*HUBBUB 26 People’s Choice Awards Winner: Project with most potential for impact.”

Onion was inspired by the growing food insecurity crisis affecting Canadian households in recent years. Food insecurity is a deeply complicated and systemic issue driven by factors including income, housing costs, and infrastructure. Our team wanted to provide Vancouver’s residents and city officials with a tool to visualize food accessibility for specific areas within the City of Vancouver and demonstrate how new developments in the city could affect local residents. We created a heat map that incorporates food asset locations, transit stops, median income, and walkability into a single vulnerability score. We also created adjustable sliders to change the weights of various factors so users could have a tailored experience. Additionally, users can create simulations by placing potential food assets on the map, then see the heatmap updates or read the AI summary.

This theme hit close to home for our team, as many of us and our friends and family are impacted by low cost food accessibility. As we learned more and more about the factors affecting food insecurity, it became clear to us that this is a systemic issue that developed from compounding socioeconomic inequity. We hope that our map will serve as a valuable tool for people to advocate for more equitable food access in vulnerable communities. We want people to be inspired to think of solutions that can make a real impact on the lives of the people in their communities. We think there is a lot of potential for impactful services to maximize the quality of life for our friends, families, and neighbours.

Next Steps

It is recommended to allocate more time and resources to analyzing prior studies and data collected on the topic to improve the accuracy of our algorithm. Once our data pipeline is established, potential next steps would include automating our data processing and deployment to ensure our site always uses the most recent data available, making it more valuable to both planners and residents. We can also share our tool with organizations who share similar values when we finish these tasks.