Map sampling is a collaborative planning tool visualizing social and environmental narratives, inequities and opportunities.

Map Sampling overlays and remixes cultural, social, municipal, infrastructural and ecological geo-data into cartographic provocations.

Map Sampling recontextualizes systems, histories and future projections to be more user-driven, grass roots, holistic and resilient through the dual lenses of community and institutional knowledge. Map sampling appropriates the language of institutional planning to narrate what communities live everyday and might propose in a future.

Map sampling is currently being utilized in collaboration with GrowHouse to visualize strategic opportunities and design spaces for community resiliency and networking in Central Brooklyn, from both cultural and environmental perspectives, appropriating existing underutilized urban infrastructures and open spaces.

Map Sampling is an ongoing research project and the inaugural project of Ten to One’s nonprofit sister studio, Ten to One For All. Research culminating in the GrowHouse collaboration began with studying New York City-wide urban ecological and social development which revealed socio-spatial inequities and opportunities in Central Brooklyn. 

To start, City-wide GIS spatial data is layered of environment climate and pollution crises such as coastal and street flooding both current and projected, heat islands and pollution ie. GHG and lead. Demographic crises indicators are overlayed such as illness and mortality rates, home ownership, home values and loans, income and employment and migration in and out. Systems both current and historical are underlayed such as land-use zoning, urban fabric, urban renewal, redlining, municipal boundaries, transportation, utilities ie. sewage, civic structures, parks, street trees and topography. Overlaying crises and systems reveal hot spots and patterns of inequity and systems of oppression.

Sampling then layers systems data which presently serves or in an alternate future could be adapted to better serve particular hot spots and crises. Central Brooklyn for instance has a disproportionate abundance of community gardens and farmer’s markets, vacant lots, open space within urban renewal projects, unused infrastructure, Public Right of Way medians and other non-programmed spaces and unfinished green infrastructure projects. Map sampling appropriates the language of institutional planning to narrate what communities live everyday and might propose in a future.