Abstract
The term urban ‘blightscape’ refers to cartographic visualizations of urban blight locations. Such locations describe disordered neighborhoods in urban areas characterized by the deterioration of properties and the environment. The creation of urban ‘blightscapes’ is explored from data collection to final mapping in five selected neighborhoods of Baton Rouge, US. The spatial video is applied to gather urban blight incidents. This technology consists of a video stream with an embedded location and timestamp included in each video frame. It allows the digitizing and storage of identified urban blight locations in a Geographic Information System (GIS) for subsequent analysis and visualization. Different spatial analysis methods are applied to create urban ‘blightscapes’. Results show ‘blightscape’ hot spots exclusively found in the two northern neighborhoods, where crime is (very) high. In contrast, ‘blightscape’ cold spots are solely identified across most of the southern three neighborhoods, where crime is moderate to low. Results also indicate that spatial video and GIS are appropriate technologies to establish urban ‘blightscapes’ in a relatively quickly, complete, and standard way.
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Notes
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An administrative subdivision in Louisiana that corresponds to a county in other US states (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/parish).
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the Doctoral College GIScience at the University of Salzburg (DK W 1237-N23). Alina Ristea and Judith Stratmann are very thankful to the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation for receiving a Marshall Plan Scholarship to fund their research stay in Baton Rouge to cooperate in this project.
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Stratmann, J., Ristea, A., Leitner, M., Paulus, G. (2020). Exploring Urban ‘Blightscapes’ Applying Spatial Video Technology and Geographic Information System. In: Edler, D., Jenal, C., Kühne, O. (eds) Modern Approaches to the Visualization of Landscapes. RaumFragen: Stadt – Region – Landschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30956-5_28
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