Comparisons of Chicago Neighborhood Boundaries from Crowdsourced Resident Drawings (Short Paper)

The idea of the urban neighborhood has long been of interest to residents, planners, and scholars. We describe a project focused on Chicago neighborhood mapping and pose related questions about the analysis of crowdsourced neighborhood boundary drawings. To gain insight into Chicago residents’ cognitive maps and the relationship between those internal representations and existing administrative boundaries, the authors launched the Chicago Neighborhood Project (CNP), which invited Chicago residents to draw their own and other neighborhoods within the city using an online mapping interface. The goal of CNP is to examine variation in how neighborhoods are defined by residents and use that variation to inform how policymakers, planners, and researchers create, implement, and measure place-based policies. Because the project had a goal of collecting a large sample of neighborhood map drawings, the project took a crowdsourced approach, recruiting responses via email to community groups, social media, targeted web advertisements, flyering, collaborations with news media, and word of mouth. This paper describes our data collection methodology, resulting in over 5,000 responses, as well as decisions related to initial data cleaning and analysis. We present early findings from the project in relation to understanding Chicago residents' cognitive boundaries of the "neighborhood." TL;DR: We present preliminary results of the Chicago Neighborhood Project (CNP), which collected over 5,000 drawings of neighborhood areas from residents, making it the largest such effort to elicit an understanding of neighborhood regions in Chicago.