Mapping race and segregation

October 30, 2017 5:49 PM

How Is Digital Mapping Changing The Way We Visualize Racism and Segregation? A new project from the University of Iowa uses interactive maps to show segregation patterns in Washington, D.C., Omaha, and Nashville in the late 19th century.

More maps and articles!

Chicago

• Mapping Dissimilarity and Isolation (using R);
• New Deal-Era Maps Show Racist Redlining and Anti-Density Forces at Work

Detroit Metro: Segregation then and now
Georgia: Demographic patterns in every Georgia county, 1990-2050
Houston: How blacks, whites and Hispanics mix—or don't—in Houston
Los Angeles: Segregation in the City of Angels: A 1939 Map of Housing Inequality in L.A.
Maryland diversity between 1970 and 2010
Milwaukee

• Ranking: Milwaukee Still Country's Most Segregated Metro Area
• Milwaukee Shows What Segregation Does to American Cities

Minneapolis - The Mapping Prejudice Project is working to identify and map racial restrictions buried in historic Minneapolis property deeds.
New Orleans:

• Racial divides among New Orleans neighborhoods expand (2011)
• Constructing New Orleans, Constructing Race: A Population History of New Orleans

New York:

• How segregated is New York City?
• Emergent Ghettos: Black Neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880–1940

Philadelphia: Redlining Maps
St. Louis: Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City
San Francisco: The San Francisco Indicator Project: Ethnic Diversity Index
Seattle: previously

Selected Cities

• Find your neighborhood on a redlining map
• New York Times interactive maps allow you to drill down to census tract level
• Eric Fischer created (static) dot maps of racial and ethnic divisions in US cities

United States

• How railroads, highways and other man-made lines racially divide America’s cities
• This map tracks racial diversity spatio-temporally by laying census data from 1990 to 2010 over detailed grids from NASA satellite maps.
• One Dot Per Person for the Entire U.S.

posted by AFABulous (7 comments total)

I spent some time earlier this summer looking at the Richmond redlining maps for Pittsburgh and Miami as a part of a project. The Miami maps were pretty subtle about tying home values to race, but the Pittsburgh one was blatantly antisemitic, racist and anti-immigrant. It was shocking. This is a view of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. The original paper work includes phrases like "infiltration of Jewish" and tracks the percentage of foreign born residents. Keep clicking on other neighborhoods if you feel like being angry at people from 1937.
posted by Alison at 6:05 PM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

So many slides from the autopsies could dramatize the crimes, resentment, and resignation if so many people weren't convinced that race segregation in the USA is some kind of choice, affliction of poor job skills, the wrong job skills, and of course nothing can be done. BTDT.
A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America LISTEN
Change's all about personal income growth, charter schools, and yanno six-digit affordable housing. So there's that. Trump. Russian collusion.
posted by marycatherine at 6:48 PM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was thinking that it would be interesting to map restrictive covenants in early-20th-century D.C., but it looks like someone has already done that.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:11 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

I am very interested in critical geography and how maps interact with social justice - this post is fantastic, thank you!
posted by faineg at 8:30 AM on October 31, 2017

Apologies if this is too far into self-promotion land - but I did research earlier this year on how the GOP is attempting to remove access to and defund databases that clearly visually demonstrate housing inequality. There’s also concern over what will happen with the next census - will there be efforts to conceal or not collect data that clearly demonstrates inequality? Maps and geospatial data are powerful tools, and I think we all need to stay vigilant in ensuring we retain access to that data.
posted by faineg at 8:36 AM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

For the Georgia map, it's interesting to see that in the Atlanta area they predict that Forsyth and Cherokee counties will still be overwhelmingly white in 2050, almost as much as they are today, even as Gwinnett and Cobb trend towards higher minority populations. (The predictions are supplied by an outfit "Woods and Poole Economics", the web page of which is under construction until October 31, 2017; they have expounded upon their methodology but I'm too tired and too at-work to make sense of this.
posted by madcaptenor at 10:46 AM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

Redlining was still happening in the neighborhood I live in in North Portland as recently as the childhood memories of someone I met who is younger than me. I asked if it was still happening and the person I was talking to had no idea because they were living on avocado toast and couldn't afford to find out.
posted by aniola at 2:35 PM on October 31, 2017