The way in which we approached the interview process for this research was to start with the largest potential facilitator of change in the criminal justice design system and work our way down to the most granular agent of change, the local resident. At every scale of the process, stakeholders are focused on different facets of what will make these facilities work as a system but also while being integrated into existing communities that may already be thriving. The way we see it, there are two ways of using the proposed jail locations to the advantage of the city’s development:

1. Redesigning Rikers as a centralized, efficient system. This would require the island to be able to facilitate the components of justice properly. The implementation of a cross town train line whose last stop would be Rikers and the addition of a courthouse directly on the island could solve the larger issues of connectivity to the city and speed of inmate processing.

2. As a form of real estate mitigation and anti-gentrification. These jails could be used as a means of control the mean real estate values in ares where it is currently too high. This would take advantage of the stigma associated with creating a new detention center in a neighborhood and would more likely keep people of a certain tax bracket from moving into these neighborhoods.

Our graphic report below details the association between the geospatial official (and unofficial) models, actual flooding, and individual perception of flood risk. From the start, we had difficulty gathering information from the public and private individuals working most closely with these flood maps, and chose to make that facet of our subject one of the core components of our narrative.

Our final project thus ended up using both existing FEMA floodplain boundaries, building data from mapPLUTO, and the extent of Sandy Inundation from the City of New York. Then we gathered our own original data by surveying individuals on the streets of Tribeca in order better understand how these maps are perceived by those they impact.

At the end of the project, we came to the conclusion that flood maps poorly convey risk, and perceptions of flood risk are inconsistent and complicated by maps that don't tell the whole story.

Where does our water come from? Is it safe to drink? How will climate change and privatization impact our access to water in the future? These are not questions New Yorkers, who enjoy some of the best free drinking water in the world, think about on the day-to-day. But asking these questions as a public is critical to the maintenance and resilience of our water system. 500 ft below New York City’s sidewalks, 25 ft diameter pipes transport 1.3 billion gallons of water per day to the city’s five boroughs. In 1970, the City recognized the folly of resting eight million people’s water security on two aging tunnels. Water Tunnel No. 3 was born in an effort to create resilience in a highly centralized water distribution system. The tunnel is the longest-running infrastructural project in the City’s history (totaling $5 billion in cost thus far) and has witnessed major fatalities, protests, and political stalls. Through this narrative, we hope to show how Water Tunnel No. 3 came to be, the barriers hindering its completion, and the need to rethink our engagement with the City’s water more broadly to ensure access to safe drinking water in the future.

Water Tunnel No. 3 is a system that, for security and proprietary reasons, has no dataset. Our analysis pieces together points of data based on vague maps, articles, exposes, and interviews to visualize the tunnel. This story has many actors, all of whom play critical roles in the construction of the tunnel: the City, which includes the Department of Environmental Protection (the contracting agent), City Hall, and Office of Emergency Management; the Expert, which we define as scholars and engineers who consult for this project; the Laborer, mainly tunnel diggers in the Sandhogs Union, and Citizens. Shafts sites along the water tunnel became literal points on an otherwise obscure map. But even these, as we describe, are highly politicized and often difficult to find.

1. Do you consider your neighborhood safe?
2. Do you know about the Mayor's plans to close down Riker's Island? Do you support this plan?
3. Are you aware that this neighborhood is one of the sites proposed for a location of a jail?
4. Do you think a jail should be placed in this area? How might it change the area?

Interview 1 // Nicole

• Neighborhood is safe
• Does not support the closing of Riker's
• Neighborhood is not a good site for another jail
• "I wouldn't be living here if I didn't feel it was safe" (in regards to jail already existing in neighborhood)
• "Living space is already limited in this part of the city and there is no room to expand"

Interview 2 // Fran

• Neighborhood is safe
• "Wait Whaaaaat!? There's already a jail here? I pass that building all the time"
• "I think it's fine though, once I did see a prisoner wandering around which spooked me slightly."
• I lived across from the Queens Courthouse for a bit and it was fine... it does kill retail a bit though."
• "It's probably better for anti-gentrification!"
• "It's not too bad once you remove the stigma"

Interview 3 // Jay

• "Yes, I consider my neighborhood safe"
• "Yes, I support the closing of Rikers Island if the city and state have a rigorous plan to bring the number of inmates down before it redistributes them to other facilities.
• "There are jails all over the city. Being so close to City Hall, the federal jail, and courts in Lower Manhattan, I've never considered the neighborhood to be unsafe. In fact, it's interesting to think about how that type of presence - we can call it "police presence" - or just the proximity to the criminal justice system kind of reinforces a sense of safety. I'm particularly thinking about late night walks home, even with no one in the street, having that institution looming over, while implicitly scary considering I'm a person of color and those spaces are made to pull us in, the walls home still felt safe."

