During my time in New York City, I have seen many situations where productions are being installed for filming, acting the street in the middle of the day on a busy street. Is fascinating to see how many different movies, series, and documentaries are filmed across many different streets that I usually pass by or even live nearby.
“I can’t believe I’m here!” “Welcome to New York City! I should I say, ‘Ghe deu flooff New York City’?” “Why would you say that?” -Erica (Anna Farris), Joey and Chandler, Friends.
While looking for an inspirational topic for this lab, I was able to find NYC open data about NYC permits by the city government initiative, then proceeded to do more reading and research and found that there is a series of requisites by production to file a permit here. It happens that, there is a protocol to follow to plan a film which considers the category of production, borough, location, time, etc.
Open questions that I intend to address with this lab:
1. Where in the city these permits are issued the most?
2. What are the implications of the insurance and liability of a permit?
3. Which zip code are these permits issued the most?
Methodology
When downloading the data, I noticed it was composed of 3,420 rows and 14 columns. The data types were classified as a number, plain text, or date & time. The data dictionary included the following description:
Event ID
Auto-generated unique event identification number
Event Type
Type of Activity for this approved permit. Load in/out
Start Date Time
Activity scheduled to begin
End Date Time
Activity scheduled to be completed
Entered On
Date permit request submitted to MOME
Event Agency
N/A
Parking Help
Locations request to hold parking in advance for permitted filming activity.
Borough
First borough of activity for the day
Community Boards
First Community Board of activity for the day
Police Precincts
First Police precinct of activity for the day
Category
Description of production as selected by the permit applicant
SubCategory
A more specific description of production as selected by the permit applicant
Country
Project Origin
Zip Codes
First zip code of production activity
Data dictionary
Visualization
Based on the data provided by the data set, I proceeded to summarize in R Studio the data set by boroughs which gave a summary of total permits based between Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island to be able to merge with Modified Zip Code Tabulation Areas (MODZCTA) Map provided by NYC Open Data here.
After summarizing them and importing to as a layer in QGIS visualize them based on a heatmap and have Manhattan as the highest with 1621 permits followed by Brooklyn with 1058 permits. This visualization helped me to address open questions #1 and #2.
Borough name
Number
Bronx (Blue)
131
Brooklyn (Light Green)
1058
Manhattan (Yellow)
1621
Queens (Teal)
493
Staten Island (Purple)
13
Legend
Visualization #1 – Permits per borough
Visualization #2:
Now that the previous data has indicated that the boroughs that have the most permits are Manhattan and Brooklyn, I proceed to summarize through R studio by zip code from Open Data here to see where exactly in these boroughs have the most permits issued, also grouped by 5 zip codes that had the most quantity.
Zip Code
Permit Count
10001
64
11385
54
11222
483
11101
243
10023
131
The most popular zip code: 11222 in Brooklyn with 483 permits | Google Maps resource
Reflection
I had a difficult time visualizing with QGIS, it seems to be easy to do so but perhaps the complexity of merging variants such as boroughs and zip codes, didn’t help me in this instance. I would like to try in the future other geospatial visualizations such as ArcGIS.
