I live in a nicely kept, integrated community. However, just across the city lines the racial and income mixture changes dramatically. You could use the time honored phrase that they are on the wrong side of the tracks, and it just so happens that there is a railroad separating the two distinct areas.
Bill Rankin takes a look at neighborhood boundaries in Chicago. Using United States Census data, he graphs dots that represent 25 people. Each dot is colored by ethnicity. In some areas, one can see the quick transition from one neighborhood to another. In others, the transition is more subtle.
My alternative is to use dot mapping to show three kinds of urban transitions. First, there are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries — such as between Lawndale and the Little Village, or Austin and Oak Park — and Chicago has more of these stark borders than most cities in the world. But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult — in a good way.
via : Chicago Boundaries
