A Christopher Alexander provocation engine for neighborhood imagination. v0.1.
This tool does not measure your neighborhood. Aliveness is what Alexander called the quality without a name — by definition not fully namable. What you're about to read is a chorus of opinions, each citing its source, encoded in math. The interesting part is where they disagree, or where they tell you what they couldn't see.
The map is one more opinion. Parcels are an administrative cut by Norfolk City GIS — they are not buildings, sidewalks, or the way people walk this place. A neighborhood is more than its polygons. Basemap tiles fetched from openstreetmap.org; if those don't load the parcels still work.
An auto-proposal is one more opinion — the opinion of an algorithm encoding an Alexander pattern. It is NOT a coalition product. The Eastside Commons coalition's proposal is the one labeled "Proposal" above. Generated proposals are signed by the algorithm and the seed, so the coalition can decide for itself whether any variant deserves a conversation.