Tara Pham
2024 Urban Tech Fellow
Tara Pham (she/her) is founder and CEO of Numina, which takes a privacy-first approach to measure all forms of street-level activity for cities, to support planning for bicycles, pedestrians, and transportation equity. By making this real-time intelligence queryable via API, Numina turns streets into a developer platform for the urban planning, mobility, and real estate sectors. Numina has deployed in more than 50 cities globally, awarded as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and the global grand prize winner of Toyota Mobility Foundation’s City Architecture of Tomorrow Challenge. Numina is also a New York City-certified Minority- and Woman-owned Business Enterprise and the alum of such programs as Elemental Excelerator, URBAN-X, and the Transit Tech Lab.
Individually and with Numina, Tara has led city-scale data projects with the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Code for America, Living Cities, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Clinton Foundation, and others. Prior to civic tech, Tara had worked in public health/urban design research, radio and print media, and arts administration. One of her proudest achievements was organizing Sloup, a monthly roaming soup dinner in St. Louis, MO, that crowdfunded arts projects and raised over $35,000 for 60 grassroots projects, one bowl of soup at time. She is also a former Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, Mercedes Benz EQ Fellow, Next City Vanguard, and winner of the $50,000 Globalhack hackathon, and a founding co-host of Women Who Hardware, which brings together the female and gender-nonconforming doers of the NYC hardware ecosystem.
Project Description
Transportation has seen major, swift transformations in recent years, but the built environment has not evolved on pace with these trends. In particular, more is happening on the street than before — new modes of transportation, unprecedented delivery and commerce, and new forms of public life — and available street space remains constrained. Land use is ultimately our biggest lever to address the urgent climate crisis, and we must find ways to accelerate conversations to re-assess it.
As a 2024 Cornell Tech Urban Tech Fellow, Tara will develop participatory models and ideas for more responsive land use policy in cities, exploring how the public realm can dynamically adapt to local needs, at the smallest units of time and space possible, and engaging communities to decide how they want street space to be allocated.
Individually and with Numina, Tara has led city-scale data projects with the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Code for America, Living Cities, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Clinton Foundation, and others. Prior to civic tech, Tara had worked in public health/urban design research, radio and print media, and arts administration. One of her proudest achievements was organizing Sloup, a monthly roaming soup dinner in St. Louis, MO, that crowdfunded arts projects and raised over $35,000 for 60 grassroots projects, one bowl of soup at time. She is also a former Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, Mercedes Benz EQ Fellow, Next City Vanguard, and winner of the $50,000 Globalhack hackathon, and a founding co-host of Women Who Hardware, which brings together the female and gender-nonconforming doers of the NYC hardware ecosystem.
Project Description
Transportation has seen major, swift transformations in recent years, but the built environment has not evolved on pace with these trends. In particular, more is happening on the street than before — new modes of transportation, unprecedented delivery and commerce, and new forms of public life — and available street space remains constrained. Land use is ultimately our biggest lever to address the urgent climate crisis, and we must find ways to accelerate conversations to re-assess it.
As a 2024 Cornell Tech Urban Tech Fellow, Tara will develop participatory models and ideas for more responsive land use policy in cities, exploring how the public realm can dynamically adapt to local needs, at the smallest units of time and space possible, and engaging communities to decide how they want street space to be allocated.