The exhibition, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum of Art (through Sept 23) is a large scale installation by Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. The New York times reported on the exhibition’s extraordinary centerpiece, an intricate conversion of the museum’s most famous work, the Panorama of the City of New York , to depict the location of foreclosures in the five-borough area. The Panorama is a 9335 sq. foot scale model (1 inch = 100 ft) of Manhattan and all five boroughs made in 1964 for the World’s Fair, and updated in 1992. On top of this 3-D “map”, Damon and his young helpers placed bright pink plastic triangles representing blocks where 3 or more foreclosures have taken place. The result shows the concentration of foreclosures in areas where the non-white population is highest.
According to the Times: ”Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.”
The neighborhoods with high foreclosures, according to the Times, are the same areas where the disastrous practice of “redlining” denied credit to African-American and Latino families until it was made illegal in the 1970’s. The data used in creating the exhibition was also used by NY Times staff to create a great interactive map which allows you to see the growth of foreclosures across the area, and at the block level, since 2005. Frightening!
This Recovery Map is a really slick interactive map mixing Google Maps with USDA (US Dept. of Agriculture) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) data, showing ARRA(American Recovery Act of 2009) funding by state. Click on a state and county levels to zoom in and projects appear at the local level. The map looks like a great resource for people who want to hook into funding. As for map-makers, I am still trying to reverse-engineer it! Shouldn’t there be freedom of information on how to do this?
Another such map about DOE (Dept. of Energy) projects was made by ace cartographers at Axis Maps in Madison Wisconsin. This illustrates various techniques for communicating data on a static map. Axis Maps also posted a super video (with a beautiful musical accompaniment composed by one of the map-makers) showing 106 10-minute steps used to create a meticulously-crafted custom printed map. Nice!
This nicely constructed interactive flash map was published by the Dutch paper, the NRC, at the end of February, with data through 3Q 2008. Hopefully they will update it for 4Q, etc. The data source is listed as Eurostat, which appears to be an excellent resource for general EU statistics. Not pretty, even in pink.
For US economic statistics, a rich data source is the St. Louis Fed. The NY Times published an interactive mapbased on Fed data, showing unemployment by county. They updated the map from December to January (the image is December and the link is to January), but don’t yet have a map allowing monthly comparison. In fact they use two different color classification schemes making comparison between the two maps visually impossible. It would be nice if they made a comparative map like the NRC map.
The exhibition, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum of Art (through Sept 23) is a large scale installation by Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. The New York times reported on the exhibition’s extraordinary centerpiece, an intricate conversion of the museum’s most famous work, the Panorama of the City of New York , to depict the location of foreclosures in the five-borough area. The Panorama is a 9335 sq. foot scale model (1 inch = 100 ft) of Manhattan and all five boroughs made in 1964 for the World’s Fair, and updated in 1992. On top of this 3-D “map”, Damon and his young helpers placed bright pink plastic triangles representing blocks where 3 or more foreclosures have taken place. The result shows the concentration of foreclosures in areas where the non-white population is highest. 
The neighborhoods with high foreclosures, according to the Times, are the same areas where the disastrous practice of “redlining” denied credit to African-American and Latino families until it was made illegal in the 1970’s. The data used in creating the exhibition was also used by NY Times staff to create a great interactive map which allows you to see the growth of foreclosures across the area, and at the block level, since 2005. Frightening!
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