For my project, I have decided to focus on New York City Football Club’s Soccer initiative of creating mini concrete “Mini – Soccer pitches” around New York City. The team has created so far, thirty out of potential fifty soccer pitches in the most underrepresented areas in New York City. The initiative has started a google map of the already created soccer pitches.What the team did was a simple plotting the pitches in a map with symbols. Below is a current screenshot of their Google Map.

Direct link of their map is available here

Likewise, It was an interesting experience in creating my own map, so I also created a similar version using the same Google Maps tool, in where I was able to insert “potential” new NYCFC mini pitches that could come in the future.  

I found the process extremely simple to create and edit. It was a matter of minutes in where I was able to click and create these icons on a map. 

At first, my mind raced in many directions as I was trying to find areas to explore. I was able to modify the different layers and found the satellite version for the base map the most eye appealing. I made the icons for the “pitches” orange to contrast with the base map.  It was easy to zoom in and out to find potential locations, the power of Google Maps is showcased here as I was able to quickly find “public parks” to order to drop my pins on the map.

Direct link here

As I was creating this map, I was wondering how were the original pitches selected. So i decided to search up recent poverty maps of New York City in google maps and was met with some roadblocks. First, I could not find any recent data, I found some data ranging as far as 2011. I did however find a website not using Google Maps, in which I was able to see poverty levels in NYC as recent as 2016. This map was clear and even in tune with the already created mini soccer pitches. It could be possible that NYCFC has use some sort of poverty map and decided to based their location on poverty levels. We can see below that many of the pitches were based in the low income areas. In my example, I instead created new pitches in the most affluent areas in Manhattan. Which i doubt would become reality.

in conclusion, it was a fun experience in which the tool was simple to use and how we can see organization use it in order to visually showcase projects to the world. I learned that Data maps are hard to come by and I wonder if this information is behind a paywall, as it is a tiresome job to plot information. Another conclusion could be that these Data Maps have not been created and it is up to the community to create them.