News Flash

NORFOLK, VA – Find beauty, wonder, and an expanding tree canopy through Open Data – our portal now includes data on public art and tree planting.

“We get requests all the time asking where all the murals are,” said Karen Rudd, Manager of the Norfolk Arts program. Employees with the arts program have inventoried all the public art in Norfolk and put it in a database, which became the foundation for the information now in the Open Data portal.

“It’s pretty complete,” Rudd said. “We do our very best to keep track of everything. People will see Norfolk’s commitment to public art.” 

The dataset includes information such as name of the artwork (“It can provide a window to the meaning of the work,” Rudd said), its street address, location, the artist, the media (“Art nerds like me want to know: is it spray paint? What kind of board is it on?” Rudd said.) the category, credit to the organization that funded the work, the installation date and budget, along with links to images and other information about the artwork.

“Norfolk has been doing the arts and celebrating the arts for a long, long time,” Rudd said. “It’s how we define our city.”

Our city also works to mark our place on the planet with trees – hundreds and hundreds of trees, grown from seeds, acorns and saplings in Norfolk’s municipal nursery. This nursery allows Norfolk to control the quality and quantity of trees for planting in our parks and playgrounds, around office buildings and in city right of way areas. Data on these trees now resides in NorfolkOpenData.

City Forester Steven Traylor said 70 to 90 percent of the trees planted by the city come from its nursery, a unique program that helps Norfolk deliver on its commitments to resilience and reducing flooding at the street and parcel level. Traylor said the city is now growing hundreds of trees, repotting them so they can reach greater maturity before planting as part of the Ohio Creek transformational coastal resilience project. 

Fields for this dataset include the Latin and common names of the trees, the site and date of planting. 

“Research students can use the data to see what local government is doing to green cities and increase the urban tree canopy on public lands,” Traylor said. 

The City of Norfolk will continue to add datasets in 2019 to enhance residents’ ability to find information about the work of the city, to support coordination and efficiency among City departments, and with the hope that these data will serve as a catalyst for innovation by businesses and education institutions. 

Each of the data sets can be sorted, filtered and customized – create and save your own searches to keep tabs on your neighborhood. Residents may also view data with charts, graphs and maps. Need help? View one of the easy to use tutorials on the NorfolkOpenData portal.

As always, feel free to view, download and manipulate this data. We provide this data as an affirmation of our commitment to transparency and community collaboration. We hope that you will use this data to improve your community, spark a business idea or just satisfy your curiosity.Data will be updated and expanded often as we work to build a comprehensive open data portal.

For more information on NorfolkOpenData, call 664-4007 or email opendata@norfolk.gov.