Seven years ago I had an idea for a website that would tell you which advocacy groups were already working on your street. It’s live now as the Urbanist Atlas — here’s what it is, who it’s for, and the principles it’s built on.
A long time ago, in a Brooklyn brownstone far, far away…
Alright — 2019, not exactly ancient history. I’d just moved to New York from Chicago and wanted to plug into the local advocacy scene. After some searching, I found a few groups to get involved with. It sparked an idea I floated to a friend at the time: what if we built a website where you just enter your zip code and get a list of local advocacy orgs?
Seven years later
It exists. And it exists for one reason: when someone moves to a new city — or wakes up one morning in the place they’ve lived their entire life, angry about a dangerous intersection three blocks from home that no one has ever fixed — they should be able to find the people already organizing for better streets and better transit nearby. In under a minute.
That’s the Urbanist Atlas, and it’s live at urbanistatlas.com.
Core Principles
This is my small contribution to fellow advocates across the US and Canada — many of whom fight tirelessly, day after day, in political and social headwinds that rarely favor them. A few principles guide how it’s built:
- Curated, not scraped. Every listing is reviewed by an editor (me, for now!) against published criteria — applied case by case, not picked by an algorithm.
- Deliberately narrow. Transit and safe-streets advocacy only, and only groups with a real geographic home base. The tight scope is what keeps a zip-code search useful instead of noisy.
- Open, and built to grow. The full codebase is open source and the dataset is open-licensed (ODbL). A public submission process lets anyone add a group or file a correction — so organizers, researchers, and advocates can find (and improve) the listings where they are, and the directory stays fresh as a community effort.
The About page has more details on what gets in, what’s excluded, and how the directory stays independent.
Tech Stack
For the developers in the audience, here’s how it’s built. The Urbanist Atlas repository on Github is a monorepo, split into two components:
-
API - A Go service, with HTTP handling via the chi routing library, deployed to Fly.io. It is a stateless application: the
api/seed/TOML/CSV bundle is baked into the image and loaded into an in-memoryFileStoreat boot. It hosts the public JSON API at/api/v1. For now, this is only accessible by the WEB component, but the ultimate goal is to allow registration of API keys so anyone can integrate with the Atlas easily. -
WEB — Built as a React + Vite SPA, and deployed to Cloudflare Workers + Pages (Static Assets). It consumes the JSON API to power all of the data.
More information is available in the repository and the site itself.
What’s next?
For now: get the word out, watch how the API and site perform at scale, and keep curating to expand coverage across the US and Canada. Beyond that, I want to open the API up for use outside the web component, and — longer term — support more countries. The region graph I designed is built to be flexible enough for it: a wide range of regions and all their edge cases.
I’m thrilled to see it come to life. If you’re a developer who wants early API access or to contribute to the source code, reach out — and anyone’s welcome to write with questions or corrections.
Find the people fighting for better streets where you live.