Courts of New York: A Visual Atlas of the City’s Public Basketball Spaces

Basketball courts in New York City are recreation facilities, community anchors and part of the city’s cultural image. In the basketball capital of the world, New Yorkers are rarely more than a few blocks away from a court. The visual diversity of these courts, however, is not widely documented in systematic ways. This project makes that diversity visible to the public, combining open data, aerial imagery and computational analysis to document this important public space across the five boroughs. It is a narrative story and digital atlas of New York City’s public basketball courts, using surface color as a way to explore the design and aesthetic diversity of the city’s basketball spaces. The piece is available at the following URL: https://naterattner.com/courts-of-new-york/