Million Neighborhoods: Mapping Slums on a Global Scale
Channel: Chi Hack Night
Date: 2020-01-15

The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago recently released the Million Neighborhoods Map, a groundbreaking visual tool that provides the first comprehensive look at informal settlements on a global scale, helping to identify communities most in need of roads, power, water, sanitation and other infrastructure.

The Million Neighborhoods Map is the first such map of its kind and digitally renders building infrastructure and street networks – or the lack thereof. The goal is to provide municipal leaders and community residents with a tool to help inform and prioritize infrastructure projects in underserviced neighborhoods. Without access to basic infrastructure, residents of informal settlements or “slums” are more vulnerable to health risks and the impacts of climate change, including flooding, extreme heat and natural disasters.

For Chi Hack Night, the research team will provide an in-depth walkthrough of the data, methods, and computational techniques utilized in the project. These include: ETL methods for processing and preparing over 1TB of OpenStreetMap data for parallelized computation Computational geometry techniques for creating topological indices, generating geometric cadastral maps of building footprints, and implementing spanning-tree algorithms Demo of large scale tileset visualization tools

This presentation will be geared toward people interested in technical approaches towards processing and analyzing large scale GIS datasets.