A collaboration between Deloitte, Datawheel, and MIT has produced an intuitive aesthetically-pleasing gathering point for public data in the United States. Specific locations and industries boast easy-to-read profiles.
DataUSA is another attempt to make hard-to-use public data easy to access and fun to browse. This time, the result looks quite promising. Tanvi Misra writes, "For any county, city, metro, and state in the U.S., this site pulls up visualizations of data on the economy, demographics, health, education, and housing. It's essentially a one-stop shop for information that is easy to search, understand, embed, and build into new code."
The site's creators approached the design with users in mind, in terms of both structure and presentation. "The creators hope that journalists, businesses, teachers, and policymakers using the site come away with insights on these topics instead of just a set of loose facts and figures. That's why they've also included a tab called 'stories' on the site’s main menu, which features some notable highlights from the datasets."
Users interested in particular locations or demographic topics can use the search feature to bring up easy-to-understand, visually attractive profiles. Data has been assembled from a variety of sources including the American Community Survey, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, among others.
FULL STORY: The One-Stop Digital Shop for Digestible Data on Your City
Oregon Passes Exemption to Urban Growth Boundary
Cities have a one-time chance to acquire new land for development in a bid to increase housing supply and affordability.
Where Urban Design Is Headed in 2024
A forecast of likely trends in urban design and architecture.
Savannah: A City of Planning Contrasts
From a human-scales, plaza-anchored grid to suburban sprawl, the oldest planned city in the United States has seen wildly different development patterns.
New York Transit Agency Launches Performance Dashboard
The tool increases transparency about the agency’s performance on a variety of metrics.
Washington Tribes Receive Resilience Funding
The 28 grants support projects including relocation efforts as coastal communities face the growing impacts of climate change.
Adaptive Reuse Bills Introduced in California Assembly
The legislation would expand eligibility for economic incentives and let cities loosen regulations to allow for more building conversions.
City of Rochester
Boston Harbor Now
City of Bellevue
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact Transit + Community
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
City of Birmingham, Alabama
City of Laramie, Wyoming
Colorado Department of Local Affairs
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.