Update on Project Activities
This week we pulled our resources together to design the initial survey draft. We also took a drive down to Salinas to meet with other stakeholders including: The Mayor Deputy City Manager CHISPA CEO Building Healthy Communities Director GIS experts They provided unique perspectives/insights to the city of Salinas and further enriched our understanding of the socioeconomic and demographic paradigm in the city. With the input we have received so far, we are confident in moving forward with the second version of the survey and the database platform; they gave us a better idea of what to include and how to incorporate it. We are also excited to receive more data from the GIS department showcasing ownership of homes, bedrooms and sizes of houses, which he said he could provide. This information coupled with the data that we collect will provided for an in depth multilayered GIS enabled database that will be critical in the analysis leading to grant applications. We will also be visiting Prof. Carol this coming weekend to further discuss the history of Salinas and continue to stay on the same page through every step of the project’s progression. What We Learned and Observed Today (February 10) we visited the Alisal and city council house to speak with the Mayor of Salinas, Building Healthy Communities, CHISPA housing management, and a GIS data collection expert. Our meeting with the mayor was an overall enjoyable and enriching day trip. Mayor Joe Gunter was lively and candid, clearly bewilderment on and proud to have been elected mayor of the city in November 2012. Given that Salinas is mostly composed of Hispanic residents, the mayor conveyed that he understood the implications of being a white male representative over his jurisdiction. Mayor Gunter cited low voter turnout as the reason behind his seat. With Mayor Gunter and the assistant city manager, we learned more about the hierarchy of city council (the mayor acts like a chairman over the city, while the city manager acts as the CEO) and we learned about the bi-monthly public city council meetings where residents voice their opinions and concerns, and how crucial yet restrictive an agenda is in terms of facilitating the city council meetings that leaves predetermined, strict time slots for each topic. Our meeting the GIS expert instilled confidence in our current trajectories and gave us more data options to work with. We noticed that the Building Healthy Communities representative was reluctant and almost skeptical of our positions there, as outsider Stanford students attempting to make change in a city that wasn't ours. However, she was open to helping us develop a survey that would be simple, useful, and non-abrasive. We originally planned on presenting our survey through Google Forms, with the assumption that most people have access to have smartphones. Though the Building Healthy Communities representative confirmed that most do have access, she illuminated that they may have limited data coverage- an additional cost we did not anticipate. With this information, we collaboratively decided that a print-out version of the survey would be most effective. Finally, we took a tour of the Alisal. We saw major overcrowding-- small houses directly behind small houses right next to small houses, all occupying one block without rest. Front lawns were cluttered in some spaces, and in others front lawns were kept meticulously neat. Sometimes, we would see small trailer park patches on the periphery of house clutters, adding to the crowd. There were playgrounds interspersed for children, and we passed a couple of small parks. Those small lots were, for the most part, the only green places the residents could enjoy. From our tour, we learned that we may need to have a more specific metric for exterior evidence of housing conditions. In mentally “rating” each home, as residents would have to for the survey, it was apparent that the lines between good, fair, poor, and substandard can be very ambiguous. The people we met with also helped us brainstorm that cars, parking spots, and converted garages are strong indicators of overcrowding- a variable we weren’t sure how to quanitify. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward From our meetings with CHISPA and Building Healthy Communities, we realized that resident input is important for our project to be valuable in the long term for the city. They discussed a previous program by the Visiting Nurses Home Association to collect health data from the residents that required six months of public discussion, but in the end, it was incredibly successful because it was community-led and community-based. Especially in our current political climate, in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, many residents may be suspicious of people walking around their neighborhood and conducting a survey. We need to ensure that we have community buy-in for us to be able to accurately gauge the housing conditions of the Alisal. Our next steps are editing our survey to take into the input we got today (including more measures of overcrowding for example) and building a training module for the residents. We will also be sending our survey to Building Healthy Communities and CHISPA to get feedback from them on what we can improve and discussing what features should be in our training module. The GIS team will additionally send us demographic data about the city that they already have so we can figure out what has been recorded previously and does not need to be in our survey. Our next steps include finalizing our survey and drafting a training module that includes how to respond to passerby that may question the purpose of our survey. It is very helpful that we now have a wealth of more contacts to receive advice from; this project is truly becoming a community initiative. Update on Project Activities
The biggest event of this week was our team check-in with Dave on Tuesday. We were able to take about 45 minutes to talk through the work we’ve done and get his take on how we are going to format the data we gathered. Unfortunately, we still haven’t gotten information from all the organizations, but we began to consolidate the data we do have. This check-in allowed us to make sure we were on the right track and that the end product we envision continues to match that of our community partners. Organizing the data is proving to be a bit of a challenge as well. As we mentioned before, the data we received from the Felidae Fund alone was over 60,000 rows, so combing through them to get a full sense of scale is a little intimidating. However, with the magic of copy-pasting, we’ve been able to make progress in organizing the mess and getting unique data. For example, the 6k+ rows contain multiples of camera locations. By filtering the spreadsheet to only show unique latitude and longitude numbers, we can accurately pin the camera locations to actual maps in our GIS software. We’re still reading up on background/context literature on the subject of “critical linkages” between the parks. The issue of connectivity is one that we’re getting more and more familiar with, and it’s interesting to see what various sources say on the topic. What We Observed and Learned Data observations: The spreadsheets we have currently include columns like date, time, species observed, latitude/longitude, and whether the photo is “unique” (the first photo showing that animal) or not. As far as organizing the data goes, we may only need to add a column specifying the original source of the data (i.e. “Felidae Fund”), or we could separate the various spreadsheets by “sheet” and label each sheet differently. The real learnings, I feel, have been from trying to either sort or isolate data so that it could easily be integrated into GIS platforms like ArcGIS online. There’s definitely still some struggle in doing so, but we’re making baby steps forward in terms of progress. Contacts have been made with a variety of peripherally related Bay Area communities and we are hoping to hear back from them soon. The insect museum in Berkeley, the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, and Outdoor Afro have all been contacted, and we are waiting for responses from them. In our call with Dave earlier this week he was in support of looking into the interdisciplinary aspects of the project, and that confirmation has revitalised our efforts into researching the issues of park accessibility. Also, while we had assumed that the broad scope goal of our project was to protect our parks, we weren’t certain until we had that conversation with Dave. He made us aware of the fact that in issues of government budget cuts, park services are frequently the first to go, and he confirmed that this data may be very important in the face of an unstable political and financial climate and the pressures of urbanization. We are now much more confident in moving forward now that we are certain we are on the same page. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The main priority moving forward is choosing a GIS platform to use and creating a visualization for the data we have collected. This task carries with it the complication of figuring out how best to display the data. In order to achieve maximum benefit, the user display must be easily understood by the target audience while the database to display aspect must be easily understood by future editors of the data. Good labeling and explanations where useful or needed will prevent the display from being esoteric like the CEQA document. This point was also brought up by the Salinas group in their quest to create an easily understood questionnaire and we see valid ramifications to our project. A highlight in the near future: (next Tuesday, February 14th) we are headed as a team to the San Pedro park to install tracking cameras to create some of the data they will add to the database after we hand the project over. Looking over the data we have been given sets a frame for the data we need from our photos such as latitude and longitude as well as making sure the date and time are correct in the camera so later the data will be accurate and perhaps tell a larger story. Seeing the sites should broaden our view and understanding of the concept of capturing the photos and their potential effect. |
Archives
November 2020
Categories
All
|