Detroit turns to new maps to understand itself

For most people the word map means a piece of paper that helps you find your way from here to there. But for a growing band of Detroit enthusiasts, new maps that marry big data and visualization software have created important tools for understanding – and helping – the city.

Two examples stand out. The Detroit Future City strategic framework is filled with maps that visualize data in new ways -- the extent of Detroit vacancy, where the city's jobs are found, and other key factors that have contributed to new planning initiatives.

And last year's Motor City Mapping endeavor produced the most detailed survey of the condition of virtually every parcel in the city – essential knowledge for the blight-removal campaign now underway. The interactive and frequently updated maps can be found at motorcitymapping.com.

This spring a new book called "Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City" (Wayne State University Press, 243 pages) looks at Detroit through the lens of maps old and new, some from colonial times and some brand new. The book is evidence that Detroit's fascination with maps is growing as we try to understand our city.

Edited by June Manning Thomas, a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, and Henco Bekkering, a visiting professor at UM, Mapping Detroit offers new insights into how Detroit rose and fell.

One example: An essay by Thomas includes maps showing how various federal aid programs have targeted different areas in the city. The maps show at a glance how various programs at different times scattered aid across Detroit, never concentrating in one area long enough to do much good. It helps explain why all the federal dollars that have poured into Detroit in recent decades have not accomplished more.

Jerry Paffendorf of Loveland Technologies, a firm that helped create the Motor City Mapping website with the non-profit Data Driven Detroit, said last week that maps are an essential tool for understanding the city.

"Underlying every other crisis that the city faces – it's got a fiscal crisis, social and racial and equality crises -- information crisis underlies all," he said. "The reason that a lot of those other symptoms express themselves is that nobody knows what's going on."

Detroit is hardly alone at being fascinated by maps and the new visualization techniques that computers make possible. At SENSEable City Laboratory, a research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers used big data and visualization technology to create the "Trash Track" effort (senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/). Researchers gave hundreds of digital tracking devices to volunteers to insert into their trash to see where garbage wound up.

Most of the trash had found its way to dumps or recycling centers within a few days. But some bits of trash took weeks to reach resting places all across the United States. Over several weeks one printer cartridge made its way 2,000 miles east to Chicago before turning west again and winding up near the California-Mexican border. Even two months after the start of the exercise, a few alkaline batteries (Energizer Bunnies?) were still meandering across the United States looking for final destinations.

Such visual displays are arresting and entertaining. But UM's Thomas cautiones that the current mapping trend is not a substitute for the political action it takes to actually solve problems.

"We have to careful to not overemphasize the power of maps," she said. "Maps are just a tool, and we still need the basics of figuring out what the problem is, developing strategies to address that problem, and then actually carrying it out.

"What do you do with a place like Brightmoor or Delray?" she said. "We have beautiful maps of those places, but there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of understanding what needs to happen to make those places livable."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.