City neighborhoods rarely have crisp, universally agreed-upon boundaries. Unlike political jurisdictions, neighborhood borders are shaped by lived experience: where people shop, who they identify as neighbors, and shifting social and cultural trends. These boundaries are often fluid, overlapping, and contested, changing over time and varying from person to person. As a result, neighborhood geographies tend to be “fuzzy,” defined less by official lines on a map than by collective perception and everyday use of space.
Because neighborhood boundaries are often inherently subjective, many projects over the years have attempted to capture local knowledge by crowdsourcing residents’ perceptions of where their neighborhoods begin and end. Rather than relying on official designations or administrative lines, these efforts invite people to map the city as they experience it, revealing areas of consensus as well as zones of ambiguity and overlap.
Back in 2015 DNAInfo asked New Yorkers to draw their neighborhood boundaries on an interactive map. More than 12,000 people outlined where they thought their neighborhood's borders existed. Adam Pearce then used this data to create a map of New York Neighborhoods Drawn by New Yorkers. This interactive map provides an interesting visualization of where New Yorkers believe their neighborhoods begin and end.
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