Redlining in Literature

— Michel de Certeau, Walking the City

This project began in the spring of 2020, a simple spreadsheet in the center of a tempest. The pandemic was then still in its early days; it was the era of bread-baking and sanitizing groceries, of Tiger King and toilet paper shortages. A time when Zoom calls were novel and we still believed in the idea of flattening the curve, when 100,000 COVID deaths - a mere tenth of the total now - felt truly incomprehensible.

These were the days when social distancing was at its peak. Times Square sat empty; so did the Piazza San Marco, the Red Square, the Kaaba in Mecca's Grand Mosque. I was living alone, well and fully isolated, finding relief in my daily dog walks - and wishing desperately that Nashville was more walkable.

This began as a project about walking. About cataloguing routes. I was thinking about Baudelaire’s flâneur and the power of leisurely spectatorship. I was thinking about how strange it was to be walking empty streets with nothing to see at all, and, as a woman, about how strange it was to walk without being seen.

Janet Wolff argues that the female flâneur, or flâneuse, isn’t a real possibility: “There is no question of inventing the flâneuse,” she writes. “The essential point is that such a figure was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (45). In a lot of ways, I agree with her, even when I reassign her comments to a contemporary context. How many times have I been honked at on the street, disrupting a daydream? How many times have I felt uncomfortable as the lone woman on a dark block? Perhaps the role of the flâneur always necessitates masculinity, because its fundamental principle is the ability to remain invisible, and the female body - by no fault of its own, of course - simply does not have access to that same kind of invisibility. 

Yet what Wolff and many of her fellow critics of the flâneuse leave out is the question of race - and I see this as a massive oversight. If the female body’s hyper-visibility precludes the possibility of the flâneuse, how do we understand this concept in relation to the Black body? Baudelaire’s loafing flâneur is the picture of sophistication - the languid, fashionable dandy. To dawdle while Black, however, is not a celebration; it is loitering. It is a crime. For Blackness is itself a kind of paradox - that which renders one both invisible and hyper-visible simultaneously. The Black body is negligible to authority until the very moment it becomes otherwise, and then it is rendered deviant, criminal.

So this project began as an interrogation of the notion of the Black flâneur. I examined three New York City-based novels spanning roughly across the 20th century - The Blacker the Berry (1929) by Wallace Thurman, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) by James Baldwin, and Open City (2011) by Teju Cole - and mapped the walks taken by characters in these novels, hoping to consider these routes not only as representations of the city over time but also as a reflection of the characters’ internal states. I later expanded this scope to include a number of other novels; the fourth text, which I have also presented here, is Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers, a 2017 novel about the Great Recession.

What quickly became apparent, though, was that understanding these routes required more than simple mapping. It required a greater consideration of external factors, of the carceral measures imposed on the bodies of my novels' characters. By mapping these routes, I had hoped to create a kind of psychogeographic map, a bird’s-eye representation of a character’s interiority. I needed something more: a consideration of physical limitations imposed by city-planning systems; and perhaps specifically, those imposed by segregation and the legacy of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation.

More than 80 years ago, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created “Residential Security” maps of major American cities. The maps utilized data and evaluations organized by local real estate professionals—lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers—in cities across the country to evaluate "mortgage security" across various neighborhoods. Neighborhoods considered high risk or “hazardous” were often “redlined” by lending institutions, denying them access to capital investment which could improve the housing and economic opportunities of residents.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the areas receiving "D" grades were often assigned to areas with majority-minority populations. The HOLC did not create housing segregation, but it certainly enabled it, systematizing and regulating the process. These documents are rife with language that communicates a clear disdain for impoverished populations, and particularly for immigrants and people of color.

In Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for instance, agents noted that "colored infiltration" had had "a definitely adverse influence on neighborhood desirability." In north Harlem, which you will see well-represented in my maps below, agents specifically noted an "infiltration of Negroes," adding that though the district had "formerly" been a "good" area, "with many well-built private homes," it was now "practically entirely negro." The implication here, of course, is that the area's Black population is precisely the reason why it is now an undesirable neighborhood.

For the purposes of this project, I have layered my initial walking maps with HOLC data provided by the University of Richmond's “Mapping Inequality” project. Mapping Inequality has digitized the HOLC archive's maps, making them available to the public in multiple downloadable forms. These combined maps make clear the impact of redlining on the physical movement of the characters in these novels; even in 21st century texts, the legacy of housing segregation is clear.

To collect this data, I sorted through a number of books -- not just the texts indicated above, though I ultimately narrowed down my mapping in the interest of time. I took note of any walking scenes and assembled all walks in   Google Sheets  , organizing them accordingly.

My columns were as follows: book title, author, year of publication, character in question,  general route taken, direction of the route, OLC plus code for the location in question, page of occurance, and an accompanying quotation. I also assigned a number to each location, with whole numbers representing destinations and decimals representing roads specified between the two locations.

While my initial project utilized ArcGIS StoryMaps, I was dissatisfied with the basic capabilities of those features. For this new iteration, I chose to map my routes using an in-browser GeoJSON program I found through GitHub. I then exported these to ArcGIS and layered them in Map Viewer, utilizing an open source GeoJSON file provided by the Mapping Inequality project. At points I also considered utilizing a 3D model of New York provided by the Department of City Planning (see above), but ultimately I did away with this feature, as it slowed my map’s loading to a glacial pace.

Each of the maps in my final quartet is quite different from the others. When viewed separately, the maps are case studies, portraits of characters - of their relationships, their internal states, their personal trajectories. Viewed together, however, they are representations of the larger history of New York City. The impact of segregation becomes quickly apparent. 

There is an obvious correlation in these maps between the year in which the novel takes place and the total area wandered within the text. Gender dynamics in the various periods these novels cover clearly play into the breadth of any given map - indeed, one can easily note that our novels' male characters have more freedom to wander, even if that wandering is fraught. Admittedly, this is an imperfect study; the data set is far too small to make significant conclusions. But I’m also not searching for statistical significance so much as consistent anecdotal evidence. I could never catalogue every Black New York City novel.

In considering a potential future use-case for this data set, I find myself considering the potential for covert deviance and reclamation of a space through the act of wandering. Julius in particular rarely takes a direct path; rather, he finds joy and enlightenment in the detour. The possibility of this reclamation in Black and especially Black female narratives is particularly meaningful. If, as de Certeau writes, “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level… it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian” (97), then walking the city, especially the spaces that are inaccessible in the maps of earlier novels in this project, becomes a potentially political act. The imposed routes of major thoroughfares, grid systems and subway lines are inherently representative of the regulatory abilities of the state -- a state that has historically disenfranchised Black people and women. As Katherine McKittrick writes, “interrogations and remappings provided by Black diaspora populations can incite new, or different, and perhaps more just, geographic stories” (xix).

1. Baldwin, James. If Beale Street Could Talk. 1974. Vintage Books, 2009.
2. Cole, Teju. Open City. Random House, 2011.
3. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. 1929.
4. “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining.
5. Mbue, Imbolo. Behold the Dreamers. Random House, 2017.
6. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 
7. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. The MIT Press, 1998.
8. Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life. The Macaulay Company, 1929.
9. Wolff, Janet. "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 3, 1985, pp. 37-46.