Sam Wear — one of New York’s pre-eminent GIS leaders — published a fun interview with me about our mapping work at the CUNY Graduate Center. I’m honored!
Filed under: GeoWeb, Social networking | Comments Off on eSpatiallyNY profile
The City Council Comparinator site is now embeddable for your website, blog, etc.
Here’s how to use it:
Sample embed code:
We also added a feature: if you turn off the popup window before clicking “Link”, it’ll add a “popup=false” property to the URL, so the person viewing the link (or the starting image for your embedded map) won’t have the popup in the way but the district will still be highlighted.
Here’s an example:
Our Center for Urban Research (CUR) at the CUNY Graduate Center has launched an interactive map today to visualize proposed New York City Council districts compared with existing ones along with the demographic characteristics and patterns within the districts.
The Center hopes the map will help involve people in the NYC districting process simply by showing them how proposed or newly drawn lines looked in relation to their homes or workplaces. Our map is not for drawing districts; others such as the NYC Districting Commission are providing that service. But CUR’s comparison maps are designed to be be engaging enough to visualize the impact of redistricting for everyone from local citizens to redistricting professionals, hopefully inspiring people to participate more actively in the process.
CUR’s map was designed and is being maintained independently from the NYC Districting Commission’s website. However, we hope that people who use CUR’s maps will then access the Districting Commission’s website for drawing maps online.
The main features of the map are as follows:
The mapping application was developed by the Center for Urban Research. David Burgoon, CUR’s application architect, constructed and designed the site, with data analysis support and overall conception from CUR’s Mapping Service director Steven Romalewski.
The application relies on geographic data hosting by cartoDB, open source mapping frameworks and services including OpenLayers and Bing maps, and ESRI’s ArcGIS software for cartography and data analysis.
Current City Council district boundaries and proposed maps from the NYC Districting Commission are based on block assignment lists provided at the Districting Commission’s website.
Other proposed maps such as the Unity Map are provided by the advocacy organizations who developed those proposals.
Filed under: Cartography, GeoWeb | Tagged: Cartography, GeoWeb, NYC, online maps, Policy, redistricting | Comments Off on Interactive “Comparinator” maps launched for NYC Council districting
In partnership with the Long Island Index, our team at the CUNY Graduate Center has mapped the complex and complicated special taxation districts and service provider areas throughout Nassau County. We’ve updated this information at the Index’s mapping site, along with a new street address search feature.
I couldn’t say it any better than the Index’s news release on the project, so I’ve reproduced that verbatim below.
The Long Island Index, in collaboration with the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, launched a new tool on its website that for the first time provides public access to maps representing the profusion of special districts that exist within Nassau County’s villages and towns. Visitors to the site are now able to search by street address or village to view any or all of the 240 fire, sanitation, water, library, parks, parking, police, school and sewer districts – as well as areas where local, county, or state government provides these services – and see clearly who provides what services and where. This new tool is the result of a comprehensive project to delineate all service provider boundaries using computer-mapping software, which integrates data on special districts from multiple sources. The maps are intended to give taxpayers and service providers a common and consistent basis for discussing special district issues.
The Long Island Index’s new mapping tool allows visitors to view any or all of the 240 fire, sanitation, water, library, parks, parking, police, school and sewer service providers in Nassau County.
Want to know how many different entities provide water services in Nassau County and their exact boundaries? Well, now you can see them. Want to know who provides water services in your community? Want to know how they are organized, which are special districts, which are town services? You can find that too. With the click of the mouse you can find the contact information and election data for all the service providers for your property. “This is the kind of tool we were looking for when we first started studying how services are provided on Long Island,” said Ann Golob, Director of the Long Island Index. “It didn’t exist so we took on the effort and have worked for over two years to collect, analyze and digitize this information. I think it will be a tremendous resource for the region.”
Also available on the site is a report by the Center for Governmental Research (CGR) in Rochester that explains the historical context surrounding the founding of special districts on Long Island along with the issues associated with so many providers. The CGR report, and the data found on the maps (provider names, URL, contact information, election data) can be downloaded from the either the Index Web site or the interactive maps site.
Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, said: “The maps bring a new level of information which will be a valuable resource for anyone trying to understand how special districts affect them. To create the service provider maps, we used raw data from the Nassau County assessor’s office, worked with the Index to validate the information independently, and reviewed additional data such as printed maps, historical metes and bounds, and some boundary maps in computer format from Nassau County. The online navigation is quick and easy with dynamic tools such as transparencies and map layers that combine seamlessly with the existing demographic, land use, and transportation data on the site.”
The site also features a detailed glossary of terms to help people understand the complex nature of different special districts across the county. For example, within the 54 library districts in Nassau County, there are four types: an Association Library, a School District Public Library, a Special District Public Library, and a Public Village Library. The glossary explains how each of these were established, how they are funded, bonding authority, if employees are subject to civil service law, and to what extent the community can be involved.
According to Long Island Association President Kevin Law, “These maps give Long Islanders a fantastic new tool for understanding the complexities that exist within our numerous special districts. It is really the first time that we can see who has what and where. It provides an opportunity to think out of the box about consolidation, which has the potential to improve efficiencies and stabilize taxes. People are only going to be supportive of this kind of initiative if they understand what is going on and these maps clearly show how multiple layers of government are a challenge for Long Island.”
“Civic organizations trying to research special districts in their own communities now have a powerful resource that never existed before,” said Nancy Douzinas, President of the Rauch Foundation and Publisher of the Long Island Index. “These maps will undoubtedly be of significant assistance to community groups, government agencies, private businesses and anyone else interested in Long Island’s communities.” In addition to the support from the Rauch Foundation, the Hagedorn Foundation helped support the initial mapping work leading to this project.
The Long Island Index plans to incorporate Suffolk County’s special districts in the coming months. The Long Island Index special district mapping feature is accessible at www.longislandindexmaps.org.
Filed under: GeoWeb | Tagged: Cartography, Data, Long Island, online maps | 1 Comment »
In preparation for the Nov. 2012 election, many news organizations and others are linking to our interactive State Legislature and Congressional redistricting maps. We’ve posted examples at the Center for Urban Research website.
We’ve updated our map of redistricted State Senate and Assembly districts, highlighting the differences in race/ethnicity characteristics between total population and voter-eligible population – in other words, comparing the characteristics of all those who live in the new districts versus the smaller group who will be eligible to vote for each district’s representatives. In some cases the differences are striking.
Our examination of the district-by-district data is available here.
New York State, like all other states, is in the midst of redrawing its legislative district lines. To help you follow along, our team at the Center for Urban Research has launched an interactive redistricting map for New York. We collaborated with The New York World to develop the maps (though we encourage anyone and everyone to use them!).
The World’s reporters and editors are using our maps to go between the lines and explain how redistricting really works in the Empire State. (Here’s their first piece: The art of redistricting war.) And we hope you’ll be able to use the maps too, to help answer questions such as:
We have some examples of gerrymandering at our Center’s website. In the meantime, here’s how you can use the maps.
The maps compare the current and proposed district lines (which our team mapped based on Census block lists published by the state’s redistricting task force, known as LATFOR). Here’s how they work:
If you’re using the “Overlay” view, you can move the transparency slider to the right to display proposed districts, and to the left to fade back to current districts. The video below shows how:
If you want to share the map you’ve made, click the “Link” in the upper right of the map page to get a direct link to the area of the map you’re viewing. It will look like this:
http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nyredistricting/map.html? lat=40.72852&lon=-73.99655&zoom=13&maptype=SIDEBYSIDE &districttype=SENATE
http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nyredistricting/map.html?output=embed
http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nyredistricting/map.html? lat=40.72852&lon=-73.99655&zoom=13&maptype=SIDEBYSIDE &districttype=SENATE&output=embed
src="http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nyredistricting/map.html?output=embed" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" width="600" height="700"
We borrowed from our “Census Comparinator” mapping site that Dave Burgoon artfully developed, in order to provide three ways to compare the current and proposed legislative districts:
I blogged about the Comparinator approach here and here. John Reiser also gave the technique a shoutout at his “Learning Web Mapping” blog for Rowan University.
