Geoff Boeing had an unusual hobby as a kid. Growing up against the foothills of Rancho Cucamonga, California, Boeing bicycled around town with a notepad, mapping out his hometown. He sketched out streets and city landmarks, canals that carried storm water, bridle paths for horses, and habitats filled with frogs.
“I guess at a basic level, it was about understanding how the world worked,” explained Boeing, Associate Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy. “To me, the way that manifested itself was in how the world was laid out.”
As Boeing grew older, he learned that the world wasn’t “laid out,” in the passive sense. There were city planners who chose to arrange his neighborhood that way. Boeing mimicked this process at home, designing fictional metropolises in the video game Sim City.
Now, Boeing helps planners design real cities around the world. He recently won a prestigious Nobel Sustainability Trust Sustainability Award for his work on the Global Observatory for Healthy and Sustainable Cities, which helps cities around the world measure their progress toward becoming healthier and more sustainable.
“What I like about city planning is that it teaches us to never take for granted how the world is,” Boeing said. “It’s not just ‘how the world is.’ It’s not the passive voice. It’s planners. There is an active agent who chose the layout of those streets. There were real estate developers who built buildings shaped by those planning regulations.”
Bringing Big Data to Big Cities
Boeing began his career as a web developer and data engineer. Seeking degrees that would land him a stable job, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer systems and information management from Arizona State University. Consulting giant Accenture hired him as a project manager and sent him around the world, from England and Cambodia to Mozambique and Malawi working on projects from technology implementation to knowledge management.
When he came home, Boeing experienced “reverse culture shock” that got him thinking about cities again.
He noticed the difference between U.S. cities and those like London or Berlin, where one can easily stroll city streets to get to work, dine in sidewalk cafes and take in the “public culture” of a vibrant city or even a small town. By contrast, U.S. cities often seemed designed for cars, single-family homes and an “intense private culture,” as Boeing puts it.
“I felt the strangeness of U.S. urban planning in particular. Just how little freedom of choice there is for a country that talks a lot about freedom of choice, right?” Boeing said. “In a lot of ways, when it comes to the sort of urbanism that we provide, you have to drive to get around most of the time. It’s constraining for many people.”
Boeing realized, or perhaps rediscovered, his big interest in life: cities. He decided to pursue a PhD at UC Berkeley that would combine this renewed passion with his computer science skills. He worked under a “very like-minded advisor,” Paul Waddell, who ran an urban analytics lab at Berkeley, which brought together computing with urban planning for modeling cities.
At the USC Price School, Boeing integrates seemingly disparate fields – computer science, geography, and design – and applies them to urban planning challenges, such as optimizing street networks or planning green spaces.
The flagship initiative of his Nobel-winning project – the 1,000 Cities Challenge – provides open access tools that help local policymakers generate reports and scorecards to assess whether their cities are moving in the right direction to improve health and reduce factors contributing to climate change.
For example, the tools can measure a city’s walkability, access to healthy food, public transportation, and urban heat vulnerability, among other factors. Launched in 2022, the network now includes 319 researchers and policy practitioners from 198 cities in 57 countries.
“It’s about creating that freedom of choice we talked about earlier,” Boeing said. “If you have safe, frequent, convenient bus routes, people have a choice to take the bus instead of driving. If you have grocery stores or elementary schools that are within walking distance and you don’t have to drive to them, some people can make that choice to walk or ride their bicycle if they’d like to.”
Too often in the U.S., people are limited to driving from an air-conditioned office in an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned single-family living room, where they watch TV and repeat the process the next day, Boeing noted.
“When we create land-use or transportation regulations that make that the only way to live, you end up with poor health outcomes, from sedentary behavior to poor access to your daily living needs,” Boeing said. “That’s where our project comes in.”
Sound and Fury
Another project by Boeing arguably got even more attention, at least on Fox News.
In 2023, he published a study showing a pollution paradox: Los Angelenos who drive less are exposed to more air pollution, as commuters from predominantly white suburbs travel through urbanized non-white areas. The Los Angeles Times wrote about the study in a climate column, which was later bashed on social media by a who’s who of conservative personalities. Donald Trump Jr. posted “The air is racist now” with clown emojis. Fox News had wall-to-wall coverage about the Times article on several shows for a day.
“It was super weird,” Boeing said.
“What I like about city planning is that it teaches us to never take for granted how the world is.”
Geoff Boeing
Particularly because none of the critics were critiquing the peer-reviewed paper on its merits. No one claimed that the study used a flawed dataset or incorrect methodology.
“They weren’t ever making a point. Their argument never went beyond, ‘We just don’t like it,’” Boeing said. “I kept thinking, what kind of reply would I want to make here? And I realized there’s nothing to say. You just let the wave crest.”
