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Chapter 5 Mapping Philadelphia’s neighbourhoods Liza Casey and Tom Pederson 5.1 INTRODUCTION Since 1994, the City of Philadelphia has been working to bring GIS technol-ogy to the level of neighbourhood planners, hoping to initiate with them a PPGIS. Although it has been successful in generating enthusiasm for the appli-cability of GIS for this purpose, use of the technology in the neighbourhoods is still minimal. A 1995 paper by these authors documented the project with particular focus on the limits of existing mapping techniques and symbol-ogy for mapping urban neighbourhood environments. This paper documents the progress of the City’s continued efforts to give neighbourhood plan-ners access to its GIS resources and the impact of new technologies on that effort. Our finding is that although the City may now be in a much better position to distribute its GIS data through less expensive, easier to use inter-faces that can effectively distribute public records, the difficulties of building effective PPGIS in urban neighbourhoods still exist. 5.2 BACKGROUND The City of Philadelphia, which was literally on the verge of bankruptcy in the early 1990s, was rejuvenated under the leadership of Mayor Ed Rendell. The downtown has been revitalized. The new convention center is booked for years. Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross and the Liberty Bell are being more effectively promoted and Philadelphia is becoming a true destination city – even attracting the Republican National Convention in 2000. But there is another side to the City. Philadelphia is a victim of the move away from an economy based on manufacturing. It has steadily lost jobs and people over the last 50 years. Between 1965 and 2000, the City lost over 25 per cent of its population. Just since 1988, 100,000 jobs were lost and almost 30 per cent of its residents live in poverty. As a result, many of Philadelphia’s neighbourhoods are filled with vacant buildings and trash strewn lots (Figure 5.1). They are tormented by crime, drugs and unemployment. © 2002 Taylor & Francis 66 L. Casey and T. Pederson Figure 5.1 A West Philadelphia streetscape. The people to whom these neighbourhoods are home, are clearly margin-alized communities. Working with Philadelphia’s Office of Housing and Community Development (OHCD) our hope was to introduce GIS to com-munity organizations in these neighbourhoods as a tool for strategic plan-ning. If used correctly, GIS could help allow politicians and decision-makers see both the problems and the potential in proposed neighbourhood-based planning efforts, and to see how these neighbourhoods might be affected by their funding. In 1994, recognizing both the appropriateness of moving neighbourhood planning back to the neighbourhoods and the applicability of GIS for this purpose, OHCD funded a pilot project to bring GIS to the neighbourhoods. The project provided equipment, software, data and training to 6 of the City’s 25 Community Development Corporations (CDCs). Both authors were drawn into the activities surrounding the GIS pilot; Casey as the head of GIS for the City, and Pederson as the consultant under contract with OHCD to provide training, support and data to the CDCs. Community Development Corporations are inner city neighbourhood organizations with a goal of neighbourhood revitalization. They emerged in the 1970s as participants of the funding and support gen-erated by the ‘War on Poverty’. © 2002 Taylor & Francis Mapping Philadelphia’s neighbourhoods 67 After working with the participant CDCs on almost a daily basis, we came to understand well the issues emerging from the GIS pilot. There were a number of practical and logistical problems ranging from bad addresses to problems involving the transfer of data between incompatible operating systems (DEC VMS and Windows). However, while addresses can be cor-rected and data transfer paths can be forged, during this pilot, we began to see problems more critical to the project – problems with the maps. A sec-ond critical issue became the lack of skills necessary to run a GIS. 5.3 PROBLEMS WITH THE MAPS The maps we started to see as a product of the pilot could not be compared side-by-side or collectively. Each attached significance to colour differently and used its own classification schemes and categories, and symbology. We realized there were no standards and no ‘symbology vocabulary’ for mapping the urban environment in the way that exists in cartographic tradition for road maps or maps of natural features, such as hills or grass-lands. In addition, the maps seemed very limited in their ability to portray the qualitative aspects of a neighbourhood environment. As we were witness to maps from neighbourhoods scattered over the City and had developed site context based on our repeated visits, we were in a position to notice that the maps did not meaningfully convey the very distinct physical and social dis-parities we observed in the neighbourhoods. The following paragraphs are from a paper these authors wrote in 1995 that focused on the limitations of traditional mapping standards, techniques, and symbology as applied to mapping neighbourhood environments. If one follows the premise, that ‘maps are models of the world – icons if you wish – for what our senses see through