Looking at the criteria of proximity to schools and childcare facilities as a negative and proximity to facilities that are for rehabilitation, criminal justice, transportation and hospitalization as positives we created this first draft of a decision map. More layers to be considered include real estate prices (in conversation with the fact that jail facilities have the potential to mitigate rising prices) and population density (in response to the fact that facilities should be located where most accessible to the public). Through interviews with locals at proposed jail locations each criteria of the maps will be weighted accordingly. Below the draft shows all criteria weighted evenly, showing the highlighted neighborhoods as prime locations. Interestingly enough, Staten Island is not showing up as a good location which coincides with the jail facilities being proposed in every borough but that one.

The Mannahatta reading painstakingly chronicles the steps that a team of researchers followed in order to recreate a map of a "primeval" (as they called it, in quotes) Manhattan, with its many biomes and varied flora and fauna. In order to do this, they scoured various sources of data--from old maps, literary/biographical texts, and even the contemporary shoreline and topography of the island of Manhattan.

The end result actually puts our flooding map into context: much of the higher ground in Harlem was covered in forests, while contemporary areas at a lower sea level like Tribeca (our site of choice) was covered in sandy beach-like areas--today, there is a clear parallel between the areas that were naturally allowed to flood or were generally "wetter" and the areas that today are getting ransacked during flooding. Also, when putting this reading in context, I was thinking about Kate Orff/SCAPE studio's recent work with the proposition of oyster reefs as a way to not only diversify the aquatic ecosystem around Manhattan but to relieve the intensity of flooding around the island. The extremely diverse marine life that existed around Manhattan probably also mitigated extreme effects of bad weather and kept the Island in a state of equilibrium.

One of the things that I think our team can take away from this reading is to scour more diverse sources outside of GIS data and interviews in order to contextualize our eventual map: historic photographs of flooding around Tribeca (not just from Sandy), blogs where people describe the flooding, and the larger ecosystems and infrastructure around Manhattan that makes Tribeca particularly susceptible to flooding.

For the next class on Friday, April 7, we would like you to continue to work with your groups (and editors!) to work towards producing your final geospatial narrative.

In addition, please review the stories below. These are journalistic pieces that have novel implementations of maps as stories. Please review these as an opportunity to explore how journalistic inquiry/reporting has led to novel spatial representations. No response (individual or group) is required for next class.

“How Fire Feeds,” Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

“Spies in the Skies,” Buzzfeed

“How Trump redrew the electoral map, from sea to shining sea,” The Washington Post

“Mapping Segregation,” The New York Times

“Outdated and Unreliable: FEMA’s Faulty Flood Maps Put Homeowners at Risk,” Bloomberg

“Tracking Harvey’s Destructive Path Through Texas and Louisiana,” The New York Times

“Seven million Texans, flood-prone land and oil refineries stand in Hurricane Harvey’s path,” The Washington Post

“Do you live in one of California’s pesticide hotspots?” Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

“35 Years of American Death,” FiveThirtyEight

“Chicago Area Disparities in Car Insurance Premiums,” ProPublica

“Is your school near a busy road and its air pollution?” The Center for Public Integrity

These references are pulled from Mapping for Stories by Jennifer LaFleur, David Herzog & Charles Minshew.

1. A revision of our pitch can be found here

2. Geospatial representations:




(Previous representations and data:)

3. Outline of future representations:
Based on our research on the continuing fluctuation of budget and end dates in this project, we plan to create a prediction about future fluctuations. (This will also show that the longer it takes to build, the more expensive it will be.) This representation might come in the form of graphs of our calculations, but will also be spatially represented similarly to how we have started representing budget over time on our maps so far.

We also plan to create a spatial analysis of where shaft sites might best be placed in the last, unplanned section of Water Tunnel (north to The Bronx). This map will incorporate information such as population density (how many shafts are needed), demographic data and superfund sites (who is served by the shafts, but also what neighborhoods are being imposed on with large infrastructure, that have perhaps been hurt by this kind of construction in the past), land ownership and land use (the shafts ideally will be in government-owned land zoned for industrial use), and of course lateral distance from the tunnel (though we only have a schematic notion of where that will be).

In a more speculative vein, we may also consider alternatives to the tunnel entirely. Visualizing ways of diversifying water sources could be another more sustainable alternative, given how long and expensive this project has been.

