by Aaron Shkuda (Project manager of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton)
The week-long “Digitally Mapping Eastern Europe” workshop brought to the forefront a question I’ve been asking myself for several years: how do the longstanding visualization practices in urban studies fit with current digital methods in the humanities? What can mapping tell us (or fail to capture) about urban life?
As an urban historian, nearly every class I teach introduces the “concentric zones” map developed by University of Chicago sociologists Ernest Burgess and Robert Park in their 1925 work The City. This visualization depicts Chicago as a series of rings, from the Loop at its center to the commuter zone of single-family homes at the edges. Park and Burgess postulated that cities grow by a process of invasion and succession, with people and businesses moving out of the more congested areas of the inner city towards the open land, peaceful neighborhoods, and less-intense land usages of the outer rings.
Like today’s digital mapping projects, Park and Burgess used the data that they collected by visiting Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods as the basis for a visual model that sought to explain the dynamics of city life. This model makes intuitive sense – central business districts expand when businesses move into neighboring areas due to high land prices. It’s a goal of many residents to move out of a smaller house in a crowded neighborhood to a more affluent area of single-family homes
Yet nearly 100 years later, the map Park and Burgess produced based on the best data processing tools of their day seems hopelessly out of date. Anyone who looks at a city map can tell you that 1) neighborhoods rarely resemble circles; 2) American cities do not always grow; and 3) nothing in Park and Burgess’ model resembles an actual city. What remains relevant, however, is the theory behind the map – the idea that residents from one neighborhood tend to “invade” the next, and in doing so fundamentally change its character. It was this notion that inspired the redlining maps of the 1930s, and (consciously or not) inspired white residents in the U.S. to react violently to attempts by people of color to integrate their neighborhoods. We now see this process of invasion and succession taking place in reverse, with affluent white residents “rediscovering” inner-city neighborhoods and pricing out long-term residents through a process of gentrification.
Invasion and succession can be mapped, and digital tools are helpful in this regard. In my Princeton course Mapping Gentrification, I ask students to turn their observations of urban life into data points that can be placed on a street grid using ArcGIS. They learn to download government data on topics including education, race, income, and housing prices to visualize neighborhood change. Comparing these two items – on-the-ground observations with publicly available data – can produce a compelling portrait of urban life. To site one example, looking at where new coffee shops or art galleries locate compared to where housing prices are rising fastest can allow students to explore how consumption patterns and real estate value function in tandem to shape gentrification.
Yet in these projects, and in all urban maps dating back to Park and Burgess and beyond, what is most interesting is often not on the map. The backroom deal that allowed a developer to skirt zoning regulations and cause an area to become wealthier, whiter, or more educated, may only turn a square census tract on a GIS map a slightly darker shade of red. A single geocoded point representing a gallery does not encapsulate the risk that artists may have taken to open the space, and this single point does not represent the creative networks that sustained them in doing so.
As “Digitally Mapping Eastern Europe” keynote speaker Katharina Lorenz reminded us, the best maps allow us to ask better questions. They are the starting points for further research, and most often point us back to the original sources that provided the data for our maps. In the end, a week of thinking of maps returned me to the question of why we map and how mapping as a methodology can be used be conjunction with (and not as a replacement of) longstanding research practices in the humanities.
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