<aside> 📢 This exercise assumes you have completed the Governmental Open Data, Raster Data, & Density Mapping: New Housing in Queens exercise.
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It’s 2014 in New York City, and you work for a strategic design and planning firm that’s been recently contracted by the Queens Public Library system to help consider new opportunities for system-level engagement and services that meet the needs of different and changing communities. This is particularly pressing given the amount of new residential development the Borough has seen in recent years and its implications for the neighborhoods of Queens. Among the rising pressures on the system are new residents as well as the effects on existing communities of library users.
With all this new development, the QPL system believes it is worth investigating whether there are neighborhoods and communities without ready access to a library branch, for which a new branch might be built. You’ve been asked to identify vacant parcels in the borough that meet several criteria warranting a new library and to recommend three top choices based on your analysis. First and foremost, you must consider parts of Queens without nearby libraries already as well as the density of recent residential development. Given the populations most urgently served by the branch libraries and the shifts in borough-wide demographics, you must also consider a small number of specific demographic variables.
In effect, you have been tasked with performing a preliminary site suitability analysis. The question you must answer is “Considering the new development in Queens, the current distribution of libraries, and the populations targeted by library programming, where might a new library be sited in the borough?”
Complete the exercise below, answering the embedded questions.
After completing the exercise, compose a series of four presentation slides (landscape orientation, typical of a visual presentation format) to present your findings. The first slide should include a summary of your analysis and serve as an introduction to the three potential sites for a new library. The following three slides should each highlight one of the chosen possible sites. (Your slides should be compiled into a single deliverable.)
Through the exercise, we will perform a multicriteria decision analysis that ultimately assigns desirability or suitability scores to vacant lots throughout Queens based on the criteria we choose. From those scores, you will choose which three sites to propose. In making your decision, consider the different values for each of the criteria datasets. You may also want to consult additional information (such as the size or zoning of the vacant lots with high scores) or data we have used in previous exercises.
There are always several (and sometimes competing) ways that a site selection analysis—or any decision support model—might be construed and constructed. And so, unsurprisingly, the decision of where to site a new branch library could be made based on a variety of considerations and priorities.
<aside> 💻 In this exercise, you will download the necessary data from the US Census Bureau’s website as well as the NYC Open Data repository. Whereas the latter is fairly straightforward (and follows the same Socrata service template as many other governmental data repositories), the US Census Bureau’s data offerings can be a unwieldy given the specificity and variety of the variables included.
If you are unfamiliar with finding and downloaded data from the US Census, the tutorials below walk you through the process.
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Consider the process model/diagram above and the criteria of our decision analysis. The datasets we will need for our analysis are