Hello! I'm Wenfei Xu, a PhD candidate in urban planning at Columbia GSAPP. My main research traces the legacies of historical structural disinvestment and asks how they have shaped present-day inequality and processes of neighborhood change.

I have a new paper that uses mobile phone data to measure variation of ego-centric social contexts and how that changes our measurements of diversity and segregation.

Another paper I published recently compares neighborhood outcomes using the FHA redlining map in Chicago to the HOLC's.

I made a map tool that looks at the socioeconomic and demographic trajectories over from 1930 to 2016 of areas graded by the HOLC.

My other research interests include: using spatial big data to improve our understanding of social context, urban data science, and mapping and visualization as exploratory techniques.

I also work at the Department of Homeless Services as a data scientist.

You can reach me at wx2133[at]columbia.edu or on Twitter @iamwfx. Some of my code is on my Github page.