Talk:Community areas in Chicago

Untitled
How about adding an infobox template to the neighborhood articles instead of a custom table for every one? Cacophony 18:51, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

ZIP codes in Chicago are not tied to the neighborhood boundaries. That is simply not factual. Fingusernames 19:55, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Roads, Landmarks?
It might be nice to have an overlay or an alternative version of the map with major landmarks--rivers, big parks, interstate highways, etc. marked. I was trying just now to figure now where Midway Airport was on this map and it was not easy! A few key landmarks would help people get a sense of where these community areas actually *are* in the city. Look at how useful this map is, for example: http://www.wildonions.org/NeighborhoodsMap.htm


 * This actually would not be hard to create based on maps I made for Wikitravel. If someone is interested in doing this and who knows how to edit SVG files, all maps are available here. --Peter Talk 23:47, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

City of Chicago Neighborhood maps
Does anyone know the proper way to add City of Chicago Neighborhood maps to the neighborhood templates or to the pages. TonyTheTiger 01:41, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Community areas of Chicago / Neighborhoods of Chicago merger discussions

 * Merge I believe these two pages should be merged and text should be included to describe the difference between neighborhoods and community areas. I think that the community area page should be the merger destination.  Almost all of the neighborhoods listed on the Neighborhoods pages just link back to the Community areas.  I don't think the neighborhoods are actually encyclopedic in general. TonyTheTiger 00:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * The failure of Chicago's wikipedians to create pages for their neighborhoods should not, in my opinion require the merger of the community page with the neighborhood page. Speciate 00:38, 15 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Merge I agree that the neighborhoods and Community Areas articles should be merged, perhaps to a renamed page titled "Neighborhoods and Community Areas of Chicago," with redirects from both.
 * 1. Chicagoans tend to use neighborhood to mean both neighborhoods and official Community Areas, even when they know the difference.
 * 2. The distinction is confusing, particularly to nonnatives, especially since the names of some neighborhoods and Community Areas are similar (or even the same), even when one is the subset of the other.
 * 3. While the boundaries of Community Areas are official and unchanging, neighborhoods are often ephemeral (e.g. New Town), with amorphous boundaries often subject to the whims of Realtors, chambers of commerce and other promoters. However, since the boundaries of CAs tend to be physical barriers like railroad tracks and the river, it's rare for a neighborhood to overlap CA borders, so understanding the CAs is key to grasping the neighborhoods.
 * 75.56.60.44 07:22, 28 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Don't merge, but help them refer to each other Researchers and planners need the community areas and datasets depend on the community areas. Neighborhoods are different quality, cultural/historical, commercial, popular.  They have distinct audiences and combining them puts too much info on one page.  If the distinction bet n and ca is confusing, then explain it, but don't merge the two pages. Katewill 04:34, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Don't merge, but help them refer to each other I agree with Katewill. But please, don't say "bet n and ca". Slo-mo 07:48, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Merge for a number of reasons, in addition to what has been said: I also think that the merge destination should be this article, as it is the parent category of the neighborhoods subsets. --Peter Talk 07:12, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Content unnecessarily split across pages becomes easier to overlook. I was actually unaware that there was a separate neighborhoods page, despite having referred to this article often while writing a Chicago travel guide over the past year. There is some useful content on that neighborhoods page that visitors to this page may miss without cause.
 * 2) All neighborhoods listed are subsets of the community areas. The fact that the community areas have been so heavily relied on in the presentation of the neighborhoods belies the argument that they have distinct audiences. If there were neighborhoods that went across community area borders, then there would be a much better case for separate articles, as they would be two separate ways of looking at the city's subdivisions. Currently the "neighborhoods approach" is merely adding a finer level of detail to the community area approach.
 * 3) A merge will improve the presentation of the content on both pages. The context provided by the community area information on this page is useful to understand the relationship between the community areas and popularly conceived neighborhoods. The neighborhood lists will provide context to understanding what exactly the community areas entail for those familiar with the more finely grained neighborhood names.

Do not merge, instead, remove the Neighborhood info from this page and let it focus on Community Areas only. The Community Areas are more of a technical term with precise definitions and should not be "poluted" with the more ephemeral and controversial neighborhood information. The Neighborhoods page should be redone as an category index page rather than an HTML Table. Chicago2020 (talk) 23:33, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Do not merge, The neighborhood area have a different set of boundaries than the community areas. I agree with Chicago2020 the list should be completely separated and add that the neighborhood boundaries often fall between 2 or more community areas. --Nickvet419 (talk) 00:41, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Populations
--Does anyone know why the population and population density numbers are constantly changing and inaccurate on individual community area neighborhood pages? They seem to change at least monthly and constantly conflict w/ other census #'s I've seen. Shouldn't they be based off of 2000 census #'s? 98.206.218.29 (talk) 15:46, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

--Looks like the table is all sorts of incorrect. My wikipedia editing knowledge is not nearly good enough to try and fix it as of this moment. If anyone is up to the challenge, it needs to be fixed. It looks like O'Hare neighborhood is the only one that is correct if you want to use that as a template. Mhay2290 (talk) 18:49, 23 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Welcome to Wikipedia! If you have any more recent figures, feel free to change them as appropriate and cite the new data, by clicking on the "Edit" tab and modifying the source text to fit. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 19:20, 23 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi John. I meant it as the formatting is wrong for the table. I do not know how to fix the formulas. As you can see, the square kilometers column is actually outputting the population density, and the population densities are blank. Something with the formulas are wrong, and I do not know how to fix that. I just wanted to bring it to someone's attention who can fix it! Mhay2290 (talk) 19:28, 23 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Fixed, thank you! – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 19:30, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Origin of Chicago Community Areas - Encyclopedia of Chicago
Much more informative (and seemingly accurate) description of the origin and concept of these areas in Amanda Seligman's article3 in the Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/319.html). Suggest that someone incorporate this material if I don't get around to doing so. Sjsilverman (talk) 15:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Source for sides?
Hey,

is there any official source for the divison of Chicago into sides? Where do the information about sides come from? I can't find anything about sides on Chicago's data portal.

--Kagawa (talk) 19:58, 17 February 2018 (UTC)-
 * Not really. The Chicago river separates the three main sides, North, West and South. One might argue that the Calumet river or its drainage basin defines the East Side. The Northwest Side is really the north part of the West Side, and the Southwest Side is really the west part of the South Side. These are based on race more than anything else, and the boundaries are similar to neighborhood boundaries in that they are based on opinion which may not be static over time. Speciate (talk) 16:55, 2 November 2018 (UTC)