2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

ESSAY
Mashup City
Tools for Urban Life and Urban
Progress in the Internet Age
Greg Sanders
In 2011 a Chicago, Illinois, technology firm launched a digital service
that allowed mobile phone users to find nearby restaurants serving
their favorite meals. Type pasta primavera into your phone, and you
received not only a list of nearby offerings, but ratings—and not only
for each restaurant, but for each restaurant’s pasta primavera. It was just
another reliable, customized, granular data product served up for mobile
consumers in a matter of milliseconds. Nothing remarkable there. Since
restaurant locators without menu-level detail were already popular, of
course someone would improve and extend those services within a year
or two. Our expectations for more detailed, localized, personalized information,
growing on an ever-steepening upward curve, were confirmed
and raised a little bit more.
Meanwhile, across town, a community revitalization initiative brought
together government, nonprofit, university, and volunteer groups for a
collaborative effort to improve the neighborhood. They planned a commercial
corridor renovation with mixed-income residential units and
green space. But they needed data, and lots of them. They needed to
find out who owned all 800 parcels within the project area. They sought
data on zoning, land use, and property tax status; traffic counts; crime
statistics; and income and spending. They needed historical numbers
to effectively tell the story of how their community had changed, for
better and worse. And they needed to sort, query, visualize, and analyze
all that data. But while enthusiasm for the project grew, data acquisition
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