Neighborhood Research
The key to understanding spatial cognition in urban environments is rooted in heuristics—rules of thumb that help us form mental models and understand our environment. By representing space in ways that users experience the built, one can construct meaningful depictions of reality.
Neighborhoods do not follow a logical hierarchy: uniform definitions rarely exist, they overlap to form blurry boundaries and they may be present across cultural and temporal lenses. These implications render unstructured data impotent for commercial purposes, yet UMI has created a uniform and flexible structure, allowing businesses to harness this knowledge base.
UMI leverages its globally-distributed network of researchers to use their local expert knowledge to parse colloquialisms, translate cultural nuances and disambiguate fuzzy space. We have developed relationships with municipal planning organizations, mined the hospitality, real estate and retail industries and researched local media.
The resulting output is analyzed and enhanced—Urban Mapping then spatially encodes neighborhood boundaries using a variety of GIS tools and normalizes the data, taking into account multiple names for a given area, overlapping polygons, postal code intersections and other factors.
The result is the most comprehensive and culturally relevant database of informal space available. Updates are made on an ongoing basis, taking into account user feedback, expanded geographic coverage and changing perceptions of neighborhoods.
