Reflections on Place and Power
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For me, the best part of the Creativity and the Arts class LCS 220 was hearing the students describe where they live, and talk with each other about places important to them. It brought up memories and associations they had not considered before; in reexamining their surroundings with a new eye, they were able to make discoveries and connections with each other. Even though we were apart, we could appreciate how the map pieces could fit together into a pattern.
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It also reminded us that patterns of where people live and how places are named are historically motivated. Catherine D'Ignazio cites the example of the Maria L. Baldwin school in North Cambridge, MA. Previously, it was named after Jean Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor of zoology and geology who held racists views and argued against the admission of Irish and Jewish students, until the name was changed in 2002 to honor the first female African-American principal of the school (D'Ignazio 25).
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Locally, we remember that Bryant University occupies land that was the original homeland of the Narragansett and Nipmuc Indian Nations.
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In the twentieth century, the United States, through its discriminatory lending policies, determined patterns of segregation and inequality that exist to this day. "Mapping Inequality," a joint project of the University of Richmond and Virginia Tech, is a website with detailed data and information on the history of "redlining" created by the Home Owner's Loan Corporation--HOLC (see below).
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Redlining also had environmental implications, given that the "desirable" neighborhoods had more parks and green space than poorer neighborhoods, as this project from ESRI amply illustrates:
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Maps are not only about finding our way, but also always about power, and one needs to consider how personal decisions about where to live intersect with history and systemic inequalities to have an understanding of the full picture.
Further References
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D'Ignazio, Catherine.“Civic Imagination and a Useless Map,” in DIY Utopia: Cultural Imagination and Remaking the Possible, Editor Amber Day, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Feigenbaum, Anna & Aria Alamalhodeai. The Data Storytelling Workbook. Routledge, 2020.
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Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of how our Government Segregated America, Liveright Press, 2017.
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Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City, MIT Press, 1998.