With the closure of the Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001, New York City had to come to terms with what to do with the more than 25,000 tons of domestic and commercial waste produced by the city every day. In 2006 the Bloomberg administration proposed the “Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan” which among other measures, reformed the waste infrastructure. It aimed to share the burden of transporting and processing waste equally throughout the City. Central to this plan was the proposal and eventual construction of Marine Transfer Stations throughout all five boroughs. In concert with this plan, City Councilors proposed legislation crafted with the DSNY to mandate reduced reliance on the Solid Waste Transfer Stations. The legislation was due to go into effect as soon as the construction of the Marine Transfer Stations was completed, thereby encouraging private haulers to join DSNY in the use of the more environmentally friendly stations.

Although DSNY’s plans have been widely publicized and steps have been taken to reduce New York City’s reliance on ground transfer stations, a switch to full implementation has been slow. At the center of this difficulty has been the disparate systems dealing with residential and commercial trash in the city. While residential trash is regulated under DSNY and has moved to marine transfer station processing, commercial trash still operates through ground transfer stations, perpetuating issues the Solid Waste Management Plan was meant to address. Our group is investigating how the separate operations of these systems create spatial waste inequalities and how political maneuvering, through lobbying and campaign donation, has allowed the private commercial waste sector to operate free from DSNY’s efforts to create borough equity in waste processing.

Using publicly available lobbying and local campaign data, our group has been able to identify patterns in the commercial hauling industry that has created its current operations. We’ve narrowed our focus to only the companies that regularly employ lobbyists to target DSNY to influence policy in their favor. This data has revealed cross-borough relationships that keep the commercial hauling system running in its current state, where companies headquartered in Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens funnel money into Manhattan to influence policy related to the boroughs of their businesses. As an added level, businesses are also influencing waste policy through the funding of district campaigns. While hauling companies may own a business in Brooklyn and donate to a campaign of a politician there, the individual donating may actually live in another borough or outside of New York City entirely, creating an inequality between the lived experiences of people within these districts who are affected by stagnant policies and the business owners who profit from them. We aim to show how the dual operations of the residential and commercial waste systems have maintained and perhaps even exacerbated waste inequality throughout New York City.

New York Penn Station, one of the busiest and most overcrowded train stations in America, is at the center of significant urban infrastructural issues and complex social dynamics. Given its geographic location underneath Madison Square Garden, improvements to and expansion of the station have proved challenging, as has regular infrastructural maintenance, which is further burdened by increasing use and demand (particularly among commuters from Long Island and New Jersey into and out of Manhattan).

Through visual representation, our group seeks to address issues such as overcrowding, narrow and confusing pedestrian connection routes and absence of natural light, and provide both a spatial analysis and conclusion that includes an alternative proposal that is both solutions oriented and sensitive to prior investigative studies.

Additionally, we aim to provide an overview of the numerous entities involved, including federal and state government, including the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak), the Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit, coupled with private development agencies like Vornado Realty Trust and Madison Square Garden and a private contractor (AECOM), our group seeks to map and in turn unpack the complexities at play at Penn Station in order to enlighten readers and provide a nuanced spatial analysis that sheds light on the multifaceted dynamics in and around Penn Station.

The City of New York has initiated the closing of Riker's Island, to be completed by the year 2027. We cannot help but think about what the use of the island is now, what it once was and the real implications of this closing on a localized scale. This closing comes in the form of the decentralization of the prison facility and redistribution of its inmates to new ones. The impact on the proposed communities, where these facilities will be, could be quite substantial. There is little knowledge of how these communities will receive the expanding correctional facilities in their neighborhoods. With the island’s history of violations against human rights, inmate escapes, incidents of physical violence, and the distribution of inmates being planned for 4 out of 5 boroughs, this comes with much risk. Property values, insurance rates, and even future incarceration rates all need to be accounted for if these plans are to be truly effective.

Precedents show that islands which act as extensions of institutional control, such as Ellis and Roosevelt Islands, are often repurposed after serving their initial intent; Ellis, a gateway into the city now celebrated as an icon of diversity and Roosevelt, a place for disease control and isolation, now a place associated with peace and residence. Following in that same vein of thought, Riker's - also being one of these extensions of institutional control, has the potential to live out its time after the decentralization as something newly beneficial to the city. But will this deeply-troubling history live on by way of this surface-level solution.

