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Overview

Places are the most useful lens for public civic discovery. A place lets a user ask a concrete local question, inspect who appears, and understand whether the available evidence is broad or thin. Use place APIs when your workflow starts with a city, region, or local issue rather than a known actor name. For exact endpoint shapes, use the API reference.

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Place keys

Atlas uses normalized place keys in the format city,state (lowercase, hyphenated): State-level queries use just the state name: kansas, idaho, missouri. Use place keys in URLs after you have chosen the canonical place. Store the key with any exported record so the result can be refreshed later.

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A good place-first workflow

1

Confirm the place

Resolve the canonical place record so the rest of the workflow uses the same key and display name.
2

Find actors

Search entities inside the place, then narrow by issue area, actor type, or text only when the result set is too broad.
3

Check coverage

Use coverage to understand the shape of the local directory before drawing a conclusion from the actors that appear.
4

Inspect sources

Use place or entity sources to keep the evidence attached to the local claim.

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Read coverage carefully

Coverage helps you understand what the data can support. High counts can point to active local source coverage; low counts can point to a real local gap, a taxonomy mismatch, or a search that needs a different issue area. Use coverage before:
  • Publishing a local actor roundup.
  • Launching outreach from a place-based list.
  • Starting a discovery run for missing source coverage.
  • Comparing issue strength across cities.
Do not treat coverage counts as impact measurement. They describe Atlas’s source-backed records for a place, not the full civic reality of the place.

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Add place context only when it helps

Place profiles and issue signals are useful when context changes how a user interprets a result. Use them to answer questions like:
  • Is the place record the one I meant?
  • Which issues have visible source-backed activity?
  • Where does the local evidence look thin?
  • What context should travel with a brief or export?
Keep actor evidence separate from place context. A demographic profile can help interpret a place; it does not prove that an actor works on an issue.

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Next steps

Find source-backed actors

Search actors and preserve the source trail.

Use issue taxonomy

Choose the right issue area slugs before filtering.

Trust and provenance

Understand what local source evidence can and cannot prove.

API reference

Check exact place endpoint parameters and response schemas.