2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

ESSAY
Beyond Mapping
Spatial Analytics and Evaluation
of Place-Based Programs
Julia Koschinsky
Over the past decade, community change efforts have increasingly
used geographically based community information (Brown 2010),
primarily to visualize data in a mapping format. The collection of such
geo-referenced data has been advanced by several community data initiatives,
including, for instance, the efforts organized through the Urban
Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership or projects in
Chicago such as MDRC’s neighborhood trajectory database for the New
Communities program evaluation, RW Ventures’s Dynamic Taxonomy
Project database, or Sampson’s (2012) analysis of neighborhood effects
using Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods data.
This essay builds on these developments and introduces explicitly
spatial concepts, methods, and tools to the evaluation of place-based
programs. Some of these spatial approaches have been applied in particular
place-based evaluations before, but the use of a spatial analytical
perspective beyond mapping geographic data is less common. This perspective
has been neglected in the field of evaluation in general. In contrast
to other research areas with exponential growth in the application
of spatial methods and tools in the last decade, spatial analysis beyond
mapping is less well-known or used in evaluation practice and research
(Koschinsky 2013). Existing evaluation research and practice tend not
to go beyond the standard functionalities of mapping tools [such as
geographic information systems (GISs); see, for example, Renger et al.
(2002)]. There is an opportunity to benefit from recent research that
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