Visualizing the food landscape of Durham, North Carolina

Abstract

AbstractIn partnership with community leaders of Durham, North Carolina, the Duke World Food Policy Center is creating a Durham Food Justice Plan (DFJP) for envisioning an equitable food system. The Food Justice plan serves to incorporate Durham's local food history in terms of combating historical and present injustices in the food system. We propose creating an integrative, interactive visual for DFJP to view the food landscape of Durham, which will be utilized to study its relationships with the people living in the area where these establishments reside. We created a food landscape platform in Tableau using multisource data including Durham's food vendor data from North Carolina's Department of Commerce and census data for demographic data, neighborhood labels, and street and highways. We incorporated the Google Geocoding API and the aggregated information based on census blocks and tracts in visualization. We produced a variety of maps and graphs to highlight diverse relationships. The food landscape visualization allows us to see interactive patterns among food vendors and demographic data in Durham. We expect to utilize the developed landscape visual for insightful statistical analysis on food inequity issues.