2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 253
its members to get feedback as to the relevance and legibility of the maps
that were being created.
The Audubon Society of Portland, more than any other of CLF’s member
organizations, recognized the potential that a fine-grained geospatial
analysis of access to parks and greenspaces across the region (as opposed
to simple per capita measures, such as acres per thousand residents of
municipalities) could offer its advocacy work. Under the leadership of
Portland Audubon, the parks and greenspaces workgroup had always
been the best organized and most active of CLF’s workgroups. In 2003, as
the equity atlas project was beginning, Audubon and others were advocating
for the revision of the regional framework plan to (1) establish
levels of service, required of local jurisdictions, for a full range of park
and recreational opportunities; (2) require local jurisdictions to adopt
policies that would ensure the protection and restoration (if necessary) of
natural areas; and (3) require the cleanup of local tributaries to the Willamette
River to ensure equal access to water-based recreational activities.
Just as Orfield’s maps had helped to mobilize CLF in its efforts to
influence the first regional framework plan, CLF’s parks and greenspaces
working group saw in the Regional Equity Atlas project an opportunity
to mobilize and shape regional policy related to parks and greenspaces.
In April 2003, Mike Houck, a naturalist with Portland Audubon
who had helped to found CLF, created a “Natural Resource Protection/
Parks and Greenspaces Equity Draft Outline” for consideration by the
workgroup. In this document, he suggested that the workgroup submit,
for the equity atlas project, a document that would argue that natural
resource protection and parks and greenspaces were equity issues with
regional significance; identify one-to-three year policy or project goals
that the equity atlas research would support; and outline indicators that
the group wanted to see mapped and the primary questions that should
be answered by the Regional Equity Atlas and its underlying research.
In fact, Audubon saw this effort as so important that it dedicated some
of its own staff time to the equity atlas project. On Audubon’s behalf,
Jim Labbe, an Audubon conservationist who had previously volunteered
with CLF, worked closely with Ken Radin, the Portland State University
geographic information system (GIS) analyst on the project, to help
frame the issues and assist in conceptualizing the analyses. No other
coalition member organization did this. For example, Radin and Labbe
developed a concept they called park-sheds, which was achieved through
a high-resolution geospatial raster analysis (which creates a continuous