Austin Parks Equity App

This is a civic app that aims to help visualize how Austin's park resources are distributed throughout the City of Austin.

Status: under development

Related News:

• Does Austin spend enough on parks? - Nov 19, 2015
• District 4 residents want more parks, connectivity - June 3, 2015
• Council Member Houston sees disparity in treatment of parks - May 20, 2015
• District 4 community meeting on parks - April 30, 2015
• North Austin green space becomes a priority for council - March 25, 2015

See our progress: Live Demo

Running Code Locally:

1. npm is required

npm is Node's package manager. You can install Node at their site or with a command like brew install node if you use Homebrew.

2. gulp is required

gulp is used to build and run the app. Before you can serve the app locally, you need to install gulp cli:

$ npm install -g gulp

3. webpack is required webpack is used to bundle assets

$ npm install -g webpack

To bundle assets:

$ webpack

4. install npm dependencies

Install the npm dependencies:

$ npm install

5. run the development server

To run the local server and see the app in your browser:

$ npm start

Serves the app at http://localhost:8080.

To (re)build data files:

The data processing workflow is (for the most part) automated with a Makefile in the data/ directory. This workflow assumes a UNIX operating system (such as OS X or Linux). You'll also need:

• node / npm
• ruby
• ogr/gdal

To build data files, cd into the data/ directory:

$ cd data

And run make

$ make

If you want to rebuild or update a file, just delete it and re-run make. At the moment, not everything has been ported over to the Makefile, so this won't work for all files.

Data sources & use:

• City of Austin, Parks and Rec Dept (PARD) Data
  • Basic Park Feature Layer via ArcGIS Server
    • Also available on data.austintexas.gov
    • This data is used across the app to produce park shapes.
  • Park Amenity Points
    • This data is used to calculate whether a park is "undeveloped" or "developed".
  • Park Facility Points
    • This data is used to calculate whether a park is "undeveloped" or "developed".
  • Park Trails
• Open Street Map Park Data:
  • We use the Overpass API via the "query-overpass" plugin to extract data. Here's the commit that added OSM data if you're curious how.
  • We use this data to expose privately owned but publicly accessible parks that PARD doesn't maintain.
• Census.gov Data
  • District Demographic Data via City of Austin Demographer.
  • CitySDK API
    • We use this data to show park need and compare districts.

Architectural Decisions & Known Issues:

• Our javascript files are messy. Based on the way this project grew from one map to many, we are currently making a separate js file for each html page. This is bad and should eventually be fixed.
• For the park access heatmap, we ran a GIS process in ArcGIS. This static heatmap layer isn't response to park layers being toggled on and off. We'll probably use CartoDB to host these heatmaps in the future and rely on their PostGIS servers to create simplified buffers vs the cost-distance analysis heatmap we are currently working with.
• Question about why or how we did something? Create an issue!

Credits

• Maintainer: @mateoclarke - dev
• @kyoder - GIS Data Analysis
• @wilsaj - GIS & dev
• @fremn - dev
• @luqmaan - dev
• @mattybow - dev
• @johntryee - dev

Unlicense:

Released to the public domain under the Unlicense by Open Austin, 2015.