Examining Spatial Opportunity for Local Action: From Theory to Practice

Abstract

Opportunity assessments have served as crucial tools for advocacy and policy-based action to address variability in spatially distributed urban opportunity. However, despite the vast body of theoretical and normative frameworks for discerning the effects of space, the current practices of opportunity mapping do not provide grounded assessments of differences that disproportionately affect the poor and racial minorities. We analyze seventeen opportunity assessments from the last twenty years and find issues of construct validity, implicit racial bias, and limited interpretability of outputs. More importantly, symptomatic outcomes of historical marginalization are conflated with problems of material access in poor and minority neighborhoods.