NJ-6 is #6! This is the second district from New Jersey to make our Top Ten list of least compact congressional districts. What’s up with the Garden State?
Check out this 2006 article in Slate, which tells the story of New Jersey’s Great Bipartisan Gerrymander. Key concept: “…the problem in Congress isn’t just the politicians, but also the process that put them in office.”
New Jersey's 6th Congressional District: The 6th least compact U.S. House District
For more juicy stories and powerful stats about redistricting in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (with a focus on our home city of Philadelphia), check out Redistricting the Philadelphia Region. It’s a taste of what you’ll find in our broader Redistricting the Nation site, launching on October 21.
The Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities Association held its 67th annual conference and trade show from September 13th to 16th, 2009. Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities provide potable water, sewage treatment and waste management services to municipalities across the State. I attended the conference on September 15th to learn more about current trends for GIS in the water, sewer and stormwater management industries, and to evaluate the conference as a possible future venue for Sajara.
You might already be familiar with the use of the Sajara software framework in the popular PhillyHistory.org and MuralFarm.org web applications. Sajara provides an excellent means of managing and geographically displaying historic documents that had previously been languishing in file drawers, or celebrating the City’s unique collection of architectural murals and local artists. Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities and other infrastructure management organizations often have historic documents as well, and they have a very specific set of management needs that the Sajara software framework can help to address.
Much of the water and sewer infrastructure in the United States was built between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. For water and sewer management purposes, infrastructure includes things like pipes, manholes, fire hydrants, water mains, wells, pump stations, water storage tanks, and sewage treatment plants. For stormwater management purposes, infrastructure includes things like inlets, outfalls, drainage basins and culverts. The original plans and blueprints of these facilities provide invaluable reference when repair or replacement is needed. Unfortunately, finding these archival documents can be difficult, since they have often been haphazardly stored over long periods of time and may not even be accurately indexed. It can be very frustrating to manually search through hundreds of original hardcopy infrastructure drawings in order to find the one critical piece of data that is really needed, particularly in an emergency situation when time is of the essence. The Sajara software framework can geographically reference these important documents and make them instantly searchable by address, date, type of infrastructure and other criteria. The plans can be made available specifically to authorized personnel over the Internet and through various mobile platforms to provide field access when and where it is needed.
Next time you turn on the tap, drain the bathtub or watch the rivers of stormwater pooling in a drainage basin after a heavy rainstorm, think of the infrastructure people behind the scenes that make it all possible. We hope that by applying the Sajara software framework to their historic infrastructure data, their work will become a little less challenging.
Using the Sajara software framework for an infrastructure application might look something like this. Water, sewer and stormwater management documents will be easily accessible in relation to their geographic locations or other search criteria important to infrastructure management personnel nationwide. The Sajara software framework will provide a much more efficient means of searching for historic data than rummaging through stacks of hardcopy drawings, particularly in the event of a water main break or other emergency situation.
As office-bound data geeks, we seldom get to do fieldwork. But last Thursday we had the pleasure of visiting New York’s 8th Congressional District — #7 on our list of least compact congressional districts. We were at the offices of the Green Film Company in Chelsea, being interviewed for a new documentary about gerrymandering. (Big thanks to Jeff, Susan, and Gary for all their great questions about maps and politics. We hope their film travels far!)
New York's 8th Congressional District: The 7th least compact U.S. House district
NY-8 is an urban gem. While the district appears contiguous in the image above, it’s really divided across two separate land masses — the northern part of the district stretches from the Upper West Side to the tip of Manhattan; the southern part skips along the edge of Brooklyn to pick up parts of the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island. Physical geography played a role in the creation of this two-part district, but a bigger driving force was the desire of legislators to consolidate the Hispanic vote in neighboring NY-12.
We plan to pick up the pace of our Top Ten countdown over the next several days. The October 21 launch of Redistricting the Nation is fast approaching. Like the crew of the Gerrymandering movie, we’re working down to the wire. Good luck to all of us!
We just wanted to share a quick note with our blog readers about today’s launch of Walkshed.org.
Walkshed provides the public with the ability to define what walkability means to them. By generating a custom heatmap, they can explore Philadelphia and see what neighborhoods best match their factors. For example, one person might define walkability based on living close to a library, coffee shops, and a shopping center while another person might define it as being close to public transit, carshare locations and a grocery store. Thanks to DecisionTree, Walkshed enables each person to calculate the locations that best meet their weighted criteria and returns a map that reflects these scenarios “on the fly”.
We’re thrilled that you are finding the application of interest and sharing your feedback with us. Check it out at walkshed.org.
It always fascinates me to read about “old tech” being reused in the present day. The Challenger Relief Map is a 6000 square feet relief map of British Columbia exhibited at the Pacific National Exhibition until 1999. A piece of the map is now being used to help plan Olympic security for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
This is the first time a portion of the map, spruced up and freshly painted, with small lights to pinpoint individual Olympic venues, has been seen in public since its home at the PNE was demolished in 1997.
The map was made by hand over 7 years by George Challenger. Each of 986,000 plywood pieces was cut by hand and glued together to form the map. Quite an amazing project.
