Using Data Mapping to Help Reclaim Urban Commons

Big Tech understands the power of data to advance its interests.  It’s time for commoners to do the same, especially in urban settings.

A pioneer in this style of high-tech activism is the Brooklyn-based group 596 Acres, whose name comes from apparent number of acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn in 2011 as determined by the NYC Department of City Planning.  Since its founding that year, 596 Acres has ingeniously used various databases to identify vacant lots throughout the City that could be re-purposed into public gardens, farms parks, and community meeting spaces.

Paula Z. Segal, an attorney who works with the Urban Justice Center in New York City, explained in a blog post that shortly after its founding in 2011, “the 596 Acres team started hunting down all available data about city-owned land. Once we got the data, we worked to translate it into usable information. For each publicly owned ‘vacant’ lot we found, we asked two questions: 1) ‘Is this lot in use already?’ and 2) ‘Can you reach this lot from the street?’”

The group used a combination of automated script, Google Maps, the interactive community maps at OASISNYC.net, and gardener surveys done by a NYC nonprofit, to identify the unused lots accessible from the street.  It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.  But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

There is a backstory to 596 Acres’ activism: In the 1990s, many New Yorkers converged on trashed-out parcels of city land, converting them into hundreds of community gardens. This amazing surge of commoning helped to humanize the cityscape while, as a byproduct, raising property values for adjacent buildings in the neighborhood. People could undertake this work only because the vacant lots were open and accessible. (In the era of Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, by contrast, any vacant lots are fenced, effectively thwarting the reclaiming of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for commoners.) Guiliani sought to sell off the land that commoners had reclaimed, provoking a fierce backlash that resulted in the creation of scores of community land trusts to manage the gardens.

Now that vacant lots are fenced, 596 Acres post signs on the fences informing neighbors that the land is actually publicly owned (i.e., government, not commoners, has title to the land). The signs invite people to organize to try to convert the unused lots into gardens or parks. To help move this process along, 596 Acres has created online maps giving detailed information about each vacant lot – who is the registered owner, the land's legal status, city departments and politicians who should be contacted, etc.

Living Lots NYC now serves as “a clearinghouse of information that New Yorkers can use to find, unlock and protect our shared resources.”  The site features a searchable database and map of 899 “acres of opportunity” on 1,337 sites, and 1,186 acres of community projects on 584 sites.  The map also includes colored dots showing where people have access and where people are organizing to liberate land.  A primary goal of the site is to “broadcast what is know-able [about vacant city land parcels] and to help people find one another on a property-by-property basis.” 

Paula Segal explains that:

Wherever possible, the goal is a permanent transfer of public land to the NYC Parks Department, or private land to a community land trust. But sometimes creating a temporary space for a few years until other planned development moves forward—arranged via an interim use agreement—is the only achievable outcome.

In each instance, residents must navigate a unique bureaucratic maze: applying for approval from their Community Board, winning endorsement from local elected officials, and negotiating with whichever agency holds title to the land. Along the way, 596 Acres provides legal advice, technical assistance, and a network for sharing best practices from successful campaigns.

Some of the benefits of building power this way have been unexpected.  In January 2015, when NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) published a list of 181 “hard to develop” properties that they would sell for $1 to developers willing to build affordable housing, we were able to quickly analyze the list and find out that it included 20 community garden lots. Six of those were gardens that had been formed with our support.

Within three weeks of the list’s publication, over 150 New Yorkers, including four City Council members, were rallying on the steps of City Hall. By the end of that year, the administration had transformed 36 formerly “interim use” spaces to permanently preserved NYC Parks Department gardens, including fifteen of the gardens on the January list. Using our network, community gardeners had preempted a major threat, ensuring that the largest wave of garden preservation in NYC history would happen without a legal battle.

596 Acres has now moved beyond vacant lots, focusing on how inaccessible and neglected NYC parks, buildings and post offices could be put to better use.

