EveryBlock is a new site that lets you see everything going on in your block: pictures people upload, inspection violations in local restaurants, building permits, and more. Here’s my old block in NYC. It looks like it could be a very useful tool for citizens to keep up with what’s going on in their neighborhoods. Rob Halligan is pushing to bring it to DC—that would be great!

Rob Goodspeed wrote a good post a few weeks ago, Web 2.0 for Urban Development, about ways Web tools like interactive maps could help planners and citizens keep up with their city. My ultimate dream would be to have an interactive tool that lets people click and drag buildings of various sizes and shapes onto the existing city—a sort of SimCity for real cities. The objective would be to try to fit in the growth in jobs and people that’s coming in the future, like the charrette done a few years ago where participants placed Lego blocks on a map. With this program, anyone could do it, share their visions, and see the impact on traffic, the environment, crime, etc. based on the land use choices each person makes.

Meanwhile, we do need a site like EveryBlock to help citizens visualize the information already available. As long as governments expose the basic data (as DC does relatively well and WMATA does poorly), there’s a Web developer out there who can turn the data into a snazzy site.

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Tagged: development, simcity, technology

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.