by Rachel Cohen
In my pre-grad school work in campaign organizing, we talked frequently about the power of stories – when advocating to a politician or the press, a single person’s narrative often proved more memorable and therefore effective than endless statistics and analyses about the thousands or millions who a policy might impact. As a planning student, I have come to understand the frequent spatial and geospatial nature of these stories – it’s not just who is impacted by policy and planning choices at the individual level, but where these impacts occur and are concentrated, that tells the story. When it comes to the decisions that matter most to New Yorkers and residents of cities worldwide – investments in new transit infrastructure, working with developers to build more affordable housing, protecting those who are most vulnerable to sea level rise – a map can be worth a thousand words.
A choropleth map of high school graduation rates across New York City, from a recent Wall Street Journal article on the “stubborn graduation gap.”
A recent Wall Street Journal story about school graduation rates across New York City Community Districts brought the lesson home. Without even reading the piece, the accompanying choropleth map tells a very clear story about inequality and geographic determinism in our city today. The power of maps to influence policy and planning choices is all around us, which is why it is so exciting to see mapping tools, and the data needed to build compelling maps, becoming increasingly accessible.
Planners have long used enterprise tools for sophisticated mapping and geospatial analysis, particularly the infamous Environmental Systems Research Institute (AKA ESRI) GIS mapping platform. Such tools are indispensable to experts in the field, but new platforms, designed with access and affordability in mind, have the potential to open these tools up to huge new audiences. CartoDB, for example, has an easy-to-use web interface that encourages users to just jump in and start mapping, and it’s pricing model is favorable to students, NGOs, and others who might not have a line item in their budget for mapping software (those with an NYU email can use some versions for free). The rise of such tools is occurring in parallel to the trend of cities opening their data to the public. The NYC Open Data portal, for example, contains thousands of data sets – provided in a machine-readable formats that are easy to download and analyze – on everything from 311 calls to legally operating businesses (https://nycopendata.socrata.com/). Any user can, at no cost, download this data in a variety of formats, and quickly produce analyses and visualizations related to the issues that they care most about. Los Angeles is taking this all a step further with their new GeoHub, an open data portal focused specifically on geospatial data. (http://geohub.lacity.org/)
The simultaneous rise of open data and democratization of mapping platforms has the potential to change the way planning decisions are made, by opening up the decision-making process to new and newly empowered voices. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a San Francisco-based “collective” focused on telling the stories of Bay Area residents displaced or otherwise impacted by the recent tech boom, is a prime example. AEMP creates maps about demographic change, neighborhood rents, evictions, and many other community issues. Concerns about gentrification in San Francisco – perhaps even more so than New York – are widespread with the rise of the tech economy; and while it is one thing to document evictions and displacements anecdotally, it is quite another to map these instances together in a way that quantifies and compellingly illustrates the connection between evictions, rising real estate prices, and Google bus routes.
The AEMP story shows the potential of these tools to democratize planning – their maps draw from San Francisco’s Open Data Portal and use tools including CartoDB, and their work would have been at the least expensive, and at the most impossible, before the open data movement. Their maps place AEMP as not just a protest group, but as an analytical organization with the data to drive choices about affordable housing, economic, and workforce development that protect and empower a wider swath of Bay Area residents. However, their story also shows the tensions and limits of these trends – though data is becoming more open, not everyone has either access to this digital realm or the time and training to leverage its possibilities. As with any analysis, maps can be manipulated, and must not only be created, but read by educated users to be most effective. Finally, it is worth highlighting the irony in AEMP using these open data and web-based platform technology to fight back against the influence of Google, itself a leading data-producing company and an increasingly engaged player in the smart cities conversation.
All efforts to democratize the American political process face hurdles, and history shows that on balance the opportunities of engaging a broader public in choices about the allocation of our shared resources outweigh the challenges. Understanding the geospatial nature of urban data has always been essential in effective planning, for everything from tracking disease epidemics to siting public facilities. The rise of open data and accessible mapping platforms means that more people can bring their voices to this type of analysis and problem-solving, leading toward more informed outcomes that serve more people. As planning continues to move in this direction, mapping tools can empower more and more people to become both analysts and storytellers, engaging in the planning process in ways that can truly make our cities “smart.”