The Search for Meaning in San Francisco’s Boba Shops [Emma]

User Notes

This map serves as a first step in my quest to understand the logic of the arrangement of boba shops in San Francisco, within the broader context of the history of the city and of boba.There are certainly some flaws with this map, but it is meant to provide a starting point to my questions about the spread of food across cultures, and the specific issues of appropriation and gentrification at work in San Francisco. 

The neighborhood divisions and statistics on this map come from the San Francisco Planning Department, and are meant to roughly divide the city by neighborhood and equal population. They should be taken with a grain of salt—they are derived from data collected in the 2010 census (the most recent national census), and the planning department has since shifted the divisions slightly. However, this was the most complete and recent data available on the neighborhood level, and I felt this would be useful for analysis.

The orange dots represent the location of Boba shops in the city, taken from the complete list of Yelp results (and with restaurants filtered out). The top five neighborhoods containing the most boba shops are indicated with darker shading (you will actually need to zoom in in order to see Chinatown, the neighborhood with the highest number of shops, becuase it is so geographically small that it is obscured in the main zoomed out view). Hopefully, the map shows where boba shops are concentrated, and, as I add more layers of data, some patterns may emerge.

Statement of Significance

Of course, it’s hard to draw any broader conclusions from this map, and I wouldn’t want to—it serves merely as a tool for understanding the locations and concentrations of boba shops, which will be useful as I research the history of boba and look more closely at the neighborhoods where boba is most prevalent. However, in making this map, a few patterns have emerged. Most boba shops are clustered in the city’s northern, more affluent regions. And, by far the densest concentration of shops is in Chinatown, despite the fact that it is geographically one of the smallest neighborhoods on the map. San Francisco’s Chinatown has a fascinating history, one marred by episodes of staggering racism; it is also one of several cultural enclaves in the city where communities now thrive. As I try to understand the spread of food culture across different countries and within cities, I’m excited to learn more about the history of Chinatown and the current businesses and eating establishments that are located there.