It’s a way of looking at data that makes turns a statistic you might have flipped past in a book or skimmed by on a web page into something that you can’t forget. It’s a visceral reminder of the power of images and the power of looking at dry numbers in human terms.

For Mike Evans, the map below was a holy shit visualization. Properties in yellow are in tax distress. Those in orange are under tax foreclosure. Those in red have been foreclosed.

In 2014, 50% of properties in the city of Detroit were in danger of foreclosure, being foreclosed, or owned by the city. That’s a frightening statistic. But seeing what it looks like on the map makes the scale of the problem more visceral.

Evans knew this was a powerful visualization when he took the map to the county treasurer, who had his own “holy shit” moment seeing the data. Mike asks, “What does it mean when the county treasurer doesn’t know this? What does this mean for a homeowner who’s far more removed from this information?”

Evans is senior developer with Loveland Technologies, a for-profit technology consultancy in Detroit, MI that focuses on mapping land ownership in cities, especially in Detroit. He visited Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab yesterday to talk about the community mapping work he and his team have taken on in Detroit and around the US. Loveland is a project started by Jerry Paffendorf, who had the clever idea of selling distressed properties in Detroit one square inch at a time.
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/03/06/its-scary-when-we-can-do-this-out-of-love-and-theres-nothing-you-can-threaten-us-with/#sthash.0GpOr0y8.dpuf

leerstandsmelder.de is a website that maps vacant buildings in German cities. The project was initiated by students of architecture in Hamburg a more than a year ago when they mapped the vacant buildings of a derelict area in Hamburg, the Gängeviertel. After a year the project was expanded throughout Germany and currently maps vacant buildings in Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Kaiserlauten and Frankfurt.
http://synccity.blogspot.com/2012/04/mapping-vacancy-to-initiate-temporary.html