Milanography

WHAT:

Milanography is a partecipative mapping project focused on Milan's neighborhoods.

It aims to make visible the "shared" image of the city, as perceived by its inhabitants, by mapping the closest spatial unit to their daily life. Which is precisely the neighborhood.

It's basically a shameless adaptation of the great Bostonography project to la cità la pusee bèla ad mùnd (A.K.A. Milan), but has also been inspired by Areas of Edinburgh and The Neighborhood Project.

Here's a Live version

WHY:

I liked all those experiences and wanted to replicate them in milan, but I missed the tools. Hence I decided to build it myslef.
This time though, entirely onto an open-stack: Postgres / PostGIS + Flask + LeafletJS

HOW:
Milanography allows the user to draw a shape representing a neighborhood, from a list of suggest places. The user can then save and submit such shape, which is consequently saved on a Postgres instance via Flask.

Everyone is warmly encouraged to contribute to and to improve the project!

Disclaimer!
This is my first project with Python Flask, hence it's a truly crude application. Fork it and make it better!

##Update: Of course the minute I finished this project I discovered somebody else did the same -but better! :)
Props to @nichom for his amazing piece of code: neighborhoods
I'm in love with it!

Nonetheless, if you want to have the complete control of your infrastructure and run your own instances, this is still a good, yet basic, starting point to develop your own draw-collecting app.

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Dependencies:

I assume you have the following tools in your system:

• Python (v. 2.7)
• PostgreSQL (latest) If you are running on an Apple machine you might want to check out PostgresApp

Front-end

Common front-end dependencies are managed through Bower
Run on bower.json

bower install 

Other dependencies are:

• Leaflet.Draw
• FileSaver.js

Python

• Python dependencies are contained within a virtualenv

• Activate it

    source env/bin/activate
  

• Install (via pip) Flask + Psycopg2 + SQLAlchemy

    pip install Flask
    pip install psycopg2
    pip install Flask-SQLAlchemy
  

• Run Flask

    python app.py
  

• Once done, deactivate the virtualenv

    deactivate
  

Usage:

Download or git clone the repo.

Then cd dist if you want to use a raw, unstylized version of the app. Otherwise you can cd examples/milan to use a simple theme.

PostgreSQL set-up:

Create PostgreSQL Db. The data is stored as JSON data type, es:

CREATE TABLE shapes (id integer, data json);

Activate virtualenv:

source env/bin/activate

Run Flask:

Run postgres.py script:

python app.py

Profit:

See the result (localhost) 127.0.0.1:5000

Deploy:

So far I've only tested the app on a virtual server running Ubuntu server (v. 14.0) and a combination of Gunicorn + NGINX, but flask it's a pretty versatile framework.