Chinatown Rethinks Walkable Neighborhoods
New York, USA
By Heming Zhang
walking, deep mapping, chinatown, storytelling,
My project unpacks how local communities understand "walkable neighborhoods" in terms of affordability, cultural identity and social capital.
How to reflect people’s real life on the street? How to make the complex and invisible social and cultural networks more accessible? The statement of DensityDesign notices that “By rearranging numeric data, reinterpreting qualitative information, coating information geographically, and building visual taxonomies, we can develop a diagrammatic visualization—a sort of graphic shortcut—to describe and unveil the hidden connections of complex systems.” My mapping project tries to overcome the limitations of top-down view of maps and visualize people’s daily stories on the street.
Firstly, to provide general context to the audiences, my map shows the walking situations and demographic data in Chinatown by using interactive maps. According to the commuting data, car collisions data and air quality data, the overlap between sectors for both workers and residents is further supported by the high percentages of residents who walk to work. However, Chinatown is also suffering from high level of air pollution, vehicle accident, and poor sidewalk conditions.
The insight of mine to the “official” territory of Chinatown is that there is no line or sign to let walkers aware that they are walking in Chinatown. Meanwhile, from the experience of my everyday life and background research, I noticed the activities’ area of Chinese people is not limited by the invisible “boundary”.
To critique and redefine the territory of Chinatown, firstly, I mapped 1303 stores which have Chinese characters on them manually. I mapped each first-floor store in Google Street View then I did the filed research to check the current status of them on the streets. Based on the previous offline GIS mapping, I have shot more than 380 photos on the streets for each hexagon. (For more information, please check: https://due-parsons.github.io/methods3-fall2016/projects/chinatown-rethinks-walkability/ )
To engage the spatial contexts and provide more humanistic aspects and pedestrians’ narratives, this project used the idea of deep mapping. Deep mapping, as a geographical express of neighborhoods’ value, is related to communities’ daily places, such as the streets they walk on every day, the grocery stores or bakeries they frequent most. To gather data from the wider public, I did a filed survey, in which I asked people about their daily routes and places they frequent most. Then I marked down the lines and points based on their narratives by using QGIS and Leaflet.
Those points and routes make up our neighborhoods and our complex societies. Audiences of this map will feel more specific and will engage more into the discussion. The importance of visualizing the pedestrians purpose on the streets since we cannot understand their relations to Chinatown communities, and what attract them on the street by directly observe where they stand or walk as outsiders without any interaction with people. This interactive map unpacks how local communities understand “walkable neighborhoods” regarding affordability, cultural identity and social capital. By showing the social and power dynamics spatially, we can help the other learn the specific values of Chinatown to the low-income immigrant communities.