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| GIS Puts Community Development on the Map |
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A group of Ball State University students—in partnership with local HUD staff, the city of Muncie, Indiana, and the university—has conducted a state-of-the-art survey of the city that is being used as a community planning tool. The extensive survey “will help the city better target where we need to put housing and infrastructure money and where to do economic development,” says Jerry Thornburg, Muncie’s community development director. In conducting the survey, the Ball State students learned a great deal about the advanced geographic information system (GIS) technology they employed. They also participated in hands-on neighborhood planning in Muncie, where Ball State is located. The city’s Office of Community Development (OCD) will use the students’ work to help prepare its Consolidated Plan, a 5-year effort that assesses the city’s housing and community development needs, sets strategies to meet those needs, and allocates funds to carry them out. How was a group of 22 undergraduates able to carry out an analysis that would prove useful to on-the-job planning professionals? One reason is that the project made use of HUD’s Community 2020 software. The software made it possible to organize information the students collected in the different neighborhoods and link it with data available from the census and other sources. HUD Community Builder Fellow Teresa Jeter-Newburn, a graduate student at Ball State who had previously taught a third-year planning course, loaned Community 2020 software to the students and facilitated the partnership with Muncie planners. “The students were able to bring in fresh facts and issues from the neighborhoods to incorporate in the citywide plan,” Jeter-Newburn said. With the encouragement of Jeter-Newburn, OCD enlisted the 22 students to carry out the extensive analysis of seven inner-city, low-income Muncie neighborhoods. The participants, third-year architecture students, operated under the guidance of professor Linda Keys and teaching assistant Jeff Bergman. They broke into seven teams that were assigned to the cluster of seven neighborhoods that form Muncie’s inner core: Blaine, East Central, Industry, McKinley/Minnetrista, Old West End, South Central, and Whitely. The students worked during the spring semester with neighborhood leaders, assessed the condition of every housing unit, and interviewed residents. GIS and community development. Muncie is one of many communities using GIS software to streamline and broaden their approach to community development. HUD’s Community 2020 software is an example of the new GIS technology that is transforming the practice of community development. Popularly referred to as mapping software, GIS has the capacity to link descriptive data—such as housing conditions, crime, poverty, and unemployment rates—to a specific location or geographic area. The area could be a city, ZIP Code, census tract, or census block, or could be a custom-defined area, such as a neighborhood. GIS can then store, manipulate, manage, and display the information. It can compare patterns as they change over time or among different areas. Although the capacity to use GIS efficiently for community development has existed for only a short time, the past few years have marked an explosion in its use. The usefulness of GIS is due in part to its capacity to define and track levels of distress on the neighborhood level. As Akhlaque Haque, project director of the Center for Urban Affairs, University of Alabama at Birmingham, points out in a recent article in the Journal of Urban Technology:
Hague concludes that GIS is a “powerful tool” for municipalities to understand the effects of policy changes, such as welfare reform. Although current census data—almost 10 years old—may seem outdated, “once the 2000 Census is released, new numbers can simply be ‘plugged in,’ and the GIS systems would create up-to-date maps, statistics, and comparisons.” GIS can also come up with answers that ordinary data analysis cannot. For example, a GIS with the locations of all the daycare centers in a city could print out a list of these facilities located within a 3-mile radius of a particular spot—for example, a central crossroads in a low-income neighborhood. It could also display the location of daycare centers on a map of the city or neighborhood. This kind of software can bring data to life by displaying it in maps, charts, and graphs. By producing maps that, for example, show different levels of need in different colors, GIS can highlight need and facilitate communication among advocates, city planners, housing authorities, and other community stakeholders. GIS displays can be helpful tools in public information and advocacy campaigns. Jeter-Newburn loaned the 2020 software to the Muncie project and facilitated the partnership between the city of Muncie and Ball State University. The Ball State students put the data they collected about the Muncie neighborhoods on a CD-ROM and, for a time, posted their maps and data on the Internet. This provided a convenient way for city agencies and neighborhood organizations to examine community problems. The project has been such a success that it has been submitted for a HUD Best Practice award. “It is precisely the application we had in mind in developing Community 2020,” says Dick Burk, director of the HUD team that developed the software.
For more information, contact: Teresa M. Jeter-Newburn, Community Builder Fellow, Indiana State Office, HUD, 151 North Delaware Street, Indianapolis, IN 46204–2526, (317) 226–6158.
Or see: Akhlaque Haque, “Use of Geographic Information Systems in Mapping Distressed Areas of Cities,” Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 5, Number 3. 1998. The Society of Urban Technology. Dr. Haque is project director, Center for Urban Affairs, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Office Building 15, Room 141, 1530 Third Avenue,
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