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Urban Graph

Redesign Our Cities

November 10th, 2024

RPI Hackathon 2024

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What is Urban Graph?

Urban Graph is a data analysis tool to help cities figure out exactly where, and to what extent, public services have to be extended.

Our program takes in four data sets, Population by US Census Block, police Precinct location, Hospital location and size, and School locations.

We then use this info to generate a map of where these necessary public services are needed, and how many of them.

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Where can this tool be used?

In all honesty, anywhere! Our tool is designed to be easily modifiable and be used at any scale. From a small town in rural Oklahoma to the dense blocks of New York City, this tool can help find exactly what areas need more services.

As long as a city has accessible data on its population at a relatively granular level, info on its hospital locations, school locations, and precinct locations, then a city can use it.

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Why Chicago and Miami?

Chicago

Miami

A city past its boom, Chicago is a dense city that has been shrinking for the past decade. With internal population migration and the decay of infrastructure, where should Chicago focus its strained resources?

A city raised from the swamps, Miami has seen one of the largest population booms out of any city in the US, its downtown tripling in population in twenty years. At the same time, it is one of the least dense cities in America. Where should Maimi try to develop itself further?

While there are a huge number of potential cities across the US that we could of chosen from, Chicago and Miami are both well known and well surveyed cities, with a lot of data available on everything we are look for.

While they have a lot of available data, Chicago and Miami are fundamentally two very different cities, and are two good test cases for our model.

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What About Internationally?

100%! While the US has one of the most robust censuses in the world, gathering data on anything from population to where every single tree in New York City is (yes really), other countries such as Germany, Italy, and the UK all have heaps of publicly available info that can be analyzed.

While the some countries have more data publicly available than others, it is also possible to use in countries such as China and Japan who gather even larger datasets than those of the US.

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What did this teach us?

Data Standardization

Data Sanitization

Web based programming

Standardization of data is incredibly important. While the coding was a significant portion of this project, finding proper data sets that were in a similar or easily manipulated form was equally as hard.

When implementing data into code, you need specific data. Thus, a majority of our time went into finding data that our code could read and data that would provide relevant information

Not all of us had significant experience using HTML and JavaScript, thus this was a great opportunity to not just use those languages but also implement them together.

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Structure of the Code

For the code, we scraped CSV files from state databases to find zoning areas and relative populations. Then, used that to compile a graph to compare zone density of resources vs population for each zone. We defined thresholds, for the number of hospitals, precincts, and schools, based on national averages and compared our computer densities to those thresholds to evaluate if a zone had adequate community resources.

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Check out our website!

Scan the QR code on the right to take a look for yourself. Trust me, it’s pretty cool!

There are no pins on Miami because, well, Miami has roughly enough public services as of right now. The question is though, will they in the future?

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