Civic Atlas updates

What is a neighbourhood?

It sounds like a simple question, but try to define one.

Is it the streets around your home? The area served by a community centre? A ward? A parliamentary constituency? A statistical area?

The answer depends on who you ask, what you're trying to understand, and what you're trying to do.

And civic activity doesn't necessarily fit neatly into any one of those boundaries.

That's the focus of version 0.8 of the Civic Atlas.

More ways to look at a place

Until now, the Atlas has mainly used wards to describe 'place'.

Wards are useful. They're familiar political boundaries and an important way of understanding Birmingham.

But they're only one way of looking at the city.

You can now explore the Atlas using:

• Output Areas (OAs)
• Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs)
• Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs)
• Wards
• Parliamentary constituencies

These geographies operate at different scales and serve different purposes.

You can look at a smaller area, a wider area, or explore the same place through a political rather than statistical geography.

Changing the geography can change what you notice.

But there's more – you can now define your own 'place'

The most significant addition in v0.8 is that you're no longer limited to existing boundaries.

You can create a custom area yourself.

Custom areas are built by grouping together Output Areas (OAs) — the smallest geographical units currently used by the Atlas.

That means you can create an area that doesn't correspond to an existing political or statistical geography.

You might want to define a neighbourhood as you understand it, the area served by a local organisation, a cluster of streets, an area around a particular facility, or simply somewhere that doesn't correspond neatly to an existing geography.

The result doesn't have to be an officially recognised place, it can be your definition of the place you're interested in.

The point isn't that your boundary is the correct one. It's that it might be the most useful one for the question you're asking.

Civic activity is messy

The Atlas already looks at where organisations operate, rather than simply where they are based.

But those operating areas don't necessarily fit neatly into a single boundary.

An organisation might work across several wards. A community group might serve a handful of streets. Two organisations might operate in different administrative areas but work with many of the same people.

A particular issue might affect only part of a ward. A neighbourhood might stretch across a ward boundary. A group of people might identify with a place that doesn't have an official boundary at all.

The different geographies in v0.8 give you more ways to explore that complexity.

Try a different view

This is particularly useful when exploring the Atlas's Discoveries.

A Discovery may point towards a possible connection between organisations, communities or circumstances. The different geographies give you more ways to investigate where that connection sits.

You might look at the relevant organisations across their wards, then see how the same area is divided into LSOAs or MSOAs. You might consider the constituency that contains them, or define an area of your own.

The Atlas doesn't recalculate the Discovery when you change geography. Instead, these different views give you additional context for deciding what, if anything, is worth investigating further.

The Atlas doesn't tell you which geography is the right one.

It gives you more ways to ask the question.

There isn't one 'right' map

That's perhaps the most important change in v0.8.

The Atlas can now show a place in different ways:

Political. Statistical. Local. User-defined.

Each can tell you something different.

And sometimes the differences between them are just as interesting as the patterns within them.

So when you're exploring a place in the Atlas, don't necessarily stop at the first boundary you see.

Try a different view.

Look at a smaller geography.

Look at a wider one.

Switch between political and statistical boundaries.

Or define your own.

The Civic Atlas can't tell us exactly what a neighbourhood is.

But it can help us explore what happens when we define one.