When looking for neighborhood information, it’s often a good idea to check local city resources such as city government, universities or colleges located in the city, and area associations. Local institutions of higher education are likely to have guides to city information on their library web sites and might even have maps and GIS data in geography or urban studies department web pages.
Using Chicago as an example, here are some great sources of neighborhood and local Chicago demographic maps brought to my attention by Whitney Richards-Calathes, a current student.
- Maps displaying Census 2000 demographic information by neighborhood and a wealth of other tools for mapping local information from the City of Chicago web site.
- Series of demographic maps of Chicago community areas from the Egan Urban Center, which is an organization that fosters collaborations between DePaul University and community organizations.
- List of Chicago population and demographic information sources from the DePaul University Libraries web site.
- Housing maps of community areas , municipalities, and census tracts from the Greater Chicago Housing and Community Development web site.
Here are a couple more that I found while writing this blog post:
- Historical maps of Chicago from the “Social Scientists Map Chicago” project at the University of Chicago Library
- Brief descriptions and historical statistics of Chicago Neighborhoods in the Encyclopedia of Chicago, a joint project of the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University