There are a number of social-justice movements, but urban-planning movements are starting to catch up. With that comes the next generation of ânew urbanistsâ and creative designers of public spaces who are falling in love with big social terms like âequityâ while scrambling to create technology that can visualize it.
And if neighborhoods are the heartbeat of cities, wouldnât it be nice if we had digital maps to give us a candid glimpse into the ugly realities like income inequality, gentrification, residential segregation and eco-apartheid?
Suggested Reading
Now weâve got an app for that.
Currently in beta testing and scheduled for a January rollout in Oakland, Calif., Streetwyze is a mobile mapping platform that collects local knowledge in urban areas and then turns that intel into actionable, common-good analytics. The power of the app is that it makes local knowledge accessible within and outside government, thereby creating two-way feedback and data visualizations.
Simply put: Residents can âground-truthâ dataâthat is, directly observe and report the realities of whatâs happening in their neighborhoods, providing digital proof of the existence of troubling urban disparities. Certainly, as cities experience enormous demographic shifts and disruptions, thatâs something municipal governments, community organizations and residents would want to know.
But what does âground truthingâ look like?
Say you are looking at a digital map of Oakland, generated by information provided by the city and county. If you zero in on East Oakland, one of the cityâs poorest neighborhoods, you would see a bunch of grocery stores on a bunch of street corners.
But Streetwyze users, when testing the app, discover something very different: Those âgrocery storesâ are actually liquor stores, not that unusual for many poor hoods nationwide. The only food items for sale are Slim Jims, candy and salty potato chipsÂâall triggers for diabetes and high blood pressure, which plague the black community. That makes East Oakland a food desert, where residents are lucky to find fresh, nutritious ingredients for family meals.
With a digital map, the city of Oakland and community leaders can now target resources more equitably. In this way, they can achieve greater equality in outcomes, like providing access to healthy food.
Growing up in a single-parent, female-headed household, Streetwyze co-founder Antwi Akom became personally sensitive to the plight of folks left out of conversations about urban planning and development. Cities get built and the underserved never know what hit them.
âPeople of color, poor people, disabled folks, youth, the elderly andâincreasinglyâlots of middle-income folks in rapidly gentrifying cities have historically been left out of planning conversations,â Akom told The Root. âWe wanted to change that. We wanted to build a multilingual and universally accessible app that was useful to everyoneâthat didnât leave out or ignore the fastest-growing demographicsânot just in the United States but the world.â
Eager to democratize planning practices, the Streetwyze team built an interactive mapping app that allows users to find goods and services, rate their quality and take action on crucial issues. In doing so, Streetwyze offers unprecedented granularity thatâs often missed by bigger data sets.
This elevates the power of everyday people by combining their perspective with local data, thereby increasing their clout in municipal-planning conversations.
The Streetwyze teamâs work is on the leading edge of a new data-driven cities movement. It builds upon earlier âsmart citiesâ work, like John Powellâs Opportunity Mapping Project, PolicyLinkâs National Equity Atlas, the EcoDistrict Protocol (pdf) and Enterprise Community Partnersâ Opportunity Index. In the for-profit sphere, Zillowâs Invest in the Future and Redfinâs Opportunity Score are also important platforms.
But what makes Streetwyze different from other efforts is that community groups, artists, advocates and everyday people can integrate their lived experience into those big data sets, computer simulations and advanced modeling techniques. This can help cities function more effectively.
And fairly.
Still, the question remains: Are cities ready to integrate real-time, community-generated data into their planning processes? There are some positive indicators. Initiatives such as Bloomberg Philanthropiesâ What Works Cities and the Rockefeller Foundationâs 100 Resilient Cities seek to help local governments use civic tech, data democratization and advanced simulation to enhance city services and, ultimately, improve community engagement.
For the equity-mapping movement and tools such as Streetwyze, that entails real-time, crowdsourced early-warning systems to standardize and disseminate local data. More importantly, it encourages governments and communities to achieve full equality as the means, and equity as the outcome.
âFor community members to be equal partners in planning and decision-making process, cities are going to have to learn how to use mapping apps,â argued Oaklandâs Chief Resilience Officer Kiran Jain. âDoing so will reveal hidden patterns and relationships in data. That will enable us to be more responsive toâand predictâcommunity change.â
Streetwyze is currently offered in private beta in limited cities. If you are interested in participating in the public launch (scheduled for late 2017/early 2018), please contact [email protected]
Charles D. Ellison is a veteran political strategist and a contributing editor at The Root. He is also Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune, a frequent contributor to The Hill, the weekly Washington insider for WDAS-FM in Philadelphia and host of The Ellison Report, a weekly public-affairs magazine broadcast and podcast on WEAA 88.9 FM Baltimore. Follow him on Twitter.
Straight From
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.