In collaboration with the Urban Justice Center and Common Cause/NY, 596 Acres also operates a website called NYCommons that helps people learn more about New York City’s public spaces.  Some 3,243 properties are listed, with colored dots indicating whether the property is a library, post office, waterfront facility, public housing, garden, vacant lot, whether “development is pending” and if organizing [against “development”] is underway.

“Some are opportunities to organize new spaces for integrated community services,” writes Segal. “Others we hope to preserve in the face of a real estate market hungry for places it can transform into luxury development.”  Many of of the neglected land parcels, parks, community centers, public baths, rest rooms and buildings are in low-income communities of color -- victims of the city’s fiscal crisis and class-driven policy choices in the 1970s.

I’m impressed with how database-driven maps can be used to galvanize and assist citizen campaigns to reclaim the city.  It suggests that commoners should convene more “inter-mapping” confabs to trade insights and develop database activism.

Using Data Mapping to Help Reclaim Urban Commons

Big Tech understands the power of data to advance its interests.  It’s time for commoners to do the same, especially in urban settings.

A pioneer in this style of high-tech activism is the Brooklyn-based group 596 Acres, whose name comes from apparent number of acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn in 2011 as determined by the NYC Department of City Planning.  Since its founding that year, 596 Acres has ingeniously used various databases to identify vacant lots throughout the City that could be re-purposed into public gardens, farms parks, and community meeting spaces.

Paula Z. Segal, an attorney who works with the Urban Justice Center in New York City, explained in a blog post that shortly after its founding in 2011, “the 596 Acres team started hunting down all available data about city-owned land. Once we got the data, we worked to translate it into usable information. For each publicly owned ‘vacant’ lot we found, we asked two questions: 1) ‘Is this lot in use already?’ and 2) ‘Can you reach this lot from the street?’”

The group used a combination of automated script, Google Maps, the interactive community maps at OASISNYC.net, and gardener surveys done by a NYC nonprofit, to identify the unused lots accessible from the street.  It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.  But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

There is a backstory to 596 Acres’ activism: In the 1990s, many New Yorkers converged on trashed-out parcels of city land, converting them into hundreds of community gardens. This amazing surge of commoning helped to humanize the cityscape while, as a byproduct, raising property values for adjacent buildings in the neighborhood. People could undertake this work only because the vacant lots were open and accessible. (In the era of Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, by contrast, any vacant lots are fenced, effectively thwarting the reclaiming of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for commoners.) Guiliani sought to sell off the land that commoners had reclaimed, provoking a fierce backlash that resulted in the creation of scores of community land trusts to manage the gardens.

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A new resource from CIRCLE: Reaching All Youth Strengthens Engagement (RAYSE)

(San Antonio) My CIRCLE colleagues have produced a user-friendly online tool called Reaching All Youth Strengthens Engagement (RAYSE). It provides information about youth voters (and potential voters) in every county of the US. It’s meant to help organizations and movements allocate their resources effectively. It’s designed to inform a range of agendas. You could use it to identify counties where an additional youth voter is most likely to affect the outcome of the 2018 election, or where highly disadvantaged youth are most prevalent, or to learn more about the counties where you already know you want to work.

In early 2016, CIRCLE launched the Youth Electoral Significance Index (YESI), which ranked states and congressional districts that showed high levels of youth engagement (and factors that correlate with engagement) and that were expected to be politically competitive in 2016. The RAYSE Index complements YESI. Whereas the YESI ranked states and congressional districts by the potential impact of youth on voting results in 2016, RAYSE looks at counties, provides data on forms of civic engagement beyond voting, and allows the user to choose priorities instead of providing a single ranking.

NCDD Members Win Big in Bridge Alliance Grant Competition

In case you missed it, we wanted to highlight the fact the a total of nine different NCDD member organizations were awarded grants as part of first round of the Bridge Alliance‘s Collective Impact competition. We think having so many NCDD members win grants in a competition aimed at helping transpartisan groups “to better collaborate on ways to fix political processes on the local, state, and national levels” is a huge testament to the powerful work that our network does. We invite you to join us in congratulating Bring it to the TableDavenport Institute, Essential Partners, Healthy Democracy, Institute for Local GovernmentLiving Room Conversations, National Institute for Civil DiscoursePublic Agenda, Village Square, and all of the other winners!
You can learn more in the Bridge Alliance’s announcement below (we’ve marked the NCDD member orgs with an asterisk) or find the original here.


