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Challenges and complications in neighborhood mapping: from neighborhood concept to operationalization

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Abstract

This paper examines complications in neighborhood mapping and corresponding challenges for the GIS community, taking both a conceptual and a methodological perspective. It focuses on the social and spatial dimensions of the neighborhood concept and highlights their relationship in neighborhood mapping. Following a brief summary of neighborhood definitions, five interwoven factors are identified to be origins of neighborhood mapping difficulties: conceptual vagueness, uncertainty of various sources, GIS representation, scale, and neighborhood homogeneity or continuity. Existing neighborhood mapping methods are grouped into six categories to be assessed: perception based, physically based, inference based, preexisting, aggregated, and automated. Mapping practices in various neighborhood-related disciplines and applications are cited as examples to demonstrate how the methods work, as well as how they should be evaluated. A few mapping strategies for the improvement of neighborhood mapping are prescribed from a GIS perspective: documenting simplifications employed in the mapping procedure, addressing uncertainty sources, developing new data solutions, and integrating complementary mapping methods. Incorporation of high-resolution data and introduction of more GIS ideas and methods (such as fuzzy logic) are identified to be future opportunities.

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Suggestions from two anonymous reviewers greatly improved the quality of the paper.

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Correspondence to Yongxin Deng.

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Deng, Y. Challenges and complications in neighborhood mapping: from neighborhood concept to operationalization. J Geogr Syst 18, 229–248 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-016-0232-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-016-0232-z

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