Mar 26, 2026 Juliana Landis Fall 2025 Graduate Fellow

Mapping Displacement and Reimagining Development: A Mixed-Methods Digital Exploration of  Housing Justice in Salt Lake City

1.Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

My project focused on better understanding what different factors contribute to displacement risk in Salt Lake County. The end product of my project was a StoryMap that described and showed how rising housing costs, redevelopment pressure, and demographic change may be contributing to displacement. At its core, my project is about making patterns of change related to our housing more visible and usable for planners, advocates, and community members.

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to translate a complex and often abstract issue into something that can actually be mapped. Displacement does not show up as a single data point. It is a process. I had to piece together indicators like rent burden, income change, age of housing stock, percentage of renters, race and education. Another challenge was balancing technical work with ethical responsibility. Mapping risk can be powerful, but it can also unintentionally stigmatize neighborhoods. That pushed me to think carefully about how the map is framed and who it is for. On a more practical level, I also had to learn new tools and workflows, especially working between QGIS and the web-based storytelling platforms, StoryMap.

My motivation for the project is both professional and personal. As a planning student at the University of Utah, I am interested in housing affordability and anti-displacement strategies. In my program we studied a displacement-risk map produced by the city several years ago. Even at a graduate-level of study I felt confused about what the underlying data was for the map and how risk was calculated. This made me curious professionally to dig deeper and understand what was really happening beneath the map.

I also had strong personal motivation for this project. I have seen how quickly neighborhoods in Salt Lake City are changing, and how difficult it can be for communities to have a meaningful voice in that process. This project felt like a way to make complicated data more easily understandable to support equitable decision making and avoid fearmongering.

 2. How did the Digital Matters internship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

The Digital Matters fellowship fit really naturally with my academic work. I was already interested in exploring how mapping and digital tools could enhance engagement for planning, but this gave me the time and support to push those ideas further. What drew me to apply was that Digital Matters was that their space is about more than just technology and learning new research skills. Digital Matters also leads important peer-to-peer discussions that can help us critically reflecting on the possibilities and the limits of new digital tools and

3.What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

One of the biggest insights I gained is that very choice about data, scale, and design shapes the story being told. In planning, that has real consequences. As the planning field struggles with a tension between making decisions rooted in data while also considering what the data misses, I thought this project would help me better understand what planners think through when they look at the housing picture in the region.

4.What would you tell potential intern applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

For anyone thinking about applying, I would say do not get stuck on having a perfect or overly technical idea. Start with a question you care about and a problem that feels meaningful. The digital piece can evolve as you go. It is also important to stay flexible. My project changed a lot from the original proposal, and that ended up making it stronger.