Fostering Participation and Capacity Building with Neighborhood Information Systems.

Applying information to decision making, monitoring neighborhood conditions, targeting resources, and recommending action have long been key urban planning functions. Increasingly, nonprofit organizations like community development corporations (CDCs) carry out these functions in distressed urban areas. Scholars in multiple disciplines argue that “data democratization”—increased access to data—would support a wide range of community change efforts. Proponents of a specific data delivery tool—neighborhood information systems (NIS)—claim that the technology can increase public participation and build capacity in distressed urban neighborhoods. This research evaluates these claims in Cleveland where the mortgage foreclosure crisis has left a glut of vacant and abandoned properties and a dire need to prioritize activities with limited resources. The research provides an integrated theoretical framework, bringing together four distinct bodies of knowledge for the first time: science and technology studies; participation, capacity, and capacity building; geographic information systems; and management information systems. The mixed-methods approach employed includes interviews with sixty community development professionals in Cleveland and a longitudinal regression analysis of thirty CDCs’ housing rehabilitation outcomes between July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2011. NIS increased the networking capacity of CDCs engaged in the city’s Code Enforcement Partnership by improving communication between partners. NIS also increased programmatic capacity, especially as measured by the percentage of CDC-owned properties sold to new owners who pay taxes on those properties. Staff in one CDC successfully leveraged NIS to improve public participation, a measure of political capacity. The findings also suggest that access to NIS does not fundamentally change CDC priorities. This research helps to fill specific gaps in multiple bodies of knowledge and features an in depth analysis of threats to validity, practical implications for decision-making with NIS, and recommendations for NIS developers and funders. Developers and funders in other cities may wish to consider their role as not just democratizing data—but providing a platform for partnerships by enabling organizations to better share data in order to achieve shared objectives.PHDUrban and Regional PlanningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111415/1/davideps_1.pd