SCC-PG Food Environment Equity Dashboard NYC (FEED-NYC)

Urban food systems have not kept pace with other municipal functions deploying smart technologies to improve service access, manage infrastructure, and increase public participation. Food systems data are often incomplete, scattered across agencies, and insufficiently disaggregated to identify racial, ethnic, or spatial disparities. This project prototypes a Food Environment Equity Dashboard (FEED-NYC), a data, information, knowledge, and communications platform, to demonstrate the potential for community-designed smart city technologies to address food systems inequities.

The dashboard will organize, analyze, and visualize public and community-generated food systems equity data for New York City, focusing on the persistent problem of high rates of food insecurity. The project aims to explore the technical aspects of an equity-focused data dashboard and the social processes involved in its creation and use. The project team will illustrate how the dashboard can serve as a tool for government to improve program management and for community stakeholders to participate more effectively in advancing socially just food policy.

The project’s broader impact will be to show how solutions for smart and connected cities deployed by multi-sector partnerships can address equity and social justice at different scales, in different communities, and in other domains like housing, education, or transportation.

The project involves an interdisciplinary, multi-sector, urban food systems teem in co-designing and prototyping FEED-NYC. This involves design thinking workshops to identify relevant data; assessment of data collection, analysis, and visualization methods; creation of the dashboard prototype; and preparation of three cases illustrating how government officials, NGOs, and other stakeholders can use the dashboard to reduce food insecurity.

The prototype assessment explores the technical aspects of an equity-focused data dashboard and the social processes involved in creating and using it, including whether and to what extent data collection and analysis, and visualizations of sociotechnical systems like the food system, function as heuristics to shape strategies and perceived solutions to food insecurity, or perpetuate existing conditions. It explores novel methods of data collection and visualization such as crowd sourcing and big data and develops use cases illustrating the potential social and political effects of an equity-focused data dashboard.

The project aims to build a smart and connected community of practice among team members who are from disciplines and sectors that has the capacity to model solutions for smart and connected cities that address social injustice and tackle racial and other inequities at different scales, communities, and urban systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.