the filters of environment, culture, and experience,’ then the CDCs do not seem to have sufficient tools to make appropriate models of their neighborhoods (Aberley 1993). With the parcel base maps, tax assessors data, tax delinquency and vacancy data, there does not seem to be any way, for example, to convey the beautiful old stone buildings which are such a part of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Those that were turned into multi-family dwellings are simply so coded. Those that were vacant and boarded are coded as vacant tax delinquents. There does not seem to be a means to convey the value of this wonderful architecture to the neigh-borhood or what it is worth as a resource. The same applies to mapping the locations of local cultural or community value, such as a famous family-owned barbecued chicken place on the corner which is a social gathering place for the neighborhood. Nor is it apparent how to map © 2002 Taylor & Francis 68 L. Casey and T. Pederson other elements that make the environment unique such as wall size murals or statuary created by local artists, stores selling ethnic foods and other imported goods, local restaurants, blocks of particularly well kept houses, blocks of houses with details that reflect a certain building style, or lively commercial corridors. Similarly, there is no ability to communicate the shocking degree of abandonment and dissipation in some of the neighborhoods. Crumbled buildings, burned out abandoned cars, trash strewn lots and streets, broken glass and graffiti are in evidence everywhere but not on the maps. For example, in the map of one part of West Philadelphia the neat little parcel lines, which correspond to its original development, seem to suggest some kind of active ownership interest. Whereas, in fact, whole blocks have been completely abandoned or demolished (Figure 5.2) and former owners are long gone, owing the city as much as 27 years worth of back taxes. Casey and Pederson 1995: 1 In our research for this 1995 paper, we discovered that while the problem of mapping the elements needed to portray neighbourhood environments had been recognized, there were very few suggestions of means to resolve it. Our paper proposed a three-tiered approach that included standardization, structured classification, and the development of appropriate symbology. Figure 5.2 Entire blocks have been demolished in some Philadelphia neighbourhoods. © 2002 Taylor & Francis Mapping Philadelphia’s neighbourhoods 69 However, as we acknowledged, ‘the answer for the CDCs is, obviously, not a simple solution that we can profile in this paper and implement through our roles as promoters and supporters of the GIS project’ (Casey and Pederson 1995). 5.4 THE LACK OF NECESSARY SKILLS Seven years have passed since the inception of the GIS pilot. The vision was that by now, scores of neighbourhood planners and interested citizens would be sitting at PCs in the CDC offices using GIS to both query the information regarding the particulars of their environments and to per-form ‘what if’ scenarios to assist with strategic planning. This has not come to pass. If bringing that vision to reality were the only measure of the program’s success, it failed. For all the distribution of PCs and software, the cleaning and organizing of the data, and the hours of training and handholding, there is still an insignificant use of GIS at the level of the CDCs. Everyone concerned, OHCD, other city agencies watching the process, the CDCs themselves and the authors realized that one obstacle in reaching this vision far overshadowed all of the others – lack of skills necessary to use a GIS accompanied by the rapid turnover of any staff with the aptitude to learn those skills. CDCs have extremely limited budgets and their staffs do not come with training in technology. People with GIS skills, especially good conceptual and analytical skills, can easily find higher paying jobs. Our problem was that the gap between the skill level needed to navigate a Windows based GIS interface (ArcView in this case) and the skill level we would find in the CDCs was underestimated. Too much hinged on the ability of the group’s designated technology enabler. While the specific vision of PPGIS described above was not realized, the project was not a failure. On the contrary, the work that went into that pilot, the personal contacts and the ‘bell ringing’ about the applicability of GIS to neighbourhood planning brought, across the board, increased awareness of the potential of this technology. The best witness to this is the continuing GIS-centered activities. The City, OHCD, and others involved responded to the problems of the GIS pilot with new strategies. Instead of continuing to fund individual CDCs, OHCD funded the Philadelphia Association of CDCs (PACDC) at a rate of about 60 thousand dollars a year to provide a ‘centre’ for GIS activ-ity where CDCs could find continuing technical support for neighbourhood mapping without having to employ skilled operators. They could walk into PACDC’s office and emerge with a map made to their specifications. PACDC over the last two years has created over 300 GIS-generated maps responsive to the requests of CDCs. The City made GIS data available to © 2002 Taylor & Francis ... - tailieumienphi.vn
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