2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

ESSAY
The Dynamic
Neighborhood Taxonomy
An Innovative Typology for Community
and Economic Development
Riccardo Bodini
The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in urban communities:
whether it was businesses seeking new investment opportunities,
community-based organizations working to improve their neighborhoods,
or government agencies reshaping their urban policy agenda, actors in the
public, private, and nonprofit sectors have been seeking better ways to
understand how to tap the assets of urban neighborhoods. In the wake
of the economic crisis, this need has become more urgent: the problems
have grown while the available resources have dwindled, placing a premium
on targeted and strategic investment.
This type of strategic intervention primarily entails being able to target
and tailor investments to the types of neighborhoods where they are most
likely to be effective, which in turn requires accurate and timely information.
In particular, it requires good and up-to-date data even for small
levels of geography, sound knowledge on the dynamics of neighborhood
change (including what factors can lead to neighborhood improvement
or deterioration), and effective tools that can enable practitioners, investors,
and service providers to make informed decisions on what actions
to take in particular places.
Developing this type of information is no easy task, as neighborhoods
are complex and dynamic entities that are constantly evolving:
they are complex because they are composed of many different elements
(people, businesses and institutions, infrastructure, and housing stock)
interacting with each other across several dimensions. Neighborhoods
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