As noted in the Challenge Brief, the city of Detroit once supported 2.5 million people and is now home to 300,000 residents. The city is full of buildings and lots that are abandoned or in a state of significant disrepair. Efforts to "right-size" the city are underway, and I think that information visualization can make the job of understanding the scale of the problem and the potential solution much easier to comprehend.

Several projects are currently creating maps that illustrate the problem of vacant lots. Data Driven Detroit (D3), for instance, releases PDF maps and online tools that allow you to see the percentage of vacant buildings at several levels, from census tracts to individual addresses. I would argue that it is important to open this data even further, releasing the source data - which doesn't appear to be available on D3's site - so that others can extend the benefits of their data collection work. Other groups are also creating compelling visualizations: NPR recently released a census map (seen in this concept's screenshot) created by Development Seed that depicts population shifts down to the individual census tract. With this data in hand, city officials and neighborhood groups can understand the nature of the problem at a super local level, see how one neighborhood compares against another, and quickly understand trends over time.

The second piece of this concept involves engaging local youth to begin working with neighborhood leadership to determine what the neighborhood's greatest needs are. Several different kinds of spatial needs come to mind: recreational spaces (parks, paths, etc.), indoor spaces (community centers, training centers, libraries, etc.), and productive spaces (storefronts, small businesses, community gardens, etc.). Engaging youth and connecting them with neighborhood leadership has several advantages: youth will have a constructive activity to participate in; youth will develop a sense of investment in their communities; youth will develop advocacy skills; and youth will connect with their elder neighbors and therefore strengthen the social fabric in their neighborhoods. Documenting neighborhood needs should occur in a standardized way so that the data produced by youth can be integrated with the data tracking abandoned spaces and other neighborhood indicators. A number of tools for this purpose exist, including Local Ground, a paper-based mapping tool developed by Sarah Van Wart, a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, that allows people to physically annotate paper maps and digitize them at a later time.

Paired together, these two data-driven pieces will help empower youth to tell the story of their neighborhoods and advocate for improvement. Shared with city leadership, they will help decision makers allocate resources to communities with the greatest need and in places where the community is willing to support community development activities.

Thanks for reading - I would love to hear from the openIDEO community on this idea.

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