With Census data, our “Comparinator” approach helped visualize changing spatial patterns of race/ethnicity trends – in cartographic terms, between two choropleth maps. With legislative districts, the comparison is between two sets of boundary files with no inner fill. So here we’ve set the side-by-side view as the default — we think the side by side maps give the easiest way of visualizing how the districts may change. But we also give you the option of viewing the districts with our vertical slider bar if you’d like, or the overlay.
For the proposed districts, we used ArcGIS to create the legislative district shapefiles based on LATFOR’s Census block assignment lists. The current district boundaries are from the Census Bureau’s TIGER files (here’s the FTP page if you’d like to download the “lower” house districts — in New York, that’s the Assembly — or the “upper” house shapefiles — the State Senate).
We use OpenLayers for the map display and navigation with this application, as we’ve done with most of our other interactive maps. OpenLayers is easy to use, enables us to access Bing map tiles directly (so the basemap performance is smooth), and provides a robust JavaScript library for online maps.
That said, newer approaches such as Leaflet.js enable more interaction such as mouseovers, so we’ve started experimenting with some impressive new tools. More to follow!
One of those new tools is the powerful backend geospatial database engine from the team at Vizzuality: cartoDB. Hosting the legislative district shapefiles on cartoDB provided lots of advantages over hosting the data ourselves or setting up an Amazon cloud instance on our own. cartoDB provides:
Other thanks go to:
Filed under: Cartography, Data, GeoWeb | Tagged: Cartography, Census, Data, Policy, redistricting | 7 Comments »
Our team at the CUNY Graduate Center has enhanced the OASISnyc.net mapping site with new data and features to visualize neighborhood change across the city. On the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the updates help provide context for the transformation taking place in lower Manhattan, as well as in other key areas of the city.
I’ve only included some of the highlights below. Our OASIS wiki has more details plus screenshots and other examples.
We’ve added new aerial imagery, thanks to the NYS GIS Clearinghouse. Now you can view overhead images from 2010 (as well as 1996, 2004, 2006, and 2008) throughout New York City and Long Island. (The 1996 imagery is from NYC DoITT, 2004 is from USGS, and the other years are from the NYS GIS Clearinghouse).
For example, you can see what the World Trade Center site looked like from above in 1996, and then in 2006, and more recently in 2010. The overhead images show clearly how the building footprints are reflected in the memorial plaza fountains now under construction.
WTC 1996
WTC 2006
WTC 2010
We’ve also changed the way you can view the imagery over time. Now you can move the aerial timeline slider across years to transition from one year to the next, creating the effect of a timelapse movie within the OASIS map.
You can move the slider as slow or as fast as you’d like.
A good example of the new timelapse feature is Shea Stadium (now Citi Field) in Queens. The images below illustrate the transition in recent years.
Shea Stadium (2006)
Shea Stadium (2006-08)
Citi Field almost done (2008-10)
Citi Field (2010)
Land Use Changes Citywide
Since 2010, OASIS has provided the ability to display historical land use patterns (for 2003 through 2009). This gives you the ability to easily see how patterns have changed in key areas of the city.
In lower Manhattan, the area around the World Trade Center site has changed substantially in the past 10 years. Of course reconstruction is underway at the WTC site itself, but the surrounding community has become much more residential. The land use maps below from OASIS visualize some of these changes (yellow and orange are residential properties, brown is vacant, and light red is commercial).
North Battery Park City & TriBeCa vacant land (and WTC empty): 2003
Residential towers built, WTC site in redevelopment
The maps below highlight the changes from commercial office buildings to residential towers, such as the block between Broad and Hanover streets & Wall and Exchange streets — especially the JP Morgan Building at 15 Broad St and the National City Bank Building at 55 Wall St.
Financial District commercial property circa 2003
Replaced by residential by 2010
The latest example of linking mapped information from grassroots groups is the layer of skate parks in the city by longtime OASIS partner Open Road of NY. (The OASIS community mapping effort is based on Google’s new Fusion Tables service; more info here.)