Our initial map series catalogued the cognitive understanding of Water Tunnel No. 3 over time as more information became public. Our next maps will examine the tunnel in section (at both the urban and the regional scale) and consider the monetary inputs and time spent at different points of construction. We have submitted a FOIL request to the NYC DEP and reached out to the Mayor's Office for more specific information on municipal spending.

As we wait for more information to emerge, we have taken a step back to consider the broader context of labor and infrastructure within which our narrative is situated. We had the opportunity to speak with Professor Stephanie Luce at the CUNY Murphy Institute. Professor Luce focuses on global labor movements, labor standards, labor-community coalitions, and regional labor markets. She had several insights that shed new light on Water Tunnel No. 3.

Interestingly, most of the long-format articles written on the Water Tunnel focus on the valiant and dangerous work the the Sandhogs performed. It is this romanticization of manual labor that Trump has used to garner support for infrastructural and economic development that will ultimately benefit large corporations. In a society that values the hardworking man above all else, where does women's work fit in? The work of minorities who have been systematically exluded from unions performing this work? The 20th Century witnessed a major shift from an industrial economy preferencing white able-bodied men to a more inclusive service economy. Our tax dollars should be going to fix infrastructure that our lives depend on, most definitely. But if we are to value that, we must also value the other social services that make urban life possible for 8.5 million New Yorkers.

Water Tunnel No. 3 is obviously an important project, but we must recognize that attempts to validate solely by honoring the history of heroic work that Sandhogs have put into it undermines the other (physical and social) labor that has gone into the tunnel and larger fresh water supply system. Community advocates, researchers, social workers, politicians; all of these roles should be considered as forms of labor in the construction of our tunnels and city at large.

To see the full interview transcript, please click here.

1. Pitch Update
We are sticking with a story about the parts of New York City that fall between various versions of active and proposed flood zones. We have refined our topic in a few ways:

• We want to study the ways that NYC-developed maps differ from FEMA maps. Do they value certain flood predictors over others?
• We are interested in how residents interpret these maps - do they have a concept of probability? How do they approach the changes that come with classification of their neighborhood as a flood zone?
• We want to focus on a set of NYC neighborhoods to answer our core questions. Right now we are focused on Tribeca, Red Hook, Gowanus, Greenpoint (but maybe this will extend North and East to the river), and Alphabet City. We may eventually narrow down these neighborhood but that's what we are working with right now.

Our core questions remain: How are these residents approaching the prospect of a new flood map and all that comes with it? Could these updated boundaries have prevented damage from Sandy? How do the views of residents mesh with those of politicians and scientists? Which blocks are fighting back, and how many inches can they win?

2. Geospatial Representations

1. To measure the impact of Sandy and its relation to old and new flood maps we are revising our initial maps to better show the areas in and out of flood zones that were damaged by Sandy.
2. To outline how residents interpret flood maps we added a new representation to help capture how flood zones represent probabilities of flooding, even though they are often interpreted (and look like) "areas that will flood and areas that wont flood:"
   

3. Future Representations

• To address how NYC models differ from FEMA models we are working with FEMA to get additional access to their models of flood risk, so hopefully a future representation of the ingredients that create flood risk probabilities (and eventually flood maps). Ideally we will be able to compare this to the same representation for the maps from the City.
• To study how residents are approaching the prospects of new flood maps we are collecting information on civic activism around flood maps. If possible, we would like to spatially represent where this action is focused and how it might impact future flood zone lines.
• To measure the impact of Sandy we hope to use some of the upcoming spatial analysis to represent what Sandy damage may have looked like had updated flood zone maps been in use.

We will need to figure out how all of these fit together into one narrative, but hopefully this leaves us many options.

The main attempt by Eric W. Sanderson and Marianne Brown in this project is to trace back the history of landscape in Manhattan by looking into the Britain Headquarters map made in 1782. The importance of this map is to show the transformations in the island’s landscape by comparing it to contemporary maps. The trigger for change of New York was the construction of the Erie Canal, which made possible for the city to be a trading hub for the country. From there, the population started to grow exponentially, and landscape was especially affected. Through the project, we understand the intentions of each transformation in the city, but we can also imagine how the city could have developed differently to become more respectful to its previous ecosystem.
This project adds a lot of knowledge to our methodology in Rikers Island. We are interested in the evolution of the Island, how it came to be this type of environment and what it can potentially become in the future after the closure of its facilities. Learning from the Mannahatta project, we can compare historical maps of the island to modern maps and trace back the transformations. Other potentially interesting maps could be the increase of population, the artificial growth of the island using landfill, or map historical locations of prison in New York.