Author: timroge
-Mapping Decline St. Louis and the American City – Timothy Rogers
This project is a deep dive into the St. Louis region, and how various discriminatory rules and regulations over the last 100 years have shaped where people live and move to in the STL area. This project takes on the ambitious task of compiling a ton of data, from Censuses, real estate agreements, zoning maps, contemporary datasets, and much more into one relatively digestible map. It does this all while providing the primary sources where it is pulling its information from. While it would’ve been fascinating to know how long it took too complete this project, it isn’t mentioned anywhere through the website.
This project was created by Professor Colin Gordon from the University of Iowa, to be a companion to his book of the same title. It aims to aid the reader in understanding some complex, and unfamiliar legislative terminology by physically showing how this legislation affected the people. To do this, it uses an interactive JavaScript- based map with lengthy descriptions. Allowing for the user to cycle through different points in time to see different data. While this project doesn’t explicitly draw any conclusions, it presents its information very bluntly allowing for the reader to draw their own conclusions. Professor Gordon lets the data speak for itself, we can see both the “cause” and the “effect” essentially through his use of maps and their descriptions. We can see how black and white people migrated through the region, and then we can read up on the regulations that could have motivated (or even restricted) certain movements in the area.
While being about St. Louis, I don’t believe this project is aimed solely to the people of the St. Louis area. It just provides St. Louis as one specific case study of discriminatory legislation. Professor Gordon references other locations that had similar legislations put into place, such as Baltimore, Louisville, and Greenville, South Carolina. This project all the same could have been done over any of those cities. However, I will say that having some general knowledge of areas in STL does help to make certain sections easier to read, as he references places like Forest Park, Kingshighway, and Washington Boulevard; without them being labeled.
I feel like this project did a very good job at displaying as much information as it does. It’s not easy to read through and decipher one piece of political legislation from 50 years ago, let alone the plethora that this project tackles. The biggest critique that I could place, is like that I mentioned earlier, that a few labels of significant areas of the map would make following along to many descriptions much easier. I’ve lived in the St. Louis area my whole life, but even I found myself struggling to keep up in a few places.
Overall, this is a very thoughtfully and meticulously put together project, that taught me a lot about the area I’ve grown up my whole life. We learn about discrimination in history class for much of our youth, and we do get to see a lot of examples in history. But having the example be my own home, at locations that I recognize, really adds a personal perspective to the issue that I haven’t quite experienced before.