Urban Development Explorer

CAPP 30122 CS Final Project

Authors:

• Anthony Hakim
• Marc Loeb
• Sasha Filippova
• Yifu Hou

Project Descripion:

Our application is an interactive map displaying urban development indicators along with varios socioeconomic indicators at a community area level, intended for exploratoty data analysis purposes. Intended users are researchers, professionals, and students, who are interested in developing an intuition for the various factors that may affect urban growth and decay.

Example:

Running the Application Locally:

1. Create & launch a Virtual Environment with Dependencies:

bash install.sh
source env/bin/activate

2. Run the Apllication:

python3 urban_dev_explorer

This executes our dash map with a shell script. A pop-up will direct you to the online Dash map NOTE: use ctrl c to exit the application.

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Testing Geocoding & Data-Wrangling Process:

Geocoding is a highly time-consuming process in the absence of a paid service. In order to ensure that this project can be run "on the fly" geocoding was done in advance. The file build_dataframes.py accesses a geoJSON saved in our data folder permits.geojson, which contains ~44,500 geocoded building permits.

1. Run Testing Geocoding:

python3 urban_dev_explorer --test_geocode

This version of the code is verbose, with a signifigant number of print statements to allow you to see the progress of the geocoding process. A limit of 500 has been added, instead of the full ~44,500 entries. If allowed to run to completion, a file named "perm_new.geojson" will be added to our data directory

2. Run testing of API extraction, Data Cleaning & Merging process:

python3 urban_dev_explorer --test_merge

If allowed to run to completion, a file named new_map_data.csv will be added to our data directory.

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Directory:

• requirements.txt: list of Python packages required to run the application
• proj-paper.pdf: final paper describing the project overview, structure of the software, division of work, etc.
• proj-diagram.pdf: visual representation of the application architecture
• install.sh: shell script that creates a virtual envirenment and installs required packages to run the app
• urban_dev_explorer/: application folder. See description of files & subfolders below:
  • data/: folder containing processed data used in the maps
  • data_processing/: folder containing scrips to extract data from APIs, clean, merge, and geocode data
  • ui/: folder containing scripts for building maps in Dash
  • main.py: entry point of the app. There are several options to run the app described above
  • run.sh: shell script to run the app (without testing mode)

Data:

• Building permits: Chicago Data Portal API- building permits
• Shapefile of Chicago community areas: from Chicago Data Portal. This GeoJSON file is used to map building permit latitude/longitude to a community area
• Demographics: Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) Data Hub csv file
• Crime (homicide): Chicago Data Portal API- crimes
• Local Commerce: Chicago Data Portal API- grocery stores which can be used to identify food desert areas.

Final paper:

https://github.com/sashafilippova/urban_development_explorer/blob/main/proj-paper.pdf