These explorations invites fellow mappers and data folks on exploring land use issues in the City of Los Angeles. Utilizing mapping as a process of inquiry and not as end products, the explorations will evolve and iterate based on questions or spatial data to reveal unasked questions or unknown patterns. This approach is derived from a post by Andrew Wade in the Polis Blog who wrote that

In turning the information overload of the 21st century from a source of stress into an opportunity to build upon existing resources in a coherent way, mapping as a process plays a critical role...Densely packed written analyses of urban governance, housing policy, and land use in cities is crucial to understanding urban conditions. Urban design and architectural drawings are also crucial to comprehending proposed interventions in the cityscape. What if mapping, in its articulate hybridisation of policies, data, and visual intervention, eased this continuous transition?

With the recent availbility and access to open data and open-source technologies, map creation has become much easier and flexible to allow interested parties to get immediate feedback, results and visualizations. Github, where these explorations are hosted, allows a transparent exchange of information and knowledge among users of all levels and degrees of knowledge. Github's ability for version control, collaborating and branching a map into an hundreds of maps with variation on the design, data, and contribution from various collaborators interested in their development.

This exploration is on the building heights and their development across the city. These buildings follow some form of land use process or planning that allowed it to get built, either By-Right or Entitlement. To understand how these buildings came to be, layers of data and analysis will be made based on available documentation or data.