Today's stereotype comes from Andy Kiersz, who has a new blog post on Business Insider called "These Two Maps Prove That Living in the City is Better Than Living in the Suburbs." (Fair warning: Kiersz took the maps from Reddit, which took them from Sightline Institute). I'll focus on Kiersz, though, because the 'boiling down' that happens in this kind of data presentation is how stereotypes are made.
Kiersz's first map shows a neighborhood in Bellevue, Washington. His second map shows an area near downtown Seattle. Both maps also include commercial and retail establishments, coded in purple. The downtown Seattle map has much more purple than the Bellevue map. Voila! -- living in the city is better than living in the suburbs because city residents can walk to things their suburban counterparts have to drive to.
I don't take issue with the notion that walkable neighborhoods are better than non-walkable neighborhoods. Rather, I take issue with the assumption that cities and suburbs have uniform characteristics within their respective borders.
There are plenty of non-walking neighborhoods in DC, and plenty of walkable neighborhoods in Montgomery County. Below are the walk scores and associated maps for two houses listed for sale on Franklymls.com (see here for how the walk score is calculated). The first score, for a house on Houston St. in Silver Spring is categorized as a "walker's paradise." The house on Whittier St. in Brightwood, DC is deemed "car-dependent."
For another day--what the walk score can and cannot tell you about a neighborhood's 'walkability.'
I think this goes to show how we must challenge our assumptions before choosing which data to collect. I also think that D. C. burbs are slightly unique. I close neighbourhood areas around Chicago that make up Cook county when I lived there were just as Urban as Incorporated neighbourhoods of the city. However the suburbs by in Large - with perhaps the Oak Park Area were strip mall hells.
ReplyDeleteI see that the lines on the map do not make up the territory, Borges reversed.