Overview
This website asks you, the viewer, to explore an interactive map of New York City. It invites you to imagine maps such as this as tools of urban governmentality. By this term I mean administration, management, and a general approach to the operation of government as forms of population management (Rose et al, 2006). Information visualization is a practice central to administration of public data; visualizations render information into representations that can trigger action. It is thus important to consider how and in what ways visualizations render information about the world, making seem more knowable, thus creating impetus for action (or inaction). Put simply, data visualizations are inherently political (Boenhert, 2016).
To explore this perspective on data visualization, the map you will interact with in the next tab ("Map") depicts data from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2015-2020 Five Year Estimates, particularly data on plumbing facilities, using a very simple demonstration of the D3.JS library. Under the Housing Characteristics section of the survey, it reports whether a building has adequate or inadequate plumbing facilities. This data is sorted into owner-occupied and renter-occupied, and the available data is organized at the level of Census tract. Tracts are the build block of Census geographic data, adopted in 1940 (US Census Bureau, n.d.).
Indoor plumbing is an interesting question to look at because it is an aspect of "housing" that is often presumed or taken for granted. Though initially arriving in the United States in the 1840's and considered a provenance of the rich and well-off, since the 1940's indoor plubming has become increasingly standardized. Housing is thus evaluated on these characteristics as to whether or not it is sufficient and adequate. The buildings marked in this data set are marked as occupied, yet many do not have adquate plumbing. An article published in The Guardian in 2021 described the phenomenon of "plumbing poverty" in the United States, where nearly half a million households lack adequate indoor plumbing, many of them in urban settings. From the data, New York State ranked 10th in the US for the number of households without indoor plumbing, with an estimated 26,931 estimated households. This comes out to 0.4% of the state's total households. While this may seem like a small number, it is still significant, and it is important to consider the implications of the problems for the people whom are affected by it.
According to a 2021 report by The Plumbing Poverty Project, in New York City alone, 65,000 residents are estimated to not have access to piped water. Here we will focus on this problem. Although plumbing poverty has decreased in New York City over time, it is still significant and worthy of closer attention. It is also a point of intersection between the built environment, housing, government administration, and social services. Under NYC housing code, it is required that landlords provide functioning water systems and plumbing to tenants (NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Develompent, 2021). A lack of plumbing, in addition to violations of city code, can indicate a point at which "housing" is not adequate for modern standards, which could trigger administrative action such as building code inspections, child welfare investigations, or social service outreach, such as Adult Protective Services. It could also be a flashpoint of legal conflict between property owners and tenants.
As you explore the map, consider this, and what it might mean for people in New York.
Table
The following table displays county (borough)-level summaries of data regarding occupied housing units in New York City. You can click on the column headers to sort the data.
Note: currently you can sort the table by columns, but you cannot sort it by rows