Terrapattern recently launched to investigate typologies of similar places across cities via satellite imagery.

“…the Terrapattern prototype is intended to demonstrate a workflow by which users—such as journalists, citizen scientists, humanitarian agencies, social justice activists, archaeologists, urban planners, and other researchers—can easily search for visually consistent “patterns of interest”. We are particularly keen to help people identify, characterize and track indicators which have not been detected or measured previously, and which have sociological, humanitarian, scientific, or cultural significance.”

I decided to click on the baseball diamond at Tigers Stadium to see what places were similar in “Detroit” – Terrapattern’s sample area for Detroit includes a broader area beyond the city limits, but also cuts off the Far Westside.

The result is this great geographic plot of similar images and a series of snapshots of other baseball diamonds. Terrapattern even gives you a nice GeoJSON file to play with if you want to export your search results. Obviously, this isn’t all baseball diamonds in the city, especially ones that might be overgrown or covered in grass.

The resulting sample area shows the Far Westside cutoff. However, taking into account the significant clustering (z-score: -9.4) in both the suburbs to the east and Downriver, there appears to be a greater level of access to baseball diamonds and/or maintained baseball diamonds.