Mapping Detroit

A data visualization of urban history and racializing space

This map is only the beginning...

  1. Mission
  2. Digital precedents
  3. Project timeline
  4. Support needed to finish project

1. Mission

This mapping project will visualize Detroit's evolution from colonial frontier town, to industrial metropolis, to decaying rust belt city, and finally to the city's present-day landscape of poverty and segregation. The focus is not on all urban history. Nor is the focus on the purely formal qualities of the city plan like streets, rivers, and buildings. Instead, one theme will animate this map: racializing space.

The project will take the form of an interactive timeline showing the extent of street network and transportation development for each decade in urban history. Above this map of the urban form will be laid selected thematic maps specific to each decade. Thematic maps will visualize topics like population density, housing quality and price, racial segegration, factory locations, and redlining. The social qualities of urban life (like segregation and poverty) influenced the spatial qualities of the urban form (like the locations of urban renewal projects). The racial and the spatial cannot be separated, and this map will reveal how they are linked.

By reading maps, viewers in the general public will understand the urban form and the relationship between race and space in 20th-century Detroit. The project will empower viewers through data to make their own observations about urban history.

By overlaying social data from the census above spatial data from city maps, data-driven correlations can be created. For instance, this interactive map will answer questions like: In what types of spaces and living conditions were Blacks segregated? How did housing quality for each neighborhood change with each census? How much did neighborhoods that were redlined behave differently than neighborhoods that were not?

In this way, the research deliverable will serve both audiences of scholars and the public. All data and source code behind this project will be made available online for free download.

2. Digital Precedents

This project is inspired by interactive maps of the urban form created for other cities:

Carta BCN

A team of historians, architects, and planners have assembled an interactive web map about Barcelona's urban development from the Roman era to present day.

Mapping Historical NY

This digital exhibit consists of two parts: an interactive map about demographic changes to the entire city and a series of neighborhood and thematic case studies.

The Detroit Evolution Animation

My nine-minute history film tracing the evolution of Detroit's urban from from the 1700s to present. The graphics and color scheme of this film will inform the visual layout and spatial themes of this map.

3. Project Timeline

Fall '21

Assemble census data. Identify historic maps.

Refine project aims and research methods.

Winter '22

Synthesize census data and historic maps into a single spatial file.

Beta version of map shared online.

Spring '22

Proof and test beta version of interactive map.

Correct census data and map files for spatial inaccuracies.

Summer '22

Work with university faculty in architecture, planning, history, and other allied fields on a series of case studies that reflect on specific years or specific themes in the main map. Each case study will be called a story map.

Fall '22

Publication of map for digital exhibit.

4. Project Needs

Summer 2022 research funding

I would estimate working forty hours a week on this project for the four summer months of April through August. (16 weeks x 40 hours per week = 640 hours at least). I also hope to develop this research part-time during the winter semester. As I anticipate this visualization of racial and spatial to take hundreds of hours, support and funding from Taubman College is critical.

PC laptop with latest ArcGIS Pro software installed

Spatial data and maps are created in ArcGIS and then uploaded online.

This software is not compatible with the Apple brand computers I have. Remote work is not possible if I am tethered to the college computer lab.

Case study authors

The map functions as an introduction to the project and as a visual "table of contents" that links to specific case studies. I can write a few case studies and story maps within the larger map, but this series is best written collaboratively. For instance, the history of Royal Oak Township, the demolition of Black Bottom, and a history of court cases fighting housing segregation make a few studies situated within the larger project. Each case study will take the form a visual and image driven story map like the redlining interactive shown above. Case studies can present more place-specific and more data-driven research than the larger map.

This sample story map was written for the general public. To make the case for reparations, the evidence of historic images, maps, and data must be presented in a visual and spatial language. A college degree should not be a prerequisite to understanding. On a side note, this is my main concern with Critical Race Theory. Most arguments I have seen are written for an academic audience. As academics who speak mostly to other academics in academic journals that require paid subscriptions to read, we assume and trust others outside the Ivory Tower will translate our research for the public to understand. A larger segment of the American public has heard about Critical Race Theory from Fox News than from scholars and historians directly. Therefore, for an argument about reparations and Critical Race Theory to be inaccessible to voters and to the people most effected by prejudice is, I feel, itself an injustice.