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LocalData is a new digital toolkit designed to help community groups, professional planners and government agencies modernize community-led data collection of place-based information. THE NEED Across the country, community groups, planners and government agencies collect parcel-level information about communities. Typically, the process for collecting, transcribing and cleaning this data can be confusing, lengthy and disempowering. LocalData transforms this process with technology. LocalData began as a 2012 Code for America project with the City of Detroit. Three Code for America fellows (Matt, Alicia and Prashant) identified a need for local data in Detroit. Though community groups were actively surveying neighborhoods and using this data - neighborhood level surveys took a long time and further stressed the under-resourced technical assistance providers that were assisting this effort. Additionally, comprehensive city-wide surveys were taken infrequently, often involving multiple partners, with months of surveying and transcription.

There may be something inevitable about the structural changes that have made American manufacturing less central to our economy, but there is nothing inevitable about the waste, pain and human despair in cities that have accompanied that change. There are policy alternatives that can soften such transitions in ways that preserve wealth and promote equality. Just four hours from Detroit, Pittsburgh, too, grappled with white flight. But it more rapidly shifted its economy from one dependent on steel and coal to one that emphasizes education, health care and legal and financial services.

The report concludes, however, by cautioning that the high housing costs in these communities threaten that equity and must be addressed through "attainable housing programs." It also predicts that Detroit, Phoenix, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami, Atlanta and Cleveland display the greatest indications that they'll develop a walkable urbanism.

Emergence Media explores the power of creative expression to activate social transformation. We work with a core group of artists and projects, and a wide network of collaborative partners to produce music, multimedia, installations, tours, workshops, and special events. We are based in Detroit, Michigan.