About

Laura Kurgan is a faculty member at Columbia GSAPP. The page does not provide specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, no further biographical information is available from the provided content.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Law
• Geography
• Social psychology
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Living In/difference; or, How to Imagine Ambivalent Networks

  Qui Parle · 2021 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  Abstract In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

• Conflict Urbanism, Aleppo: Mapping Urban Damage

  Architectural Design · 2017-01-01 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet, Aleppo now lies in tatters. This devastation of a designated World Heritage Site is a poignant example of the human and cultural cost of armed conflict – in this case the Syrian Civil War. A project run by the Center for Spatial Research at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of New York's Columbia University is analysing satellite imagery and reports from the ground to assess the damage and casualties caused there by barrel bombs. Associate Professor Laura Kurgan describes the initiative and its sometimes puzzling findings.

  PublisherDOI

• Visualizing Conflict: Possibilities for Urban Research

  Urban Planning · 2017-04-04 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  The Center for Spatial Research (CSR) is undertaking a multiyear project investigating what we have termed Conflict Urbanism. The term designates not simply the conflicts that take place in cities, but also conflict as a structuring principle of cities intrinsically, as a way of inhabiting and creating urban space. The increasing urbanization of warfare and the policing and surveillance of everyday life are examples of the term (Graham, 2010; Misselwitz & Rieniets, 2006; Weizman, 2014), but conflict is not limited to war and violence. Cities are not only destroyed but also built through conflict. They have long been arenas of friction, difference, and dissidence, and their irreducibly conflictual character manifests itself in everything from neighborhood borders, to differences of opinion and status, to ordinary encounters on the street. One major way in which CSR undertakes research is through interrogating the world of ‘big data.’ This includes analyzing newly accessible troves of ‘urban data,’ working to open up new areas of research and inquiry, as well as focusing on data literacy as an essential part of communicating with these new forms of urban information. In what follows we discuss two projects currently under way at CSR that use mapping and data visualization to explore and analyze Conflict Urbanism in two different contexts: the city of Aleppo, and the nation of Colombia.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Conflict Urbanism, Aleppo

  Harvard Design Magazine: architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Speculation with Data

  2015-05-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Speculation with Data:

  2015-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Undelete: Recreating censored archives

  2015-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Close Up at a Distance

  Zone Books · 2013-03-26 · 206 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Million-Dollar Blocks

  2013-01-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter contains sections titled: What are Million-Dollar Blocks? Or, Justice and the City, Why are so many Americans in Jail and Prison?, From Data to Maps, From Crime Maps to Admissions Maps, Redefining the Problem: Mass Migration and Reentry, Money Maps, Criminal Justice as Infrastructure

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Eric Cadora

  2 shared

• Miranda Featherstone

  1 shared

• Jerry Dávila

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  1 shared

• Alexander Mendiburu

  1 shared

• Lindsay Nelson-Santos

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• José C. Moya

  1 shared

• Nadine Chan

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Laura Ciolkowski

  1 shared