Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each "cell" is a 30 arc-second grid cell, but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the project was to better define urban density and do it in a more granular way. City averages don't tell you a whole lot about how neighborhoods vary, and they can be skewed by the denominator you use. i.e. Where are you drawing the urban boundary?

You can play around with his interactive study, here. Each city can be explored according to its 200 most dense cells. One interesting takeaway -- though it is probably not all that surprising to this audience -- is that New York City is really a unique place when it comes to American cities. If you look at the above chart (sourced from CityLab), you'll see that most other US cities don't come close to it in terms of urban density. New York's 200th densest cell is still denser than the most dense cells of Boston, the Twin Cities, and of Dallas.

The y-axis is the total population in each grid cell.

This is an interesting study from a team of AI researchers at Stanford. What they did was use car images taken directly from Google Street View (so images of cars parked on-street) to predict income levels, racial makeup, educational attainment, and voting patterns at the zip code and precinct level.

Admittedly, it’s not a perfect survey, but when they compared their findings to actual or previously collected data (such as from the American Community Survey), it turns out that their study was actually remarkably accurate. Google Street View allowed them to survey 22 million cars, or about 8% of all cars in the US.

Here are some of the things they found:

-  Toyota and Honda vehicles are strongly associated with Asian neighborhoods.

- Buick, Oldsmobile, and Chrysler vehicles are strongly associated with black neighborhoods.

- Pickup trucks, Volkswagens and Aston Martins are strongly associated with white neighborhoods.

Interestingly enough, the ratio of pickup trucks to sedans, alone, is a pretty reliable indicator of voting patterns. If a neighborhood has more pickup trucks than sedans, there’s an 82% chance it voted Republican in the last election.

Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising given that car purchases are highly symbolic. But given that the American Community Survey costs $250 million a year to administer, this study is a good preview of what cheaper and more realtime data collection might look like.

Today is the last day of 2014.

It felt like a frenetic year for me, and so I have to say that I’ve been really enjoying this holiday break. I needed the downtime. I needed the time to think and strategize. And I got all of that this holiday. (The only thing that would make this break even better would be some more snow on the mountains.)

I’m super excited for the new year and what’s ahead, but before getting into that, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at what happened in 2014.

I was initially going to list out some of my thoughts, but then I figured that a better way would be to simply list out the most read Architect This City posts. That way it’s my (daily) thoughts, but curated according to what readers cared about most this past year.

Click here for the top 15 most read Architect This City posts of 2014. I’ve listed them on a “topics” page that I plan to update every year.

If you’re looking for some other 2014 themed reading material, I recommend also checking out the best #cityreads of 2014 by CityLab; the best articles of 2014 from ArchDaily; and what just happened? by venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

Happy new year everyone! Thanks for reading. See you in 2015.

Image: Family and friends lunch at Pizzeria Libretto, University