What if we could point to any city and instantly surface its most pressing challenges? That is the question we set out to answer in collaboration with University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) students. The result of this exploratory partnership is the Urban Insights Dashboard, an experimental prototype designed to map urban communities’ challenges based on data collected electronically, in real time.
Using the Dashboard
- Allow a few minutes for the data analysis application to load.
- Choose a city to analyze. You have a choice of five Michigan cities, five U.S. (ex. Michigan) cities, and five cities outside the U.S.
- Check out the distribution (histogram) of problems in each of the ten UEI Community Vitality Categories.
- See the details of problems indicated in the spreadsheet. Select a Community Vitality Category to see only the problems indicated in that category.
Our Information Source: The Digital Public Square
To capture these insights, this tool taps directly into Reddit, analyzing localized city subreddits where residents openly discuss their daily lives. We chose to use Reddit because it’s akin to a public square, with organic and people-driven dialog. By scraping local threads, we can capture community signals like infrastructure failures, housing concerns, public service problems, and economic anxieties exactly as residents experience them. The dashboard analyzes post data spanning the past four years.
What These Signals Mean
These data points represent localized, organic community sentiment – a valuable resource for urban entrepreneurs seeking to build meaningful business solutions inspired by true local needs.
The data points do not replace formal statistical metrics; rather, they provide the qualitative context that numbers often miss. For entrepreneurs, urban planners, and change-makers, these signals reveal hidden pain points and unmet needs within a community, offering a baseline of “digital intelligence” to guide deeper exploration.
While this tool is not a substitute for deep, firsthand community immersion, we hope it sparks new ideas, inspiration, and meaningful data-driven conversations. This is an active, evolving, exploratory effort, and we welcome your insights and feedback as we continue to develop and refine our analytical techniques and processes.