Rasheed Shabazz is a first-year Ph.D. in Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. His focus on Critical Black Urbanism utilizes history, geography, and ethnographic research to understand race and inequality across time and space. He completed his Masters in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Alameda with his cat, Safi.
Introduction to Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Data Science is a graduate-level course that combines data science and spatial analysis, or "spatial data science." Student learning outcomes include:
- "Demonstrate the value of data for planning purposes through discovery, exploration, and analysis
- Critically evaluate data and create frameworks to prepare data for research
- Apply data science programming techniques to produce relevant visualizations that inform urban policy
- Learn to visualize data spatially to communicate the importance of place-based informatics
- Learn to produce publication-ready scholarly materials in the form of tables, charts, and maps"
According to the 2020 Mosque Survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), the number of mosques in the United States has grown in the last decade, but the number of African American majority mosques has decreased. I am interested in understanding what internal factors, such as neighborhood characteristics and neighborhood change, have impacted African American mosques.
My objectives for this course are to further develop my spatial statistic analysis skills, ability to work with large datasets, and to publish a case study focused on African American mosques in Los Angeles.