical and analytic …

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Community-Engaged Operations Research: Localized Interventions, Appropriate Methods, Social Impact, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Jan 2018

Community-Engaged Operations Research: Localized Interventions, Appropriate Methods, Social Impact, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

Community-engaged operations research is an extension of multiple OR/MS traditions to support participatory research, localized impact and social change. It applies critical thinking, evidence-based policy analysis, community participation and decision modeling to local interventions. It emphasizes the needs, voices and values of disadvantaged and marginalized populations. It rests on a foundation of meaningful engagement with communities. Through a survey of current scholarship in two complementary areas of inquiry, ‘community operational research’ (referring to work by primarily European researchers) and ‘community-based operations research’ (referring to work by primarily American researchers), I develop principles for community-engaged OR, present critical questions that represent …

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Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Nov 2017

Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

Community-engaged operations research is an extension of multiple OR/MS traditions to support participatory scholarship, localized impact and social change. It applies critical thinking, evidence-based policy analysis, community participation and decision modeling to local interventions. It emphasizes the needs, voices and values of disadvantaged and marginalized populations. Through a survey of current scholarship in two complementary areas of inquiry, ‘community operational research’ (referring to work by primarily UK-based researchers) and ‘community-based operations research’ (referring to work by primarily US-based researchers), we develop principles for community-engaged OR, present critical questions that represent opportunities to expand the impact of this work, and discuss …

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Improving Decision-Making Skills Of Nonprofit Professionals, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright Oct 2017

Improving Decision-Making Skills Of Nonprofit Professionals, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright

Michael P. Johnson

Nonprofits face gaps in organizational capacity, including program design and evaluation, but previous research suggests that capacity-building exercises have a positive effect. We describe a data analytics training workshop with staff from Boston-area nonprofits reflecting a wide range of sectors. Through analysis of participant work on case studies provided by the instructor, we examine how participants made sense of training materials, the various strategies employed by participants to solve three case study problems, and participant feedback about the session. Our findings provide a basis for novel interventions in community based operations research. 

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Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Aug 2017

Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

Urban community development corporations and other local institutions routinely face challenging problems in housing and economic development that require substantial expertise in data analytics and decision modeling. Recent research, inspired by local responses to the housing foreclosure crisis, and developed in cooperation with Boston-area CDCs, has resulted in a collection of applications that can assist CDCs and similar organizations to design local interventions for acquisition and redevelopment of housing. This paper describes these applications. The first of these is values and objective design, i.e. the process of identifying decision opportunities. The second of these is data analytics, or …

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Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Opportunities, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Feb 2017

Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Opportunities, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

Scholars in multiple disciplines intersecting operations research have developed theory and applications to address the question, how can the decision sciences develop new ways to solve problems of special interest to organizations and individuals situated in geographically, economically and socially circumscribed communities? The motivation for this work is the belief that mission-driven and resource-constrained nonprofit organizations, and underrepresented, underserved, or vulnerable populations may have special needs for analytic and empirical problem-solving methods that have traditionally received less emphasis in traditional operations research and management science research and teaching. Scholarship in this area, alternatively labeled ‘community operational research’ (mostly in the …

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Measuring Success: Community Analytics For Local Economic Development, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Sandeep Jani Nov 2016

Measuring Success: Community Analytics For Local Economic Development, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Sandeep Jani

Michael P. Johnson

Main Street organizations develop local development initiatives that support economic and social goals. We describe an application of value-focused thinking and community-based operations research to identify economic development performance metrics and decision alternatives for local development interventions. Using interviews with stakeholders in three Boston communities, we show how values structures vary across communities and stakeholder groups and how attributes can be quantified using a variety of data sources. We conclude by presenting a composite values structure to support improved operations management and strategy design for all Boston Main Street districts.

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Measuring Success: Community Analytics For Local Economic Development, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Sandeep Jani Sep 2016

Measuring Success: Community Analytics For Local Economic Development, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Sandeep Jani

Michael P. Johnson

Main Street organizations are community-based nonprofits across the USA dedicated to local economic development through physical improvements, technical assistance to businesses, marketing and placebuilding. In this paper we identify metrics associated with success in local economic development and generate decision opportunities for improved program design and implementation. Our community partners, Main Street organizations in the city of Boston, want to ensure that data they collect about their service areas can help them measure progress towards achieving their individual goals as well as identify programs and initiatives that make best use of their resources and expertise. Using a mixed methods, inductive …

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Community-Based Operations Research: Data Analytics And Decision Modeling For Community Development And Social Change, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Mar 2016

Community-Based Operations Research: Data Analytics And Decision Modeling For Community Development And Social Change, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

‘Community-based operations research’ is an extension of multiple traditions in OR/MS to produce research for local change. CBOR attempts to incorporate critical thinking, evidence-based policy design and prescriptive decision modeling. This presentation introduces a theory of CBOR and reviews current applications to support a collection of new scholarship. These applications include foreclosure response, vacant land management and local economic development. We conclude with suggestions to expand the field of CBOR.

