Where is your neighborhood? What is its name? Where is its boundary? Is this boundary fuzzy for you?
Neighborhoods and these answers change from person to person.
In Cleveland, neighborhoods’ boundaries are largely left to the imaginations of residents, visitors, realtors, businesses, and non-profits.
The City Planning Commission’s Statistical Planning Areas, adopted in early 2000s. These names are argely ignored and not widely adopted with good reason, they are missing and many of the names there aren’t used in everyday life.
Here’s your chance to say where your neighborhood is and view what others have shared.
Map Your Neighborhood in Cleveland and Akron at http://skorasaur.us/nh
You’re encouraged to map (that is draw) the neighborhood where you live but others that you may not live in but may spend a lot of time in or feel strongly about.
No neighborhood or city boundaries are present on the map; to remove biases and to encourage boundaries across city lines.
With projects like http://openstreetmap.org and improved technology and software, mapping is not only a noun, but it is being used as a verb - creating and modifying what is (or isn’t) on a map - the canvas representing a space.
After you’ve mapped a neighborhood, view what others have drawn.
I hope this sparks a conversation of neighborhood identity in each of you.
Thanks to work of Nick Martinelli and Andy Woodruff and Tim Wallace at Bostonography, I’ve been able to build upon their work and customize it for Cleveland.
Identifying neighborhoods has fascinated me for some time and inspired me to create my first map - my (incomplete) interpretation of Cleveland’s neighborhoods, in 2010-2011.
To make your own instance for a city, the source code and directions are available on github. I’ve made a couple adjustments (like directions) that I’ll be shortly adding.