Chicago Participatory Urbanism

Every year, Chicago alders get $1.5 million to spend at their discretion on capital improvements on their ward through the city's Aldermanic Menu Program. Their spending is publicly available in PDF format in the Chicago Capital Improvement Archive. We are in the process of extracting and geocoding this data.

Check out the GitHub issues for things to work on.

Quickstart

1. Clone the repo.

2. If you have not created an account yet with the City of Chicago Data Portal, sign up for one at this link

3. Once you have created and logged into your account here, navigate to the developer's settings at this link and select Create New App Token. Select an appropriate name like ward-wise-data-analysis-[YOURNAMEHERE] and make sure uncheck the Public? box.

4. Once the app token and corresponding secret has been generated, create an .env file at the root of this repository with this content:

app_token=<ENTER_YOUR_APP_TOKEN_HERE>
secret_token=<ENTER_YOUR_SECRET_TOKEN_HERE>

Note: do not include the < or > brackets

5. Run the following command in the terminal:

make run_ward_spending_scripts run_bikeway_installation_scripts

Note: If you are using Windows, you will have to install the make command. The easiest way to do this is with Chocolately. Run choco install make in an elevated PowerShell terminal. If you get errors running the scripts, trying the command in an admin PowerShell terminal.

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The repo has two main parts: the data processing Python package and a library of scripts that use the package. If you're a newcomer, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the project by using the scripts to follow the data processing work flow outlined below.

Data Processing Work Flow

Using the repo scripts, the data processing involves the following steps:

• Extract data from PDFs
• Post-process data (name cleanup, field seperation, categorization)
• Geocode location data
  • Identify location format
  • Parse location into collection of street numbers or street intersections
  • Get GPS coordinates from street numbers and street interesections
  • Combine coordinates into point(s), lines, or polygons
• Post-process geo-data
  • Interpolate lines and polygons into point clouds for heatmapping

Code Overview

Scripts

• ward_spending_pdf_data_extraction - converts CIP aldermanic menu spending PDFs into CSVs
• ward_spending_post_processing - post-processes PDF data, making fixes to columns and categorizing items
• ward_spending_geocoding - gecodes the CSV data, outputtinga geoJSON

Upcoming Bike Lanes

• bike_geocoding_script - one-off, uses the ward wise libraries to geocode CDOT upcoming bike lane data

Chicago Participatory Urbanism libraries

• ward_spending.address_geocoding - use to convert location text into geo-coded geometry data
  • ward_spending.address_format_processing - use to parse location text into street numbers and street intersections
  • geocoder - use to geocode street numbers and street intersections

Ideas

Brainstorming Doc