The Bridge Alliance Collective Impact $500,000 Grant First-Round Projects, March 2017

Recognizing that organizations cannot effectively bridge the broad political divide alone, the Bridge Alliance is awarding up to $1 million in Collective Impact grants in 2017 to enable our member organizations to better collaborate on ways to fix political processes on the local, state and national levels. We are pleased to announce today the awarding of more than $525,000 in inaugural grants, to be shared by two dozen Bridge Alliance member organizations.

These joint projects will help members implement and test innovative approaches in our Alliance’s three core areas: expanding civic engagement and participation; improving governance; and reforming campaign and election processes. The programs are designed to generate tools, ideas and best practices for all Bridge Alliance members to use and to multiply the impact of each group’s work.

Additional grants will be awarded later this year, financed in partnership with Invest American Fund and others.

GOVERNANCE 

  • Improve the workings of state legislatures nationwide bybringingtogether legislators from across the country to study how to talk with others with opposing views and how to reach policy decisions without or with minimum acrimony.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: National Institute for Civil Discourse*; State Legislative Leaders Foundation; National Foundation of Women Legislators.  Grant amount: $50,000 in two phases.

  • Make local government meetings and decision making more effective by distributing a toolkit to make public meetings more productive and guide how people inside and outside of local government perceive and communicate with each other.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: Public Agenda*; Cities of Service; Institute of Local Government*. Grant amount: $45,000

CIVIC PARTICIPATION & ENGAGEMENT

  • Help people and groups find opposing forces who are willing to talk and stimulate dialogue between those of differing viewpoints by creating an online “matchmaking site” to help divergent Bridge Association members and others find each other for open conversations on difficult issues.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: AllSides, Living Room Conversations*, Digital Citizen. Grant amount: $65,000

  • Find out if voters can make better-informed decisions on initiatives and referenda, by expanding and testing new Citizen Initiative Review Panels’ voter information guides in a California demonstration project.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: Public Agenda*, Davenport Institute*, Healthy Democracy*. Grant amount: $60,000

  • Enable open conversation between leaders and groups with diverging views, with a test project in Utah to train civil discourse facilitators who will lead and teach others how to find common ground for discussion.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: Essential Partners*, Living Room Conversations*, Village Square*. Grant amount: $45,000

  • Improve government decision making and civic participation by better informing people of government procedures, successes and roadblocks, by creating, testing and distributing a new series of radio, TV and webcasts.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: AllSides, Living Room Conversations*, Bring it to the Table*, Coffee Party. Grant amount: $38,000

  • >Harness the power of social media to showcase positive acts of governing instead of just the negative, through research, tests and the participation of social media experts and companies

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: Civil Politics, Living Room Conversations*, Village Square*. Grant amount: $25,000

  • Create a new model for Americans of different backgrounds and beliefs to come together in face-to-face conversations, with social media tools and guidelines to allow all Bridge Member groups, other organizations, and individuals to organize powerful “circles” and moderated dinners for cross-party dialogue and civil debate.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: 92Y, Village Square*. Grant amount: $90,000 in two phases

CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS

  • Educate voters where new election processes are in place or under consideration, such as open primaries and ranked choice voting.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: Fair Vote, Open Primaries, Reconsider Media, Independent Voter Project. Grant amount: $35,000

  • Encourage and enable more people to run for public office, with social and other media outreach to potential candidates and the public at large, to foster a more representative, responsive, and functional government.

Collaborating Bridge Alliance members: Centrist Project, Independent Voting.org, Represent.Us. Grant amount: $60,000

You can find the original version of this Bridge Alliance announcement at http://www.bridgealliance.us/collective_impact1.