The list of work order tickets for Detroit provided by the researcher was converted into a GIS polygon data set containing 355,500 polygons using Python script in ArcGIS Pro. Polygons were mapped using the string of coordinates found in the “Polygon” field. For the ticket polygons / parcel zoning analysis, PostGIS software was used on Harvard's High Performance Computing Cluster. Using PostGIS, the ticket polygons were overlaid with the Detroit parcel GIS shapefile, downloaded from the City of Detroit Open Data Portal. The GIS parcels contain an attribute Zoning which was used for the zoning analysis. Of the 355,500 ticket polygons, 284 either were outside of the Detroit city limits, or fell into parks where no zoning codes were present. These 284 were omitted, resulting in 355,216 total tickets analyzed.

The scripts can be found on our Github here.

Questions/comments on the project can be send to Devika Kakkar and Jeff Blossom.