The Open Neighborhoods Project is an independent, crowd-sourced repository of neighborhood boundaries for the US. Three parts:

  • a web map for anyone to contribute their neighborhood boundary
  • tools to review and agglomerate different neighborhood outlines into commonly-accepted boundaries
  • a data repository of current and previous neighborhood boundaries for download and re-use, forming a People’s Atlas of neighborhoods

map

Why

Only people who live in a neighborhood are able to define its geographic extent. But neighborhoods are the ideal data frame for many activities – local government, map making, planning initiatives, journalism, electoral districts, statistical comparisons, hyper-local news, agglomerations of geo-located data, etc. Most people seeking to describe a neighborhood are ill-informed to define its boundary. Centralized attempts to define neighborhoods will always fail.

A People’s Atlas of neighborhoods is possible, now: the web-based mapping tools are ready. The open process precedents for reviewing neighborhoods are ready. The data exchange standards are ready.

The published neighborhoods will form a foundation for relevant local action. Imagine mapping city-wide data using districts that were relevant to their residents. Imagine making statistical comparisons between areas that respected local definitions of place. Imagine re-drawing electoral districts from a base of non-partial local boundaries. Imagine your hyper-local news actually reflecting the place you live in. Imagine historians reviewing the changes in neighborhoods over time.

#1 The mapper

The Open Neighborhoods Project website is built around an open source, standards compliant web map. Any visitor to the website can register, adjust the map to show their area, and draw a boundary. This boundary can be named, and saved.

Optionally, the boundary can be constrained to snap to existing local boundaries, such as Census Blocks, county line, etc.

#2 Tools for analysis and review

Learning from open source software projects, the process for storing, reviewing and analyzing the neighborhood data is completely transparent. Individual boundaries can be recalled, or all boundaries overlapping a particular area. Comments can be attached to particular boundaries, and reviewed when inspecting a map.

A toolkit allows visitors to review all boundaries for a particular neighborhood, and select from present interpretations that dynamically processes the lines into a common boundary. Different methods of interpretation give different results.

Decisions about which interpretation to use as the “published” boundaries are made through open discussions via mailing lists, with guidance from an advisory committee of cartographers and demographic data experts.

#3 Data streams

The neighborhood boundaries are offered as dynamic feeds in all modern formats.

Users can download the neighborhoods into any map tool, including Google Earth, and other GIS platforms.

Feeds allow direct integration into other software tools. News sites can adjust their news coverage as borders are changed. Analysis built with census data on the neighborhoods will update to reflect the changed consensus of a boundary location.

Historic review allows anyone to inspect a boundary at any point in time.


Censuous - a beautifully designed, non-technical web interface to pull census info into kml or shapefiles.

Getting data out of the census is non-trivial, even when you know your SF1, block groups, GEOIDs, H04001, etc. The barrier to easy data access is still slightly too high - the place-based summaries are great, but mapped data requires just a bit too much knowledge to be really accessible.

This one is such a no brainer. No need to describe it further.