Here’s the link to the map on OASIS, and the original Google map from Open Road.
We’ve also added the locations of stalled development sites across the city (based on a map from Crain’s New York Business), and the city’s hurricane evacuation centers (more on that here).
Filed under: Cartography, GeoWeb | Tagged: Cartography, NYC, OASISnyc | Comments Off on NYC neighborhood changes mapped with aerial imagery, historic land use data
Our team at the Center for Urban Research (at the CUNY Graduate Center) has updated our interactive maps showing race/ethnicity patterns from 2000 and 2010 in major cities across the US. We’ve enhanced the maps in several ways:
Here’s our news release with more info.
Btw, we’ve also updated our static maps to show New York City Council districts, to begin to get a sense of how demographic changes will shape upcoming redistricting efforts at the local level. Here’s the link:www.urbanresearchmaps.org/plurality/nyccouncil.htm (For the static maps, you can view 2000-2010 demographic change with the vertical slider bar, but you can’t zoom in/out, etc.)
An initial version of the maps launched in June with the vertical bar technique, integrating it with interactive, online maps for the first time. Our Center crafted the maps so you could not only drag the bar left and right but also zoom in and out, click on the map to obtain detailed block-level population counts, and change the underlying basemap from a street view to an aerial image (via OpenLayers use of Microsoft’s Bing maps tiles), while also changing the transparency of the thematic Census patterns.
The latest iteration of CUNY’s Census maps continues to use the vertical slider but now incorporates this technique with two more comparison options. Each approach serves different purposes:
For example, you can zoom to Atlanta, GA on the single-map overlay and see the city’s predominantly Black population in 2000 surrounded by suburban Census blocks shaded dark blue, denoting a White population of 90% or more (see images below). As you transition the map from 2000 to 2010, the dark blue in the suburbs fades to a lighter shade (indicating a more mixed population demographically) coupled with more Census blocks shaded green, purple, and orange – each corresponding to communities that are now predominantly (even if only by a few percentage points) Hispanic, Asian, or Black respectively. This pattern is replicated in many of the urban regions featured at the website.
Atlanta & suburbs in 2000
Race/ethnicity change in Atlanta by 2010
Eventually we’ll be moving all this from pre-rendered tiles to vector tiles. CUR’s application architect Dave Burgoon contributed code he developed to TileStache to enable TileStache to produce AMF-based output for use in Flash-based interactive mapping applications. This will give us flexibility in mapping as many Census variables as needed, and also providing complete geographic coverage (hopefully down to the block level) nationwide. That’s the plan, anyway! Stay tuned.
Funding for much of the Center’s recent work on Census issues has been provided by the Building Resilient Regions Project of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Hagedorn Foundation, as well as support from the CUNY Graduate Center and the City University of New York.
Several people provided feedback and helpful editorial suggestions on earlier versions of the maps and narrative. Though the materials at this site were prepared by the Center for Urban Research, those invdividuals improved our work. We greatly appreciate their contributions.
Filed under: Cartography, GeoWeb | Tagged: Cartography, Census, Data, GeoWeb, online maps | 7 Comments »
Our team at the Center for Urban Research (at the CUNY Graduate Center) has launched a set of maps showing race/ethnicity patterns from 2000 and 2010 in major cities across the US. The maps combine several mapping/web technologies that offer a new way of visualizing population change. This post explains how we did it.
(And by popular demand, we’ve also included a map of Congressman Anthony Weiner’s district in relation to demographic change — you may have heard of him and his Twitter travails recently?)
Briefly, the maps show race/ethnicity change from 2000 to 2010 at the local level throughout major urban regions across the U.S. So far we include New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco. (Others are coming soon.)
For our methodology and data analysis (and static maps), we provide that here. For the mapping and web techniques, see below.
So far we’ve received a pretty good response to our maps. Here are some tweets posted recently:
The map uses the “before and after” technique that media websites have used for images of natural disasters. We enhanced this technique by integrating it with interactive maps using OpenLayers, the open source mapping framework. Now the slider works with two sets of overlapping, but perfectly aligned, maps from 2000 and 2010.
