This web application, developed as part of Azavea's Summer of Maps fellowship, is designed to help users explore and visualize relationships between traffic crashes and poverty in New York City. After significant pressure from community organizations, local businesses, and victims of traffic violence, Mayor Bill De Blasio launched the city's Vision Zero campaign in 2014. The campaign, based off Sweden's Vision Zero design initiative, is based on the principle that no loss of life on our streets is acceptable. However, Vision Zero NYC makes no direct mention of exploring relationships between the density of crashes in different parts of the city and socioeconomic and demographic variables like poverty rate, median income, unemployment, or population density. This despite the fact that researchers are uncovering statistically significant relationships showing a higher incidence of traffic crashes in lower income communities of color, mainly as a result of poor urban design and a lack of appropriate transportation infrastructure.

This application, built on D3, CARTO, Leaflet, and jQuery, attempts to fill this gap in the Vision Zero literature by visualizing these relationships both geographically and statistically in a single integrated interface.

This layout, created as part of Middlebury College's 2016 Cartographic Design seminar, takes a look at the migration of unaccompanied children from the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to the United States. In 2014, the number of unaccompanied child migrants attempting to make the passage into the U.S. hit a critical spike, pushing President Obama to call the crisis a “humanitarian situation.”

In this layout, I explore three different geographies of the child migration stream. The first map shows the number of child migrants apprehended along each sector of the U.S. – Mexico border in 2014, with orange lines representing the number of child migrants attempting to cross the border and red lines representing the number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staff. The second map zooms in to the border crossing at the Rio Grande Valley, where 73% of apprehended child migrants attempted the passage. The third map shows the actual migration paths these children take from their homes in Central America to reach the border. The graphics help to illustrate where these child migrants are coming from, as well as the fluctuations in migration patterns from 2013 to 2015.

My hope with this layout is to tell a compelling, honest story about the child refugees on our doorstep. In attempting to do so, I also acknowledge the incompleteness of this story, and the many ways in which this layout fails to represent the lived experiences of the many children who attempt this dangerous journey. These maps are dedicated to them.

This layout, made as part of Middlebury College's 2016 Cartographic Design seminar, brings together several advanced cartographic techniques to tell a unique story about the indigenous communities of the southern Peruvian Andes. Working in collaboration with the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development (AASD), I designed this layout to discuss the challenges these communities face with respect to agriculture and social service access. I also sought to highlight some of the ways AASD is helping local farmers to integrate their indigenous knowledge with high altitude growing practices to create a more stable agricultural system in the region.

The shaded relief I created for this layout draws inspiration from the work of two marvelous cartographers – Eduard Imhof and Tom Patterson. Imhof's work, particularly his thoughts on slope illumination and aerial perspective, formed the design basis for this piece. Patterson's shaded relief tutorials were my technical guides to achieving these effects – and quite wonderful guides they were.

This map, designed as part of the application process for Azavea's 2016 Summer of Maps fellowship, takes a look at access to healthy corner stores in Philadelphia. Broken down by Census tracts, I used a combination of distance and quality metrics to pick out those tracts that are already well-served by healthy corner stores and those that are severely underserved. I then aggregated these metrics in a weighted access index to better quantify the data. As a community resource, healthy corner stores increase residents' access to fresh, local, and sustainable food sources. Learn more about Philadelphia's Healthy Corner Store Initiative.

This map, my first foray into the world of interactive and web-based cartography, combines multiple visualizations to shed light on the geography of eviction in San Francisco, CA. Since the northward movement of Big Tech began in the early 2010s, low-income residents have increasingly been priced out and pushed out of their homes. In particular, neighborhoods like the Mission, the Sunset, the Castro, and the Haight-Ashbury have seen rapid and violent change, with extreme increases in home value prices and monthly rent. The Ellis Act, a piece of legislation giving businesses the unrestricted right to evict tenants in order to “go out of business,” has given way to an arbitrary and aggressive regime of real estate speculation backed by big capital. For more information on San Francisco's eviction epidemic, check out the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Data for this map came courtesy of SF Open Data and the U.S. Census Bureau. To learn more about how this map was made and designed – and to access the code working behind it – check out this post over on my Thoughts page.