Patty Heyda is professor of architecture and urban design in the Sam Fox School. Her book “Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA” was supported in part by a Faculty Collaborative Grant from The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative.
Maps are instruments of power. We have seen this, for example in the 1937 redlined Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps that legitimized restrictions to property for some and not others in U.S. cities all over, by drawing lines of mortgage loan risk according to the racial make-up of neighborhoods. But maps are also instruments of resistance, that can override dominant narratives and tell other important stories hidden from view. The design disciplines refer to maps as mappings when they are critically constructed to this end.
As an urban designer, I map to learn about contested places. The eco-social issues I find in neighborhoods everywhere are often inflected by uneven access to systems of power, capital and decision-making. These uneven systems are fully known to residents, of course, who experience impacts every day, but the depth and intricacies of the political production of space are otherwise drawn out over time, across public and private sectors, and are thus intensely opaque. My mappings look for correlations between conditions in the built environment and the invisible political overlays that can impact access to democracy and the ability to live in that space. These overlays include legislated boundaries like zoning, land use, tax incentive zones, protective districts and other regulatory inclusionary or exclusionary constructs. But overlays may also include personal experiences and other practices that dismiss or reclaim local territorial histories.
Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA is a book of over 100 intertwined mappings that aim to unpack the many stories and competing interests shaping our St. Louis region. As an atlas, it unravels layer upon layer of the built and policy environment in Ferguson and North St. Louis County that contextualize Michael Brown’s killing by police in 2014 and the social movement that followed. The volume denies simplified narratives of Ferguson as a space of poverty and police violence (as well as the monolithic narratives of benign white American suburbs) to show instead how Ferguson, like Kinloch, Berkeley and so many first-ring suburbs in the U.S., are the product of years of spatio-political complexity and economic policy contradiction. The book also serves as a reminder that systems perpetuating inequality, like the HOLC maps from the past, are not all behind us, but alive and well today in different forms.
Some of the maps in the book, such as the “property crime” map, expose the limits of available GIS and other data that we often take for granted. This data, inadvertently or not, can reproduce narratives like those of “financial risk in minority spaces” instead of depicting the actual factors of structural racism. In the atlas, “property crime” is mapped as a relationship between physical property crime rates and the subprime mortgage-lending violations of the last decade, to show how white-collar offenses have contributed to insecurities in Ferguson in arguably even more impactful ways. What data gets selected to represent what kind of city is itself political.
Cities are inflected by many competing forces of change that accumulate over time. The process of critical mapping entails a dissection of these many forces that includes unpeeling, restacking and new plotting of the physical and political layers of the city, for more pointed understanding of the (often financial, if exploitative) dynamics at play — towards new forms of spatial agency and alternate avenues for advocacy.
Maps are understood by everyone. They have the power to bridge vast interdisciplinary terrains of knowledge across theory and practice — academia and the community. If maps are instruments of power, then Radical Atlas reveals how those systems of power work, and for whom. Maps and mappings can clarify, as they reclaim, the stories we tell.
