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Why is Roslindale so ill defined?

Mapping BostonThe map-happy folks at Bostonography have updated their work on using crowdsourcing to solve that most vexing of problems: What exactly are the boundaries of Boston neighborhoods?

We asked people to draw boundaries for 21 Boston neighborhoods and have overlaid the resulting shapes (about 4,800 from 950 respondents) to measure the amount of overlap and calculate consensus within each neighborhood.

There's a mini-FAQ that includes this question: "Why is Roslindale so ill-defined?" They say it's mainly due to not enough data, but any Roslindale resident will tell you it's actually a valid question - pieces of the neighborhood secede to get higher property values, other pieces get lumped into city-council districts with Dorchester, we don't have any elected officials of our own, etc., etc.

H/t eeka.

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Comments

pfft.

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I guess East Boston is not part of Boston. Wow.

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If you click the link:

" Why are Charlestown and East Boston excluded?
This survey was about the major top-level neighborhoods,and at that level Charlestown and East Boston can’t really be disputed because they are physically separated from the rest of Boston. Yes, there are smaller neighborhoods within both of them,but that’s not the level we were looking at here."

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The first reason is almost certainly demographic, as Roslindale is divided into native and new, old and young, and wealthy-ish and poor, by geographic boundaries within the neighborhood and the native, old and poor likely didn't contribute to the data set. Second, having just attempted to contribute to the data set myself, I think one reason may be that the drawing tool is hard to use (I could not figure out how to undo a line once I started) and people probably just settled for a slightly inacurate map once they started drawing.

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.

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