URBAN ATLAS: An Alumni Database for the Urban Programs

New York, NY, USA with a Global reach

By Callan Hajosy
alumni, thesis, living-database, design and urban ecologies, theories of urban practice

Urban Atlas is a living database for the profiles and thesis works of the alumni of the Urban@Parsons Programs.

Despite over 144 students graduating from the Urban@Parsons graduate programs (Design and Urban Ecologies and Theories of Urban Practice) since 2014, there is currently no existing database to document alumni profiles and there is no collective display of their thesis works.

As the Urban@Parsons program assistant, I was tasked at the start of the Spring semester with the challenge of organizing our alumni database. I was responsible for reaching out to our alumni network in order to update their profiles and also request their permission to publish a digital version of their thesis work. Our current archives only exist in the form of incomplete and disjointed spreadsheets. In compiling the responses, I became convinced of the need for a more visual representation of the growth of the Urban programs and the global reach of their critical thesis works.

I began by deciding where this eventual site would live. After a discussion with the program, I determined the best place would be the existing Urban@Parsons blog, and that the design of my site would be modeled after the blog for consistency.

I then went through our spreadsheets to compile one single spreadsheet with the data we had access to at the time. I fund that much of the alumni information was missing; in order to make the dataset more complete, I searched through our program files and conducted online searches. Most important was to determine the city and country of origin of our alumni in order to create geographical location points. Where a specific city of origin information was missing, I defaulted to the capital city of the country of origin, adding the latitude and longitude to each alumn. I also began to build out the alumni profiles.

From here, I uploaded my dataset to Carto in order to spatialize the alumni location points and to begin to create pop-ups.

I then began to build out the design of the site using Glitch. Below is an image of my initial sketch.

I began to build out my site and incorporated a navigation bar with links that lead back to landing pages already built into the Uraban@Parsons blog; I added a sidebar with a description of how to use the map; I added popups that include the alumni name, cohort year, location of origin, short bio, and a link to their thesis work; and finally, I added filters to explore alumni by cohort (corresponding to graduation year) and by program type.

I plan to continue adding to this atlas as I complete the alumni database for the Urban programs. In working through this, I discovered that what is more important than the origin of the alumni is their route into the programs, and where they go after graduating; essentially, focusing on their routes and how these routes converge and diverge. A future iteration of this site will visualize these routes.

I have yet to incorporate a link between each alumni’s thesis work and corresponding geographic location; the next iteration will include this. It is important for these inspiring and critical works to be showcased for the alumni themselves, as well as the program faculty and future generations of Urban@Parsons graduates.