The Age of Buildings in the City of Chicago

Following my last post, on the geography of New York City, I've been exploring other building-level datasets to see what they can offer us in relation to telling us more about the fabric of the cities we live in. This time, I've focused on Chicago's 'Building Footprints' dataset. It's not nearly as detailed as New York's PLUTO data but it does include variables on (e.g.) number of floors and year built. As with the NYC data, it is not perfect but we can still make good use of it to understand the development of the city and its structure. I've mapped the city using number of floors as a proxy for height and shaded it by building age to produce the following overview (blues = older buildings, reds = newer).

Even bigger version

Besides looking relatively interesting, the above graphic also reveals something about the phased construction of the City of Chicago and - possibly - something more about the data itself. As with the New York City PLUTO data, I produced a chart of the 'year built' column just to give me some idea of its distribution. It looks better than the New York City chart but I'm still not convinced it is 100% accurate (the year built data run from 1852 to 2010). 

Were there really nearly 15,000 buildings constructed in 2006 and only 78 in 2000? Possibly, but it would be good to know more about the accuracy of the data. In total there are 820,154 building footprints in the dataset and there are a range of different columns - which you can read more about in the metadata file. Once again, it's pretty cumbersome to work with in a normal desktop GIS setting but my machine can just about handle it. 

Quotes for Planning

In a recent trip to Chicago for a conference on planning, I took a few snaps of quotes used to market a new hotel going up in the downtown area. The first one, by Daniel Burnham, is very appropriate to planning since he was responsible, in 1909, for The Plan of Chicago (also known as the Burnham Plan) and it is used by planners time and again to motivate, inspire and cajole. Not quite sure it has any impact but it is a good maxim. The next one symbolises (perhaps) public perceptions of planning and the role it plays in society more broadly. Probably not a fair comment but that is the way it is often viewed (Jane Jacobs' 1961 book is a good place to start looking - see this for very brief overview). The final quote, by Einstein, I think is good to keep in mind when making plans for places and spaces that will most likely be permanent. Again, depending upon your interpretation, it resonates with Jacobs famous text.

Urban Change in Chicago

Not much to say today but I thought I'd post this photo from my recent visit to Chicago. I took it during a tour of Chicago public housing (see, we do serious things at conferences). The school is no longer there and much of the neighbourhood is no longer there but the sign lingers on. It makes you wonder why it was there in the first place. Chicago is fascinating from this perspective but it's people's neighbourhoods and people's lives that are affected so it was good to meet a local activist and get the low-down from the inside. It also made me think back to Hoop Dreams and the relationships between people and places.

Writings from Chicago

There hasn't been much blogging activity here lately but that's because I've been preparing for the ACSP-AESOP Joint Congress in Chicago. It's a big planning conference held every 4 or 5 years by the US and European planning organisations ACSP and AESOP respectively. I am now at the conference. There are over 1,000 delegates and so far it's been very interesting (currently it is Tuesday 8th July here and the conference runs to Friday).

I am giving my paper on Wedensday the 9th of July in the 8am session so hopefully lots of early birds there. I decided to screencast it and make it available online. I think this will be a useful tool for anyone who wants to revisit what I've said because it can often be quite a difficult thing to digest so many presentations at conferences. The paper is on geovisualisation and spatial structure using an example from UK migration data from the 2001 Census.

About to sign off for now, but I've added a photo on the left showing the view of downtown Chicago from my window.