How well do you know your neighborhood?
Building Community Workshop, the nonprofit community design center, created peopleorganizingplace.com to help Dallasites understand and explain their neighborhoods better.
They compiled data on 378 Dallas neighborhoods, including history, population, housing density and City Council districts into one interactive tool. Some entries contain extras like neighborhood association contacts and video interviews asking neighbors why they chose their ‘hood.
The People Organizing Place also has a feature called “Draw Your Neighborhood,” where anyone can create maps to name and describe their neighborhoods or create “super neighborhoods,” which are “contiguous groupings of neighborhoods or communities that function as an organizing element to bridge between neighborhoods and larger municipally designated geographies such as service areas or city council districts.”
BC Workshop spent three years developing the tool because they wanted to position neighborhood residents as experts.
“Since neighborhoods are the main way that people organize as communities, we wanted to be able to create a map of the real boundaries they use,” senior designer Lizzie Macwillie says. “This framework will help to create a network of neighborhoods with strong identities. We believe that will lead to citizens that are better able to advocate for their neighborhood’s future.”
