Ethegra Tech Corner Part 1 : What is GIS, how can it affect the community
By: Matty Sim-Sim
Tags: Black People, GIS, People Of Color, Data

Sun Tzu said: Know your enemy and know yourself and you need not fear the results of 1000 battles. Information is power.

The greatest and worst thing about technology is that it provides us access to a wild amount of information if we know how to use it. There are no battles more deserving of this technological edge than the regular fights POC activists have for freedom and justice.

One powerful such tool is called GIS or Geographical information systems. This technology is the secret to why starbucks is so evenly spaced out or how whole foods knows how to expand to a new neighborhood. This gives real estate developers the tools to begin an incursion/gentrification and helps multinational corporations find the exact spots to maximize profit and avoid competition.

GIS stands for geographic information systems. It allows us to take a geographic area and understand the data that underlies it. In simpler terms GIS lets us understand Maps really well. What the technology does is take a map of a given area like say Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn ( 2 boroughs in NYC):

The map creates our background, we can play with it as we like. Once we have the map we can pull up relevant data/information on the city to make our own map based on what we want to see. In this case say we want to look at how schools sare distributed in the city and compare that to the income of the area. We can plot on the map where all the schools are and also plot what are the income distributions. This out would give us a map that looks like this.

This read out provides us with an incredible amount of information (and also requires alot of math in the background to work). We cans see visually how the city changes with regards to income and density of schools. Interestingly enough it seems likes schools are densest in lower income areas even thought the school quality reduces in these areasIf someone wanted to open a school they could know where are schools densest in the cities, what areas are serviced and where are schools in poor communities. If they had the data they could look at what schools have libraries and even how much funding each school has. With about 2 hours of work, a day of work if they are new to GIS they can have the information to make an impact on a large, measurable scale.

This technology is useful and as more and more data becomes available on a regular basis it only becomes more and more powerful here is a layout of food systems in Vallejo:

We can look at how many grocery stores there are in and area and we can also see what traffic is like getting to each of these areas.

Every few years the US census bureau surveys people’s households and collects a whole bunch of information. This information includes household income, number of residents in the family — sometimes it may even include number of cars owned. This information is then ordered by street and zip code and is available for the public to research. With GIS we can take this information and combine it with the map of any city and then learn as much as we want about any block, zipcode, neighborhood or district. We are not just limited to census data either we can do this with health data, traffic data or even data we’ve collected ourselves as long as it includes something that identifies a location like geographical coordinates

There are also GIS algorithms that can tell us where is the best place to put something. The problem is though that most of these algorithms are optimized for corporations to use. Most of them tell us what geographic areas will give us the most profit, Very few are equipped to help us measure what would bring the most impact. Ethegra has done some work to move the needle where we adapted some algorithms to tell us where is the healthiest place to put a food coop rather than the most profitable. But still there is so much more work to be done