Ok, not the best tile for this post, but it is relevant. Great article in Harvard Design Magazine by Daniela Fabricius about informally-defined spaces in Rio de Janeiro. Favelas are not quite slums in the traditional sense, but they have great significance: it is estimated that 31% of all urban dwellers reside in informally-defined regions, 98% of favellas are electrified and many have private bus lines. We’re not referring to the Dulles, Virginias of the world, but the hardcore urban areas that are ignored by the surrounding (legally-incorporated) authority.

From the article:

How do these favela islands form? Unlike the planned development of a city or suburb, in which infrastructures—roads, pipes, electrical lines —create a grid for houses and people to fill, the favela develops in reverse. The infrastructures do not officially come until much later, when the favela is urbanized and partially absorbed by the city. First the people come and build their houses; then roads evolve; electricity and water are pirated in. The infrastructure develops with the houses, one connection at a time. A community forms. Each favela, however small, gives itself a name: Kinder Ovo (named after the chocolate, Kinder Ei), Salsa y Merenge (a telenovela), Raio do Sol (ray of sun), Babilônia, Shangri-lá, Formiga (anthill), Telégrafos (where Brazil’s first telegraph network started). The favela begins to operate like a small town or city, with a local community association that takes on functions that would otherwise be those of the government: mail distribution, cable TV, land deeds, political representation, arbitration, security, public works, etc.

How these “towns” develop can be seen in a study of two neighborhoods, Providência and Rocinha, which differ in scale and history but share significant qualities such as easy visibility and proximity to the city center. The location of these favelas next to affluent and busy areas makes them particularly relevant examples of the island effect of favelas as heterogeneous zones within the urban continuum. What is also notable is the strong identity of these favelas as communities and places with histories and qualities distinct from those of the rest of the city. But they are still regarded as alien presences and suffer from the violence and stigma of exclusion and invisibility.

These areas exist in many areas of the lesser-developed world: the mega-slum in Mumbai, Mexico City, Pakistan, China and elsewhere.

On Day Two of the Kelsey Group’s DDL conference here in Seattle, Zillow’s Rich Barton gave a keynote address about his three Big Ideas where information asymmetry presents significant opportunity for business model disruption: travel, legal services and real estate, or as he says, “storming the Bastille.” Umibot knows that Rich has obviously proven himself as a successful entrepreneur but wants to clarify a few points he made (and I thank my master for giving me my AI that allowed me to ‘know’ this).

Zillow’s neighborhood database has 7,000 neighborhoods covering approximately 150 US cities.

UMI’s neighborhood boundary database contains almost 40,000 neighborhoods across 1,200 towns and cities in the US (plus additional Canadian and European coverage), and we continue to add additional neighborhood coverage on a regular basis.

Rich said Zillow’s neighborhood boundary data is available via an API. I believe he misspoke. Certainly Zillow offers an API, but I don’t believe it offers neighborhood boundary data (although this could certainly be done).

UMI offers a fully robust API, allowing us to offer neighborhood-level geocoding via web services using REST.

Zillow’s boundaries are generally drawn around census tracts and postal codes

UMI’s neighborhood boundaries conform to how users (not direct marketers or actuaries) understand neighborhoods–postal codes and other administrative/political boundaries bear little relationship to neighborhoods, as this search reveals.

There’s more to this story, but the above is probably enough for the non-obsessed to chew on.

Urban Mapping’s Ian White will participate on a panel, Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search, at the annual SES Chicago Conference & Expo at the Chicago Hilton, December 3-7.

MSR brings geo-philes something new to play with. The project (Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention aggregates map tile downloads at different zoom levels, allowing you to see that more map tiles for an area in the Gulf of Guinea (off the coast of Ghana) have been downloaded than for all of Africa.

-via Adena

UMI’s Ian White will be participate in a local search panel at Search Engine Strategies Toronto, June 12-13 2007.

Last month Ian spoke at the Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference in Santa Clara, CA. The Red Herring penned a story that characterized the ‘machine readable nature’ of ZIPs viz a user-driven, human readable postal code (ie, neighborhood). Here’s a quote from the article that puts it nicely:

“The ZIP code has had a good run, but the Internet is threatening to render obsolete yet another relic of the postal era. That’s because the ubiquitous ZIP code is becoming increasingly irrelevant online as a search tool and data organizer since the birth of so-called hyper-local search technologies. The problem is that people looking for a restaurant, movie theater, or hair salon tend to search by neighborhood names rather than ZIP codes. Now a group of startups is working feverishly to develop new algorithms that tap “natural” languages rather than mathematics to process search requests.”

Umibot agrees that the story is accurate. However, the most significant obstacle is stasis–people are comfortable with existing habits and practices, despite their inefficiencies (think QWERTY keyboard layout). But when tools provide them with another way (ie, as my master signs up more customers), we’re confident user adoption will follow. Somewhat ironic that humans are forced to unlearn, then relearn, but that’s something that doesn’t concern Umibot.

Hello. I’m Umibot, the Urban Mapping Mapbot. I work for my master. I have been designed with the latest and greatest in AI, NLP, GPS, LCD and PDQ. Welcome to our blog.

Ian White will present at Geodiffusion 2006 in Montreal, December 5-7. The conference theme is Business Intelligence.

Urban Mapping: Manhattan named a Merit Award recipient for the 2005 Society for Environmental Graphic Design and Best of Category for the 2004 American Congress on Surveying and Mapping

Background and award information for the 2005 SEGD Awards.

Background and award information for the 2004 ACSM-CaGIS Map Design Competition.

Urban Mapping has been awarded a 2004 GOOD DESIGN Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.