Collaborative Cities

Review

I picked this up at the Esri federal conference a few weeks ago. The subtitle, “Mapping Solutions to Wicked Problems,” stuck out to me because in grad school I had an Econ course all about wicked problems. Naturally, being a social worker who has spent his career thus far working on homelessness, I was pleased that homelessness has a chapter here.

The book is a nice (and short) collection of case studies on use of mapping and GIS in particular to communicate, respond to, and storytell about, problems of incredible complexity. I skimmed the non-homelessness chapters and I think they look fine. The homelessness chapter is pretty good. There are some great examples of dashboards and maps (though some of the maps, particular a few that I think were Indianapolis based, are excruciatingly hard to read), and the case studies are interesting, if a bit light. I found myself very interested in the one featuring Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley Triage Tool, and ended up going to do some more reading on that elsewhere.

Anyway, this is a fine little book that I think would be great for a class where mapping/GIS is being discussed. It does not have any useful technical information and will not teach you anything about making maps, as far as I can tell, but it might help you justify a case for them.

As a practitioner, I have been in the position of communicating issues of social import and I can say that maps can be exquisite tools. Pure numbers are weirdly useless, people just get lost in them. Pure stories can be dismissed by people for any number of reasons. Weaving these two things together is critical, and maps are often a great way to do that.

Notes