UBC Geospatial Data Visualization (GEOB 472) Community Project
in partnership with hua foundation
*Full sized images at bottom of page.
The Vancouver Chinatown Language Accessibility Map (Figure 1) is a visualization of data that was collected for the Urban Ethnographic Field Studies program of the UBC Summer Programs. This data was collected over a period of three months, with a social innovation and environmental organization, hua foundation. Hua foundation works primarily in the neighbourhood of Vancouver’s Chinatown, and aims to bridge the worlds of cultural heritage and environmental sustainability, often through the lens of food. They are going through a major shift in their mission, and are now focusing largely on the experiences of youth in the Asian diaspora to fully participate in advancing social change through exploring their racialized identities and building resilience in communities. The organization makes space for Asian-Canadians in Vancouver to explore their identities in a safe space, in a neighbourhood that has played an integral part in the history of Asian migration, where historical discrimination against Black, Indigenous, and Asian people has played out, and where current mentions of gentrification, urban renewal, housing crises, and more are occurring every day. With the release of their very well received Chinatown Food Security Report in August, they have decided to move forward with another Chinatown report, collecting and disseminating data to impact and empower their community, in one of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods.
This report, tentatively named the Chinatown Socio-Economic Security Report, will profile the social and economic accessibility of Chinatown businesses, in terms of language (written and spoken) and service or food affordability. This will be written for the viewing of the City of Vancouver, the Hastings Crossing, Chinatown, and Strathcona Business Improvement Associations, as well as for individual businesses. This study’s geographic data collection boundaries are limited to that of Chinatown, but the issues of language accessibility for low-income and ESL/ELL groups in the city are similar for that of the Hastings Crossing and Strathcona neighbourhoods. For the City of Vancouver, this study hopes to shift the definition of a cultural food asset and of heritage preservation areas to alleviate food deserts and to preserve the rich cultural history that exists in Chinatown. For the Business Improvement Associations, this study hopes to help them become more inclusive with the businesses that they openly support and market, to attract an audience that will enjoy the entirely of what Chinatown has to offer, from the fresh egg marts, to the dried food stores, to the wonton soup next to the Hong Kong style café, and more. There’s so much to experience in Chinatown, and the Business Improvement Associations are not inclusive of that, but they have the opportunity to be. For some individual businesses, this study hopes to fill some gaps that are currently present in their understanding of the neighbourhood. Chinatown is a part of the lowest income postal code in Canada (V6A), and some new businesses often do not cater to the people who live nearby, nor to the people who have lived in the neighbourhood for the entirety of their lives, and for some, for generations, dating back to the 1850s.
To continue the collection of this data, I downloaded the neighbourhood specific business name data from the Business Licenses section of the Vancouver Open Data Portal, but because so many Chinese-only signage businesses were not recorded properly, I had to canvass the map area on foot to record them in full. I used Google Maps, which was last updated in the summer of 2016, to fill in gaps for upstairs buildings that I did not have access to. I then created a map on Illustrator of Chinatown, by using a screenshot of the neighbourhood and then by tracing each major street and all the buildings in the area. From the excel sheet I recorded my data on, I categorized each business according to linguistic accessibility, first based on the categories English Only, English and Chinese, and Chinese Only. I then colour coded each building by this code – some buildings had two or three floors, but no more than that, so I used an average. I then categorized some of the most linguistically accessible businesses and some of the businesses with the most potential to improve, and listed them as such. I encountered some problems in deciding which ten businesses were the most accessible or least accessible, and as a result, chose businesses that are seen as leaders or strongholds in Chinatown for both English and Chinese language speakers. To make these businesses locations known without making the first map too busy-looking with area labels, I created a second map to be used as an Index (Figure 2).
