Rethinking Geography & the City

Spatial Data & Research

CityWork is a research and geospatial analytics practice. We turn civic data into evidence, maps, tools, and analysis that help governments, nonprofits, and organizations of all sizes act with confidence.

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Our founding question

What does it mean to live well in a city together?

We believe another city is possible.

Most of what's known about a city sits behind hefty paywalls, or requires technical expertise to use. Our research is free and public, our findings are built to empower communities to advocate for issues that matter most to them.

We ask hard questions about how cities work and who they work for.

  • We are reshaping social and political narratives in order to challenge the status quo of urban inequality.
  • We help organizations of all sizes translate data into questions and evidence to support their mission.
  • We make our research and maps free and public to empower communities
Case Study

Zoning & Gasoline Use

How is housing policy climate policy? We modeled monthly household gasoline use across Virginia and set it side-by-side with local zoning data. Drag the divider to see how density and zoning forces longer drives.

Housing Climate Transit Job Access

Built for the people making housing decisions.

We presented this work on a panel hosted by HousingForward Virginia, a statewide housing coalition, alongside NYU Furman Center's Housing Solutions Lab.

Research cited by
NPR / VPM WHRO The Virginian-Pilot 13News Now ABC 13
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Selected work

A sample of our work

Public health
America, Exhausted. A new interactive map of sleeping habits across the country.

America, Exhausted

A new interactive map of sleeping habits across the country.

Open project →
Sep 2026 / Latest9 min read
Additional food shops reachable with transit across Montréal

What Good Is a Bus Stop?

Public transit expands grocery choice in Montréal, but the largest gains tend to occur where walking access is already strong. A closer look at access for older residents.

Read the report → Economics, Transit, Workforce
Strait to the Pump, monthly household gasoline use across Virginia by block group

Strait to the Pump

Who drives the most? And how do dual blockades on the Strait of Hormuz impact Virginia's workers?

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What we do

Spatial Data You Can Use

Data & Research

From messy spreadsheets to custom datasets built from scratch, we gather, build, and organize data across sectors, making it usable for insight, analysis, and policy decisions.

Maps & Tools

We build custom interactive maps, dashboards, and white-label applications that make complex information relevant for staff, stakeholders, and the public. Built with ease of use in mind

Latest work
Eleven heirs'-property zones across the Richmond region — SKATER clustering map
In progress / 2026 / Richmond, VA

Richmond Heirs Property Network

Measuring heirs property across the Richmond region, analyzing how many homes and parcels are at risk, what they're worth, and where they concentrate.

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Policy research / Virginia House of Delegates

Civil Asset Forfeiture in Virginia

Research and mapping for Virginia delegate office, providing a county-by-county analysis of arrests and property seizures, along with practical steps to improve the law.

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Previous work
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What we work on

Putting data to work at the neighborhood scale.

Housing

Mapping the crisis of affordable housing

From rent burden and housing supply, to evictions and who actually owns our homes, we track how housing's frontline challenges

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Climate risk

Adapting cities to climate chaos

Cities face flooding, heat, fire, and storm-surge risk, but exposure isn't distributed equally. We make exposure and solutions legible for a more just future.

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Income & employment

Building economic resilience amid uncertainty

We turn economic data into insights on labor markets, commutes, wage gaps, production, and opportunity.

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Public safety & health

Where risk concentrates, and why it persists

From violence to overdoses to housing for older persons, we get at structural factors driving health disparities, and leverage duable solutions.

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How we work

Every engagement starts with asking better questions.

01

Understand

We start with what you're trying to decide or change, then work backward to let evidence shape a question.

02

Build

Working with data you already have, or setting out to find new sources, we gather, clean, or construct the data to support the project.

03

Deliver

We give you maps, dashboards, white-label apps, and reports written for the people who have to use them- staff, boards, funders, the public.

04

Update

Data can go bad and pipelines break. We keep tools updated, train your team, and stick around for follow-up questions.

See your city in a new way.

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