Crowdsourcing Neighborhood Borders

Is your neighborhood where you think it is? In a world where cities are constantly changing, the power of crowdsourcing is helping redefine neighborhood borders. While official maps draw static lines, the people who live in these urban spaces often see things differently. What one person considers the "end" of their neighborhood could be another's starting point, creating a patchwork of local perceptions that blend and shift over time.

As cities like Boston, New York, and San Francisco evolve, their neighborhoods aren't just defined by geography—they're shaped by culture, identity, and the personal stories of the people who call them home. From the bustling streets of Manhattan to the rolling hills of Edinburgh, crowdsourced maps are offering a new, dynamic way of understanding the cities we live in.

Boston

Bostonography may have been the first to try and crowd-source neighborhood boundaries, with their project to find out where residents believe Boston's neighborhood boundaries lie. Crowdsourced Neighborhood Boundaries used an interactive Google Map to record the drawn borders of Boston neighborhoods as submitted by Bostonians.

Bostonography then created a neighborhood map of Boston neighborhoods based on the amalgamated responses. The results for each neighborhood were also analyzed to determine which neighborhood boundaries had a strong agreement response and which neighborhood boundaries had the least consensus.

New York

Back in 2015 DNAInfo asked New Yorkers to draw their neighborhood boundaries on an interactive map. More than 12,000 people outlined where they thought their neighborhood's borders existed. Adam Pearce then used this data to create a map of New York Neighborhoods Drawn by New Yorkers. This interactive map provides an interesting visualization of where New Yorkers believe their neighborhoods begin and end.

Edinburgh

In the UK the popular classified website Gumtree used to ask users to enter their neighborhood and postcode. The interactive map Neighborhoods of Edinburgh used this data to create a crowdsourced map of Edinburgh neighborhoods. If you click on an outlined neighborhood on the Neighbourhoods of Edinburgh map you can view the individual points that have defined its boundary.

The Neighborhoods of Edinburgh map does allow for outliers. If you click on a city neighborhood you will likely see a few red dots indicating responses which the Neighborhoods of Edinburgh creators have identified as 'outliers' and have ignored in creating the neighborhood boundaries. However there doesn't appear to be any explanation of the methodology used to determine which data points were excluded from the crowdsourced neighborhood data.

San Francisco

The Neighborhood Project also uses a classified listings website to gather data on city neighborhood boundaries. It uses the address and neighborhood data used on housing posts on craigslist, from people living in San Francisco.

Using the single coordinates from each craiglist post the map then applies a 'blobby' algorithm to create local San Francisco neighborhoods. Each point in a neighborhood acts as a little magnet, and "the neighborhood is the region where the combined attraction of all those magnets is above a certain strength. A single point makes a small circle on the map. The influence of a number of nearby points will combine to make a curved blob" defining the boundaries of the neighborhood.