Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Map project will give South Siders new view of neighborhoods

Chi-Town:
One morning last week, the block-by-block grunt work of verifying a database of businesses in Kenwood was anything but glamorous for college students Juan Lindstrom, Ruben Ornelas, Lauren Foster and Johana Muriel-Chandler.

But the payoff, a searchable map of every type of business in parts of the South Side, will shed light on what services residents have at their disposal in a way that Google Maps can’t touch.

That’s the idea behind the University of Chicago’s Resource Mapping Project.
“What does the environment look like?” says Colleen Grogan, the co-director of the project. “What’s the economic vitality in the community, what are all the social services provided?”
...
The four students split into pairs and spent 20 minutes recording the business names, hours and types of services: a 24-hour laundromat, three restaurants, a game store, a currency exchange and a dentist.

The slice provided some insight into what the project hopes to accomplish.
...
Much of last week’s survey in Kenwood meant verifying business listings on residential streets, checking buzzers on homes and condominiums to see if business names were listed.

“We do know that a lot of these people do have businesses where they work from home,” says Ornelas, a senior political science major at the University of Chicago.
That’s something the survey team will verify later, because people such as accountants who work from home provide useful services that also need to be included, even if they don’t have a sign hanging out front.
...
The project’s leaders hope to have the Web site up and running for the public to explore by the end of the year. At first it will have data for just six neighborhoods – East Side, Grand Boulevard, Hyde Park, Kenwood, Washington Park and Woodlawn. Eventually, the group wants to survey all 32 South Side neighborhoods. A National Institutes of Health grant for which the project has applied could help pay for that, Grogan says.

Just as important once the site is live, Grogan says, is finding ways to keep the data current, since businesses come and go.
I look forward to a survey of the neighborhoods of the 6th!

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