Visualizing fairness: Equity maps for planners

The achievement of equity in the distribution of public resources is a goal of paramount importance to planners. Equitable distribution entails locating resources or facilities so that as many different spatially defined social groups as possible benefit—i. e. have access. For planning purposes, what is of paramount importance is that planners and also their constituents understand what distributional principles underlie any geographic arrangement of public resources. This paper presents a prototype method with which planners can readily generate and evaluate various “equity maps” of resource distribution. The method exploits the visualization capabilities of GIS, which allow interactive exploration of the spatial relationships between public facilities and socioeconomic characteristics.