How and Why Community Groups Use Maps and Geographic Information

Strong neighborhoods make healthy cities. The obvious questions, then, are what makes strong neighborhoods and what can be done to build that strength? People who have access to GIS (geographic information systems) have come to feel they might have a resource that could help neighborhoods by providing maps and geographic information. In fact, because of the complications and expense of using GIS, community groups have often gone to a GIS expert to get the resources they need. This relationship is documented in an earlier paper by the senior author When that earlier work was about to go to press the two authors asked themselves, "What do community groups do with this information?" They provided a few general answers, but had no over-all framework to present. To answer the question about community use of information new research was undertaken; the results of that effort are presented in this paper . 1 Cities are social organisms. Individual neighbors affect one's quality oflife and thereby one's sense of the quality of the city (Jacobs 1961). But equally important is the neighborhood as a