Place Opportunity
Session Description
In this session, we’ll begin to examine opportunity analysis and mapping, which is a strategy used to compare multiple measures of sociodemographic wellbeing to create a single measure of how supportive a place is for economic and social mobility. Opportunity mapping in various forms has been used to craft legal remedies to discrimination and segregation, to design policy interventions, and as a source of information for planning and the allocation of resources.
Your readings for today provide a) a contemporary overview of opportunity mapping, and b) a conceptual overview of the application of opportunity mapping by one of it’s originators, john powell.
In addition to our discussion of opportunity mapping, we’ll also take a few moments to check in on your final assignment progress, your detailed project description, and more generally about how things are going with the class.
Before Class
Stromberg, Brian. (2016). Opportunity Mapping. National Housing Conference.
powell, john. (2005). Remedial Phase Expert Report of john powell in Thompson v. HUD.
Balachandran, Sowmya, and Andrew Greenlee. (2022). Examining Spatial Opportunity for Local Action: From Theory to Practice. Journal of Planning Education and Research.
Reflect
- What does place opportunity mean to you? What makes a place more (or less) opportune?
- Are there some universal dimensions of place opportunity? Some that are more specific to certain population groups?
- What types of practices support opportunity mapping? How can we use the outputs from opportunity mapping exercises for deliberation and policy decision-making?