The Neighborhood Project

Posted: March 23rd, 2005 | 14 Comments »

The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. Addresses and neighborhood data are translated into latitude and longitude values, and then drawn on the map. The address and neighborhood data are collected from housing posts on craigslist, and from people filling out a web form. The coordinates are generated using the free geocoder.us. I especially like the very nice zoom effect on the San Francisco map.

14 Comments on “The Neighborhood Project”

  1. 1 Craig Newmark said at 9:48 pm on March 23rd, 2005:

    really cool, will share with team!

    thanks!

    Craig

  2. 2 Peter Black said at 11:11 pm on March 25th, 2005:

    Cool app. But what’s the point of this map? I mean it is cool that you use a free geocoder but I’m not certain what exactly we (as the audience) are supposed to glean from this particular example.
    Thanks,
    Peter from Cole Valley

  3. 3 Claudia MIller said at 12:40 am on March 26th, 2005:

    I agree with Peter. I’ve been reading everything and I can’t figure out what the colors mean or what is being shown on the map. Any clarification would help.
    thanks,
    claudia from Duboce Triangle

  4. 4 Plasticnoodle said at 5:43 am on March 28th, 2005:

    The Neighborhood Project

    The Neighborhood Project via Craigblog, who got it from Fab How cool is this? Using geo-mapping and personal posts to create a map detailing the net’s opinion of a neighborhood. While it’s only in SF, this would be fantastic…

  5. 5 David Mehrwein said at 6:03 am on March 28th, 2005:

    North of Visitacion Valley, East of the Excelsior, South of Bernal Heights and West of Bayview is the Portola neighborhood. If you could identify as such that would be great.

    David

  6. 6 jon said at 11:00 am on March 28th, 2005:

    it looks like this map is allowing people to define their address as being in a particular neighborhood, so over time, this will be a definitive map of where SF neighborhoods actually are. I’ve always wondered whether I was in Potrero Hill or the Mission District…

  7. 7 jason said at 7:06 pm on March 28th, 2005:

    I think Jon has the idea here. It attempts to define neighborhoods based on the “collective opinions of internet users,” (quote from the descriptive text at the top of this page). This will give us the much needed answers to the riddles our time, such as:

    Stockton and Bay: North Beach of North Waterfront?
    Hermann and Fillmore: Lower Haight or Duboce Triangle?
    Is there such a neighborhood as Dolores Heights? How about the Deco Ghetto?

    However, I know people who live around Broadway and Jones and insist they live in North Beach so that tells you how “skewed” personal ideas of neighborhood can be.

  8. 8 Peter Black said at 12:18 am on March 29th, 2005:

    I think a cooler example for an application of the free geocoder would be to allow people to input information on criminal activity in the city. My buddy just got mugged in the lower haight by a gang of teens and, gulp, a 6 or 7 year old kid. Now, most of us have a mental map of where crime is happening in the city, and the cops certaintly have a map, but how helpful would it be to have an organic service that has this type of info in it?

    A little more than “defining” city neighborhoods…

    my2cents.

  9. 9 Ray Sanders said at 6:00 am on March 29th, 2005:

    This is cool. But I’m trying to get my head around exactly how I could use this where I live… which is not SFO and not even in CA. I’m in a rural part of north Fla (farms, cows, etc). I may be the only person for 20 miles that reads cl. Certainly there are a number of community names here (one being the city on the mailing addy). I can see the value and how it forms a consenus opinion of where a ‘named place’ begins and ends. Again, I’m trying to figure out how I could use it.

  10. 10 ã?”近所ブログ » The Neighborhood Project said at 10:56 am on March 31st, 2005:

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  11. 11 Starr Love said at 5:43 pm on April 1st, 2005:

    This has a lot of potential but it is confusing presently. What are the various colors meant to represent? In order to define neighborhoodsthis could be the perfect solution. There are vast areas that are totally unknown. In fact there aree only a few definitive neighborhoods presently known.

  12. 12 Devon said at 10:22 pm on April 9th, 2005:

    Since some of the colors are close to each other and we know from psychology that surrounding context matters when viewing colors it’d be nice to view only a few “neighborhoods” at a time. That is, view the just the inner sunset or just SOMA since it’s easier to tell where the strange outliers are then. That’d be quite useful

  13. 13 Gabriella said at 7:28 am on April 16th, 2005:

    As a native of the city I think this a wonderful project and helps me understand my home and city as it continues to grow from the origins of neighborhoods, the 1906 GG Park, and the marina and new nooks, and corners. In 2005 the map allows us to see another level of connection. It makes me think of personal geographies and my sense of space and community in a new way. It reminds me of Daniel Libeskind’s architecture and all of the individual connections to each other in the city through time and space. I encourage more experiments with design and limits/extentions of the map.

  14. 14 7.5th Floor » Blog Archive » Defining Neighborhoods said at 11:11 am on December 12th, 2007:

    [...] mental maps of Barcelona in WorldExplorer Update: I forgot about the The Neighborhood Project (mentioned previously), as an attempt to map what street addresses people on Craigslist consider to be within certain [...]