The Philadelphia Districting Contest: Designing Territories for City Council Based Upon the 2010 Census

Ram Gopalan (), Steven O. Kimbrough (), Frederic H. Murphy () and Nicholas Quintus ()
Additional contact information
Ram Gopalan: School of Business, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey 08102
Steven O. Kimbrough: Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Frederic H. Murphy: Marketing and Supply Chain Management, Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
Nicholas Quintus: Office of Watersheds, Philadelphia Water Department, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107

Interfaces, 2013, vol. 43, issue 5, 477-489

Abstract: The City of Philadelphia recently redesigned districts for its council members based upon the 2010 census. The districting process evinced considerable public interest and engagement because council districts from the prior census had significant shortcomings. During the 2010 redistricting process, several public interest groups came together to organize a districting contest. The organizers hoped to increase public engagement in the districting process and to proactively offer several well-constructed examples of city council districts that minimize gerrymandering. We were active participants in the contest, developing methodologies for finding good solutions to large integer programs that enabled us to win in one contest category and make presentations before the city council in this and another category. This article describes the unfolding of various events surrounding the districting process, the methodologies we developed, and the influence that the contest ultimately had on the design of city council districts.

Keywords: political districting; optimization; genetic algorithms; games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.2013.0697 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orinte:v:43:y:2013:i:5:p:477-489

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Interfaces from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().