Leveraging Open-Source and Crowdsourced Data to Evaluate Spatial Justice in Cultural Planning

Abstract

With the rise of data-driven planning and decision-making, fueled by the abundance of digital information, data are increasingly being positioned as a "common language" for interrogating the built environment. These claims perceive data as neutral representations of reality, overlooking the social, political, and institutional contexts that shape them. However, digital data can vary widely in quality, completeness, and classification standards, raising concerns regarding their accuracy, applicability, and effectiveness in examining just planning outcomes. Focusing on cultural planning as a domain and Los Angeles as a case study, I examined the utility of data for evaluating the fair distribution of cultural resources. This research addressed the following question: What can open-source and crowdsourced data reveal about the equitable allocation of cultural resources? To address this question, I developed a socio-ecological framework that synthesized Henri Lefebvre's (1991) Spatial Triad Theory and Anthony Giddens' (1986) Structuration Theory for evaluating justice in planning contexts. This framework identified three different dimensions and three types of justice. (1) The institutional dimension, conceptualized as the conceived, is centered around understanding the institutional decisions and strategies that shape cultural planning and have procedural justice implications. (2) The environmental dimension, which is interpreted as the perceived focuses on the physical manifestation of resources represented as data points and can have distributional justice implications. (3) The experiential dimension, conceptualized as the lived, which addresses the meaning and significance of these resources to individuals, which can impact participatory justice. This framework provided the opportunity to bridge theory and practice by operationalizing meta-theories to create a diagnostic adaptive tool with actionable steps for examining just planning processes and outcomes. Guided by this framework, I conducted two studies to: (1) compare digital data obtained from institutional and crowdsourced sources in terms of quality and 'fitness of use' in justice research; and (2) to compare community perceptions of cultural resources with digital data representations. The first study focused on the perceived dimension, viewing data as representations of both institutional and crowdsourced physical cultural infrastructure. In this study, I examined and compared data quality and representations from institutional city and county sources with crowdsourced OpenStreetMap. The findings revealed differences across the datasets, with significant discrepancies in spatial patterns, cultural asset classification, and descriptive detail. Recognizing the trade-offs involved in selecting a dataset for justice research in cultural planning, this analysis highlighted the need for the integration and critical examination of institutional and community-sourced data with insights from the community. The second study focused on the lived dimension of the social ecological framework emphasizing the lived experiences of the community. Taking a critical Geographic Information Science (GIS) perspective, I leveraged cultural mapping as a tool for critical data inquiry and integrated Kevin Lynch's (1960) notion of imageability as an analytical lens to identify perceived discrepancies between community insights and digital datasets. The study provided a systematic approach for the multi-level examination of cultural resources, highlighting the conceptual fuzziness in the classification of cultural resources, spatial discrepancies between community perceptions and commissioned artworks, and overlooked dimensions such as accessibility and engagement, which are crucial for cultural dataset development. Integrating theory and methods from Sociology, Urban Planning, Data Science, Geography, and Environmental Psychology, this dissertation bridged theory and practice by developing and applying a diagnostic framework to examine the utility of different types of data in justice-oriented research in cultural planning. In doing so, this dissertation made theoretical and methodological contributions, spanning institutional, environmental, and individual levels of analysis.