I had to do some social media scraping as a homework assignment for my Technicity MOOC. I scraped Twitter data using the Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet TAGS v5 from Google Templates. In the last week there were slightly more than 3200 tweets with the tags #cplan, #urbanplanning, #cities, and #urbanism. I was hoping to make a map, but only around 90 included geolocational info (less than 3%).
I’ve been looking at a lot of data for Downtown Louisville recently, in part, to be a more informed citizen as the Louisville Downtown Development Corporation gets started on a new 10-year Downtown Master Plan. Pretty soon a public engagement process will begin, and people will put forth their thoughts and ideas on how to improve Downtown… and the inevitable chicken vs egg debate will emerge at some point… does retail and commercial draw residents, or do residential rooftops need to be in place before such businesses can thrive? Obviously that argument can, and does, go both ways in many cities across the US, but in my humble opinion (and based on the map below) I think Downtown Louisville badly needs a hearty injection of new residents Downtown (and much needed new multi-unit housing development to make that possible). There are huge gaps in residential buildings across Downtown, and most of the only truly dense Census Blocks from 2010 are public housing towers and corrections centers.
I hadn’t made a Dot Density map since my days as a geography student, but I thought it made for a good visualization tool for seeing the large, uninhabited swaths of Downtown Louisville. I was inspired by Brandon M-Anderson’s AMAZING Dot Density web map for the 2010 US and Canadian populations. The population data came from the Census 2010 TIGER files, and everything else from the amazing folks at KYGEONET, who maintain Kentucky’s best free and open geodata portal.
Shew! It’s been another one of those busy periods where I haven’t had time to make a proper MapGrapher post. But never fear dear reader…I’m back with something to whet your mapgraphic appetite. I’ve been working on this project for cycLOUvia the last couple of weekends. Its an infographic that displays the information from a survey we conducted at Louisville’s first Open Streets event, cycLOUvia. We stopped around 100 cyclists and pedestrians and asked them a few questions about the event, and then I took the resulting data and made this fun little graphic. Enjoy!
IMPORTAT NOTE (9/26/12) : I do not work with Rebar, I’m just an independent researcher interested in urbanism and maps. The thematic maps below are NOT meant to be taken as “official” PARK(ing) Day statistics. They are based on the points people have plotted on the PARK(ing) Day 2012 Google Map as of the Saturday after the event. My purpose of this post and these maps is threefold: (1) I want to promote more discussion about PARK(ing) Day, (2) I want to hopefully improve the accuracy in the number of pop-ups reported, and (3) i’m trying to incite a little friendly competition between cities and states, which will hopefully increase the number of parks for 2013. Thanks for all the great feedback from folks.
If you didn’t already know, PARK(ing) Day is an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks. While PARK(ing) Day is a truly global event, with hundreds of pop-up parks around the world, I wanted to place the event in the US context, to look at participation levels across the nation.
So which US State won? Well, no one really “wins” PARK(ing) Day, but in my opinion, every state and city that was able to pull off a park is a winner, and those states that couldn’t get a park together this year, hey… PARK(ing) Day 2013 will be here before you know it.
After I downloaded the KML data for the park locations from the official PARK(ing) Day map last night (the Saturday after the event), there were 890 parks plotted on the Google Maps site by participants worldwide – 582 of which were in the US.* While there are probably some parks being added here and there in the days after PARK(ing) Day 2012, I went ahead and decided make some maps. So if you feel your state is underrepresented due to late additions to the Google Map, let me know, and I’ll remake the maps soon.
This first map shows the number of pop-ups per state, with California way out there in the lead. The top five states by number of parks were:
#1 California (195 parks)
#2 Pennsylvania (37 parks)
#3 Maryland (34 parks)
#4 Kentucky (31 parks)
#5 New York (29 parks)
The second map makes for a better state to state comparison by calculating the number of people per parks in each state. The states with the most parks per resident were:
#1 Kentucky (1 park for every 139,979 residents)
#2 Maine (1 park for every 147,596 residents)
– (D.C. had 1 park for every 150,431 residents, 4 parks total)
#3 Oregon (1 park for every 166,568 residents)
#4 Maryland (1 park for every 169,810 residents)
#5 California (1 park for every 191,046 residents)
*586 was the US total by Sunday afternoon ET.
I love this conceptual transit system map for Louisville by Luis Calvo Deik, an architect and Graduate Research Assistant at the Urban Design Studio at the University of Louisville. Luis and the director of the Urban Design Studio, Patrick Piuma, put this together for their pop-up park for PARK(ing) Day today. The map is for a streetcar transit stop that is the theme for the temporary park. Great work Luis – this is a great piece to get people talking about Louisville’s transit future.
This post (and accompanying mapgraphic) was inspired by a piece written by Aaron Renn published last month in his blog Urbanophile, looking at the worsening city-suburb divide in Cincinnati and how that divide is exacerbated by partisan politics. The gist of the piece is that the city-suburb divide is holding Cincinnati back from reaching its full potential. Renn continues to explain how downtown Cincinnati’s own Congressional Representative, Steve Chabot (R-District 1), is working against his city in an attempt to kill funding for a streetcar project.
So how can someone like Steve Chabot, so seemingly wrapped up in suburban identity politics, be the Congressional Rep for a district that includes a major city like Cincinnati? This happens through a combination of gerrymandering, overt discriminatory voting policies, the overall loss of 2 Congressional Districts statewide, and shrinking populations in Ohio’s cities. To be fair, it seems that the increase in land area of District 1 has allowed for the inclusion of more Republican voters, but check out what Ohio’s Republican state legislature and governor have done to Ohio’s First Congressional District… the graphic below shows where in the congressional redistricting based on Census 2010, the Republican state legislature went completely out of their way to tack on the staunchly Republican Warren County to the 1st District, and in the process, further weakening the voice of Cincinnati’s residents in speaking up for their share of federally-funded projects (this boundary will go into effect beginning with the 113th Congress starting in 2013).
NOTE: The percents are estimates because they include a few people outside the border of Cincinnati. The city of Cincinnati’s border dissects many Census Tracts at its edge, so populations within these tracts were included in the number. Therefore, the percentage include everyone thats over 18 within Cincinnati, and also some folks in tracts split on the city line.
Mayor Fischer vetoed Metro Council’s amendment to the landmarks ordinance today. The amendment would have given the council final say over landmark designations if a super majority felt it necessary. Many preservationists equated it to a ‘politicization’ of the landmarks process. The proponents of the amendment are confident they will be able to override the veto. NOTE: Aug. 3 – On WFPL this morning I heard a sponsor of the amendment quoted as saying that he will not take for granted having enough votes to override the veto.
In the meantime take a look at this map which shows which council members supported or opposed the amendment.
