Mapping Hacks

I was talking with Marc about a mutual friend who had moved from Bernal Heights in San Francisco, to Jamaica Plain near Boston. I remarked how much JP had reminded me of Bernal when i visited there. He said, “JP is one of those connecting neighbourhoods for Bernal Heights… Hackney is one too, i think”. This comment sparked many thoughts in me.

In connecting neighbourhoods, the infrastructure looks similar, the population has resembling different sets of cultural values within it. The social and economic impact of development powers, plays out in the same kind of way.

One group i would love to be able to do more for are the people from the No London 2012 campaign, who have been moving on from their efforts to raise awareness of the negative impact of London’s “successful” bid for the 2012 Olympics, to monitoring and documenting of planning meetings and ongoing planning proposals. in 2004 i spent a day playing around with local planning permission data for Tower Hamlets in that part of London - the Olympic Sacrifice Zone borders four separate local planning authorities in different boroughs, some of which publish reasonable metadata, much of which is partial, others of which just publish hand-created word documents once a week. Areas like Limehouse, Stratford, Leyton, “Poplar”, become subject to a particular kind of development action which can have the effect of suppressing local value creation: when the expectations of land and property value inflation are so high, local infrastructure is actually neglected: buildings that could be put to positive, collective use are kept empty, waiting for a far-distant optimum speculation point. Greenpoint in Brooklyn, parts of Cambridgeport in the Boston area, are perhaps connecting neighbourhoods for this area.

Perhaps connecting neighbourhoods look a bit like the burbclaves from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; a warp and weft of commonalities, different ties more or less strong, distributed through the old structures of cities and transportation networks. Areas with common spatial problems perhaps have common spatial fixes; at the least, we can begin to compare models, compare strategies, and see if any emerge. At the least, we can begin to build models where we can’t get at existing ones.

Posted in planning, collaborative mapping |

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