Week9 Interview contact2 (Conducted on March 12th)
Interviewee
Dr. Maryalice Wu
Title: Interim Executive Director - ATLAS Statistics GIS Data and Survey(Affiliation with UIUC)
Representative of ward1 at city Council (Role at City of Urbana)
Summary
As one of the residents grew up in the city of Urbana and a member of City Council,
I could see that she carefully choose to wear a different hat of
insider(as a resident) and representative(of ward1) depending on cases.
Although the needs of encouraging businesses in the area,
she stressed to have a big picture and paid attention to keep the balance between
the development of the city and its positive/negative influence on residents.
Dataset she generally working with in her role was slightly different from the 'data' that I had in mind,
but Dr.Wu gave me vivid concerns and challenges she faced in the context of data collection with rich example.
"Data is only useful with the definition of how it gathered"
she stressed, which echoed with my first interview from Llory and John.
In the end, she leaves me with the unique term "personality of the city" for the key term.
Compared to that of Champaign, the city of Urbana has a limited community that residents coming for, such as community for music/nightlife etc...
In other words, seeking answers for a question "We go Urbana for ~~" would craft personality of the city
and that characteristic would consequently make the city destination.
Transcripts
Q.Would you briefly tell me about your role?As a member of city council, I represent ward 1.
If people had any concerns or issues to discuss, they come to me and I try to put them on board in our weekly meeting.
We have many things that come to the city council, and many of them are city-wide.E.g. Which road should be fixed first.
My duty is to represent my constituent in the best way possible.
I feel lucky because my ward is very active and responsive.
Lots of people in west Urbana are in the email list, so relatively easy to interact.
Q.How you access the needs of residents?
A. People will reach out, email me, often they are not shy, they are vocal, even if they are not from ward 1.
Q.Challenges
A. West Urbana is the last neighbor in which students rarely live.
People choose to live in West Urbana because of its proximity to the campus, downtown,
and there has been friction between development and residential area.
Things I'm concerned about now most are zoning rules.
I'm trying to making sure that anything we approve as a council
will be the best interest of the residents
Q.Challnges. Outsource?
A. There's no money. In data-collection is a skill, some people think everybody can make a survey,
but that doesn't necessarily mean they have good questions. That is problematic.
The data or phenomena itself are not political, they are just a distribution.
But the politics is making a decision from the data.
Asking the right questions is always difficult.
Sometimes, I do by myself.one of the hardest about designing questionnaire
is to think about how different people think question differently.
You might think your questions are not biased, but people interpret differently.
So that's why we require a group of people when we design a survey. I have a team of 10-15 people.
from different backgrounds when creating a survey.
And there is an issue of distribution.
If you conduct a survey, you don't know who's answering this.
And not everybody has access to the internet.
There is a huge assumption that everybody has the Internet.
And mail service, their response is less than 10%
The right way to gather, expensive is door to door. I've done it, but not realistic.
Q.Any criterion, rules when making decisions?
A.Yes and no. When you re-zoning, There is a criterion that has be met,
but every time we discuss we need approval.
Q.How long have you worked for the city of Urbana?
A.2 years in the city council, and I was raised in here.
Q.Changes for the 5 years.
A. When I was growing up, there were no Asians. Now we have a huge population.
That's a huge shift. Probably 14% of residents are Asians.
In 1990, we had the third highest rate of the growing Asian population in the United States.
We usually call it town vs gown(University).General community vs University community.
Q. Conflicts from growing diversity among residents?
Not particularly. But I feel Hispanic residents are more underground,
for whatever reason they may be.There are large populations.
Q. Difficulty collecting underrepresented voices?
A. There was a project that online form that residents can put in anything,
and that request would be distributed to a corresponding department.
I wish if we could have that kind of mechanism to doing that type of thing.
Q. What dataset are you regularly using in your daily work?
A. Data that I use is not a traditional type of data.
Often we pull out a distribution map of the city, and you'll notice rules of zoning.
So there are all different kinds of "build by right."
*If there meet criteria of the certain rule, you don't have to ask anybody for permission to build XYZ.
So the data I'm using is a mixture of something existent in the current information and regulations,
but not something from a database.
Q.How do you collect those data?
A. City council generally doesn't collect data. All of us usually have the other full-time job,
we have the stuff to use.
There is a case in Illinois that we surveyed a pedestrian in the city with the question."Why we stop people/"
"Why we stop African American?"
When it turns out, there was no definition of what the public place or pedestrian.
The state refused to get guideline, not only that, our definition of public is incredibly broad.
Our definition is "Any place that public would go and see".
We had community members so upset because our numbers look completely bad among the US,
and you try to explain to them the reason,
but you have to get that data is only useful with the definition on how it gathered.
Without that, there's no way you can make use of the data.
That's an example to understand data.
Q.Challnge you're facing now
A. Trying to have a balance between the encouragement of business and residents' life.
We want to encourage business, but at the same time, we don't wanna mess up.
I had a people change business hour restriction in Urbana.
There was a pedal bus business want to run their service after 10 pm, and their proposal was to run a business until 1 am.
That's not right we don't wanna party bus at 1 am in neighbors, but I got pushback, that we have to encourage business.
You have to think broadly, just because one entity is asking for you to change,
that will affect all the other changes in the future. How can other people use it?
You have to set a threshold and have to think beyond that particular business.
That I think is a good thing about voices from a different background,
because you have ideas you never thought of.
The more diverse with people with diff background, the more I think a law better
we call it ordinance and resolution.
Q.Topics
1. What other communities are doing to stimulate Rejuvenation of older neighborhood.
It is a tradition that people in the city goes to suburb and housing deteriorate.
2. The city can create personality.
Compare Urbana to Champaign, just downtown.
In Champaign, lots of people walking around, enjoy music. Champaign has a destination
In Urbana, they go to a specific location, but they are not coming for the community of something.
We need some way to craft personality of people to envision of "we go Urbana for ~~"
Characteristic makes it a destination.