Fuzzy Neighborhoods

City neighborhoods rarely have crisp, universally agreed-upon boundaries. Unlike political jurisdictions, neighborhood borders are shaped by lived experience: where people shop, who they identify as neighbors, and shifting social and cultural trends. These boundaries are often fluid, overlapping, and contested, changing over time and varying from person to person. As a result, neighborhood geographies tend to be “fuzzy,” defined less by official lines on a map than by collective perception and everyday use of space.

Because neighborhood boundaries are often inherently subjective, many projects over the years have attempted to capture local knowledge by crowdsourcing residents’ perceptions of where their neighborhoods begin and end. Rather than relying on official designations or administrative lines, these efforts invite people to map the city as they experience it, revealing areas of consensus as well as zones of ambiguity and overlap.

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.

The New York Times carried out a very similar experiment in 2023. They asked more than 37,000 New Yorkers to draw their neighborhood on a map. You can view the results of this survey on the NYT's An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods.
 

Over the last two years DETROITography has been canvassing residents across the city to gather perspectives on neighborhood boundaries. The resulting map of submissions is a compelling visualization of the often subjective, socially constructed nature of borders between local neighborhoods

You can review the results so far on the DETROITography Submissions map. On this map, each city block is colored to indicate the neighborhood to which it was assigned. Blocks along the borders between two or more neighborhoods are more likely to have been placed differently by different participants. As a result, these blocks often appear as blended shades of multiple colors, reflecting their fuzzy geographies. If you hover over a block, you can see the exact percentage of participants who assigned it to each neighborhood.

Also See

Bostonography's Crowdsourced Neighborhood Boundaries

The Chicago Neighborhood Survey