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How Can Value Elicitation In Adult Basic Education Support Learners’ Success In Goal-Setting Policy?, Alma H. Biba, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Feb 2016

How Can Value Elicitation In Adult Basic Education Support Learners’ Success In Goal-Setting Policy?, Alma H. Biba, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

For the last two decades, federal legislation and Massachusetts’ state ABE policies have linked adult learners’ educational outcomes to accountability requirements. Using a multi-method approach ABE learners’ goal setting was presented as a decision problem in order to reveal and disentangle the conflicting preferences fueled by outcome-based accountability requirements. Elicitation of values using value-focused thinking (VFT) methodology revealed that learner’s self-defined goals are consistently distinct from program-defined goals, that teachers recognize this disjunction, and that efforts to reconcile the two could yield significant improvements in ABE program outcomes.

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Data And Analytics For Neighborhood Development: Smart Shrinkage Decision Modeling In Baltimore, Maryland, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander, Eliza D. Whiteman Jul 2015

Data And Analytics For Neighborhood Development: Smart Shrinkage Decision Modeling In Baltimore, Maryland, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander, Eliza D. Whiteman

Michael P. Johnson

Many older cities in the United States confront the problem of long-term decline in population and economic activity resulting in blighted conditions that make conventional revitalization initiatives unlikely to succeed. Smart shrinkage, a planning approach that emphasizes alternative land uses while preserving quality of life, offers a way for cities to remain desirable places to live and work. However, there is little research on empirical methods to support planning decisions consistent with smart shrinkage. We present results from two studies with planners from the City of Baltimore that provide novel insights regarding ways in which planners can perform vacant property …

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Data And Analytics For Neighborhood Development: Smart Shrinkage Decision Modeling In Baltimore, Maryland, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander, Eliza D. Whiteman Jun 2015

Data And Analytics For Neighborhood Development: Smart Shrinkage Decision Modeling In Baltimore, Maryland, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander, Eliza D. Whiteman

Michael P. Johnson

Many older cities in the United States confront the problem of long-term declines in population and economic activity resulting in blighted conditions that make conventional revitalization initiatives unlikely to succeed. Smart shrinkage, a planning approach that emphasizes alternative land uses while preserving quality of life, offers a way for cities to remain desirable places to live and work. However, there is little research on empirical methods to support planning decisions consistent with smart shrinkage. We present results from two studies with planners from the City of Baltimore that provide novel insights regarding ways in which planners can perform vacant property …

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Strategy Design For Community Response To Distress And Decline Using Data Analytics, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Oct 2014

Strategy Design For Community Response To Distress And Decline Using Data Analytics, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

The foreclosure crisis in the U.S. has resulted in immense economic and social losses for individuals and neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods face long-term declines in population and economic activity that have been compounded by the foreclosure crisis. How can government and non-profit organizations design responses to neighborhood distress that reflect distinctive community characteristics and are consistent with long-term policy and planning goals? In this talk, I discuss alternative decision modeling strategies that support neighborhood health. Where foreclosure responses are likely to ensure that neighborhoods remain vital places for residential housing, productive strategies may include property acquisition and redevelopment. Other neighborhoods, however, …

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Parcel-Level Redevelopment Strategies For Distressed Neighborhoods, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander Oct 2013

Parcel-Level Redevelopment Strategies For Distressed Neighborhoods, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Justin Hollander

Michael P. Johnson

Certain distressed neighborhoods cannot support traditional residential-focused development. For these communities, we develop decision models for acquisition and redevelopment of chronically vacant lands and structures for primarily non-residential and greening uses. We address social benefits and costs of redevelopment strategies, parcel clustering to exploit economies of scale, and conflicting values among stakeholders. We illustrate our models using data from Baltimore, MD.

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Michael Johnson Research Profile, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Apr 2012

Michael Johnson Research Profile, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

This document summarizes my disciplinary training and my research products.

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Senior Center Network Redesign Under Demand Uncertainty, Osman Ozaltin, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Andrew Schaefer Mar 2010

Senior Center Network Redesign Under Demand Uncertainty, Osman Ozaltin, Michael P. Johnson Jr., Andrew Schaefer

Michael P. Johnson

Senior centers off#11;er a variety of services to facilitate independent living of older adults. In the U.S., increasing suburbanization and aging of suburban residents necessitate reconfiguring senior services. We propose a two-echelon network of senior centers across large study areas and formulate a stochastic facility location/allocation model with mixed-integer recourse. We apply our model to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which has one of the oldest population in the U.S. Our model shows that a two-echelon network design is appropriate for increasing the occupancy of senior centers as community focal points while maintaining customized and accessible programming in small neighborhood areas.

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