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Habitatmap

The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

The built infastructure of our cities will come to reflect the ambitions and priorities of all the city's inhabitants, not just those with political and financial clout.

Historically, in every major city in America, poor communities of color have been burdened with more than their fair share of toxic infrastructure (e.g. waste transfer stations, power plants, sewage treatment facilities, freeways etc. etc.). Habitatmap's online community mapping platform will highlight these disparities, and our social networking tools will empower people to mobilize for equitable and livable cities.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

Together, we have created a preliminary version of Habitatmap.org that is up and running on the web. Currently we are working to significantly extend the sites capabilities to include the following four tools:

1) Community Mapping: Points of interest on this map will be plotted by Habitatmap participants. All entries are open for edits and additions by other participants.

2) Community Forums: This is where participants come to share information or hash out their differences

3) Air Pollution Tracker: Individuals will go about their daily routines outfitted with portable air monitoring and GPS devices. Their route will be mapped with the accompanying air quality information and compared with EPA data.

4) Household Utilities Tracker: By punching in their zip code and selecting from a few drop-down menus, participants will find out where their natural gas, electricity, and water come from and where their sewage and trash wind up.

This suite of online tools have been designed to achieve two goals: 1) to represent the frequently nebulous connections between pollution and human health by tracking toxic substances as they are released, move through the environment, embed themselves in the human body, and manifest themselves as disease days, months, or years later 2) to establish a platform for participants to share local neighborhood information, debate community issues, arrange meet-ups, and organize politically.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

We are currently campaigning for clean low sulfur heating oil in New York City.

For more information, download our fact sheet "Heating New York With Biodiesel, A Bad Idea" (pdf 452kb)

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

We are almost finished building the community mapping and forums portion of our as of yet unreleased site. We've got the designs and know where we want to go, but we need programmers who have significant experience with mashups and the Google Maps API, Ruby on the Rails, Javascript, and Ajax and are proficient in html and CSS.

Mashup Data Sources

Current site:
www.habitatmap.org

Renderings of the new site: http://habitatmap.org/CombinedPages_Habitatmap2.0.pdf (pdf, 14.7mb)

The Team

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