Lizzie MacWillie at NextCity: “…By crowdsourcing neighborhood boundaries, residents can put themselves on the map in critical ways.
Why does this matter? Neighborhoods are the smallest organizing element in any city. A strong city is made up of strong neighborhoods, where the residents can effectively advocate for their needs. A neighborhood boundary marks off a particular geography and calls out important elements within that geography: architecture, street fabric, public spaces and natural resources, to name a few. Putting that line on a page lets residents begin to identify needs and set priorities. Without boundaries, there’s no way to know where to start.
Knowing a neighborhood’s boundaries and unique features allows a group to list its assets. What buildings have historic significance? What shops and restaurants exist? It also helps highlight gaps: What’s missing? What does the neighborhood need more of? What is there already too much of? Armed with this detailed inventory, residents can approach a developer, city council member or advocacy group with hard numbers on what they know their neighborhood needs.
With a precisely defined geography, residents living in a food desert can point to developable vacant land that’s ideal for a grocery store. They can also cite how many potential grocery shoppers live within the neighborhood.
In addition to being able to organize within the neighborhood, staking a claim to a neighborhood, putting it on a map and naming it, can help a neighborhood control its own narrative and tell its story — so someone else doesn’t.
Our neighborhood map project was started in part as a response to consistent misidentification of Dallas neighborhoods by local media, which appears to be particularly common in stories about majority-minority neighborhoods. This kind of oversight can contribute to a false narrative about a place, especially when the news is about crime or violence, and takes away from residents’ ability to tell their story and shape their neighborhood’s future. Even worse is when neighborhoods are completely left off of the map, as if they have no story at all to tell.
Cities across the country — including Dallas, Boston, New York, Chicago,Portland and Seattle — have crowdsourced mapping projects people can contribute to. For cities lacking such an effort, tools like Google Map Maker have been effective….(More)”.