Project Proposal

For my project, I would like to create a map of Richmond that shows the correlation between diabetes rates and poverty. In my SSIR class, we read an article entitled “Ghetto Miasma” which talked about the relationship between being impoverished and health issues associated with this. Diabetes is an interesting problem to look at because a lot of the time this is a health problem (specifically type II diabetes) that can be prevented with a healthy lifestyle that includes exercise and healthy eating, which is something that is hard to achieve for people living in poverty because both of these things cost money to obtain. I would like to show that there is a strong connection in a large city like Richmond of areas that are generally more adept to poverty also having much higher rates of diabetes within the population. In order to do this, I will have to create a project that displays side by side maps, or something along these lines that will allow me to present two different sets of data to the reader while trying to convey the simple message that diabetes shares a strong connection with poverty.