As it turns out, we didn’t set out to create an interactive version of these maps. In fact, we originally created static maps, but everyone we showed them to for feedback wanted the ability to zoom in/out and click on the map for more info. So we developed the OpenLayers version. (And when I say “we”, that mainly means David Burgoon, CUR’s application architect, who I can’t say enough good things about. I made the maps, and CUR’s Joe Pereira of the CUNY Data Service created the data sets, but Dave brought it all to life.)
OpenLayers enables us to introduce interactivity into the before-and-after images. Maps like these (to our knowledge) have not been available before — where you can move a slider back and forth while also zooming in/out and clicking on individual Census blocks for detailed information. You can also change the transparency of the thematic map layer, and switch between a street view and aerial view basemap.
It involved a good amount of work to integrate the slider technique with OpenLayers and also have two overlapping map instances working in tandem. The two maps need to appear as one, and this involves painstaking effort to ensure that the pixels on your screen are translated accurately to latitude/longitude coordinates in each of the separate but related interactive map instances, and the maps pan together seamlessly as you drag the slider left or right or move the map and it crosses the slider.
In order to create the application, we used a mix of software applications, technologies, and techniques, summarized below:
We used block-level data from the Census Bureau’s 100% population counts from the 2000 and 2010 decennial censuses (from Table P2 in the “PL-94-171” files for 2000 and 2010).
The Census Bureau’s block geography changed between 2000 and 2010 — new blocks were created, blocks were merged, and block boundaries were modified in many places. In order to compare population data from 2000 and 2010 using a common set of blocks, we used the Census Bureau’s block relationship file to allocate the 2000 population counts to 2010 geography.
When you’re viewing the map, it is best to use the maps and block-level data to understand trends over a larger area, even over several blocks. Be careful when viewing a specific block on its own. It covers a small area, and the Census Bureau may have made errors.
Funding for much of the Center’s recent work on Census issues has been provided by the Building Resilient Regions Project of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Hagedorn Foundation, as well as support from the CUNY Graduate Center and the City University of New York.
Several people provided feedback and helpful editorial suggestions on earlier versions of the maps and narrative. Though the materials at this site were prepared by the Center for Urban Research, those invdividuals improved our work. We greatly appreciate their contributions.
Filed under: Cartography, GeoWeb | Tagged: Cartography, Census, Data, GeoWeb, online maps | 3 Comments »
Today our team at the CUNY Graduate Center updated the www.OASISnyc.net mapping site with lots of new data. There’s more to come by summer’s end, but here’s the latest:
(Lots of bike routes in Brooklyn.)
We’ll have more updates soon. Historic land use parcel by parcel citywide (with an accompanying statistical analysis), more data (such as parcels & open space) for northern New Jersey, more Google Earth/KML links, etc.
Stay tuned!
Filed under: Data, GeoWeb | Tagged: Data, GeoWeb, OASISnyc | 4 Comments »
The www.OASISnyc.net mapping team has been working with the great folks at New York Public Library’s Map Division to integrate digitized historic maps aligned to the city’s current street grid. But as we were working with Map Division staff to incorporate their maps, an amazing find at the World Trade Center construction site prompted us to speed up our work — earlier this month, construction workers unearthed an 18th century ship, largely intact, that likely hadn’t been disturbed for over 200 years.
Now you can display some key maps of lower Manhattan from the from the 18th and 19th centuries, view them in relation to the current street grid, and compare them to each other using OASIS’s dynamic transparency tool. We added a brief tutorial at the OASIS wiki.
Now you can fade between current property maps …
… the 1775 Montresor map …
… the 1817 Poppleton map …
… and more.
We’ve also added the Viele map from 1874, and more are on their way. This is all due to the groundbreaking NYPL “Map Rectifier” project.
Filed under: Cartography, GeoWeb | Tagged: Data, GeoWeb, OASISnyc, online maps | 3 Comments »