Metropolitics

The Promises and Realities of Data-Driven Community Development

Austin Harrison — 2022-02-22T06:00:00Z

Tennessee nonprofit Innovate Memphis has spent nearly a decade designing the Memphis Property Hub, a public data platform for community development corporations (CDCs). Austin Harrison asks if this is a replicable way to democratize neighborhood- and property-level data, so as to level the playing field between community organizers and well-resourced state and market actors, and bring community organizing back to the fore of urban CDCs' activities.
Over the past decade, city governments and

- From the Field / data, open data, smart city, community-based organizations, community organizing, community development, housing, evictions, United States, Tennessee, Memphis

Reflections on Four Years of Housing-Justice Support Work with Mapping Action Collective

Sachi Arakawa & Tim Hitchins — 2021-04-13T05:00:00Z

Mapping Action Collective, based in Portland, Oregon, leverages mapping and data to support housing-justice organizing, using GIS to dismantle systems of oppression, and grounding its work in the needs of the communities and movements with which it works.
---- Series: Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research As the interwoven US crises of homelessness, evictions, displacement, and housing instability reach catastrophic levels, students, scholars, practitioners,

- From the Field / housing, housing justice, mapping, cartography, data, community organizing, Portland (Oregon), Oregon, United States, homelessness, evictions

Miscounting Americans Correctly: Post-Truth as a Guide to Race and the US Census

Gregory Smithsimon — 2018-06-12T15:11:04Z

Paul Schor's book Counting Americans demonstrates that, in the hands of the US Census Bureau, the concept of race has consistently been both tenacious and malleable. In this review, Greg Smithsimon explores the census as the “hidden abattoir” of a deeply racialized American society, a renderer of categories that, while seeming clear and self-evident in daylight, are the contingent product of brutality.
As the best available portrait of an increasingly diverse and multiracial country, the US

- Reviews / United States, history, race, population, demographics, census, data, ethnic identity, US Census Bureau, racial classification

Looking Forward to 2020 While Looking Back: A Brief History of the US Census

Frank Donnelly — 2018-02-27T06:00:00Z

As preparations for the 2020 census are under way in the United States, Frank Donnelly looks back at how the census evolved from a basic head count to a sophisticated operation. The reapportionment of seats in Congress, the distribution of $600 billion in annual federal aid, and a countless number of derivative data sets all depend on the accuracy of the decennial census.
In 1790, the recently established United States became the first nation to conduct a population census designed

- Essays / United States, history, race, population, demographics, census, data, US Census Bureau