The Legal Clinic for the Disabled (LCD) had three core goals: to better understand the need for LCD’s services across Philadelphia; to characterize LCD’s past services over time and space; and to demonstrate the value that LCD provided to its clients, particularly through its medical-legal partnerships.
Throughout the project, spatial analysis and geographic visualization were used to understand and then graphically represent key patterns and trends within LCD’s clientele. De-identified client records from January 2010 to June 2015 were provided by the Legal Clinic. These records were transformed into points in space using an address locator, and then referenced against publicly available data sets provided by the United States Census and the City of Philadelphia. The results were visualized in an interactive web map, as well as in several static PDF maps.
Nat also extracted over 1 million records from the City’s property violation (L&I) database in order to determine whether there is a correlation to housing related legal issues and substandard building conditions. The database of L&I violations is new available for public use on GitHub.
The Summer 2020 session has finished. Sign up for notifications about future opportunities.
