Summary
On June 17, 2024, the Asheville, NC, Reparations Commissions “voted to approve a settlement for injuries caused by redlining and urban renewal.” This is an incredible result of a project that has gone on, in many shapes and with different foci, for many years, led by Professor Richard Marciano, working with community members in Asheville. Bravo!
On June 17, 2024, the Asheville Reparations Commissions “voted to approve a settlement for injuries caused by redlining and urban renewal.” This is an incredible result of a project that has gone on, in many shapes and with different foci, for many years.
Professor Richard Marciano (now Director of the Advanced Information Collaboratory at the University of Maryland) began collecting data on redlining in 1996, focusing on his own neighborhood at the time, the Mission Hills district of San Diego. He presented a poster at the “ESRI GIS User Conference” in 1996: “Temporal & Spatial Data Prototype: 100 years of Neighborhood Urban Change in Mission Hills.” He presented another poster on redlining in San Diego in 1999 at ESRI: “The Balkanization of Urban San Diego.” This then became a museum exhibit which toured around San Diego County:
- “Tolerance Zones: a Touring Art Exhibit,” GIS & Art Exhibit, San Diego, CA: Jan. 6, 2000, San Diego Public Libraries, Richard Marciano, R. McKeon, M. Cox, P. Tse, C. Waymon, L. Whitehouse.
Around 2002 or 2003, HASTAC Cofounder David Theo Goldberg (and then Director of UCHRI), reached out to Richard and we began a long-term collaboration on this project, with many iterations at UCHRI, at the University of California’s HASS data center, and beyond.
After Richard moved to the University of North Carolina, he and I collaborated on a number of local and national presentations at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and he partnered with other researchers in the state, at UNC, Duke, and North Carolina State University, to focus on redlining and Jim Crow discrimination in urban renewal. At Duke, I helped to launch an interdisciplinary, cross-institutonal course around this project, “Making Data Matter,” where students found different ways to document the devastation experienced as a result of systematic redlining in Asheville, NC. In tandem with with representatives of the displaced Black community in Asheville, led by Priscilla Robinson (Director of Urban Renewal Impact Collaborative, NC), this complex collaboratory of researchers and community activists compiled an impressive archive of personal photographs, letters, demographic and neighborhood mapping data and, together, were able to document the continuing impact of systematic redlining that had happened there. Astonishingly, on June 17, 2024, the Asheville Reparations Commissions “voted to approve a settlement for injuries caused by redlining and urban renewal.”
Most recently, in the summer of 2024, Richard chaired a panel at the Society of American Archivists on the impact of AI on the future of archival work and “borrowed the NSF LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) acronym and modified it to LTAR (Long Term Archival Research), with five examples including Redlining which I put as a 25-year old project.”
This is crucial research with an important social purpose. From 1996 to 2024.
From DH to Reparations. Huge congratulations to all!
You can read more here:
Richard Marciano, et al., “Measuring the Impact of Urban Renewal,” AI Collaboratory, June 18, 2022, https://ai-collaboratory.net/2022/06/18/june-18-2022-measuring-the-impact-of-urban-renewal/.
Richard Marciano, et al., “Measuring the Impact of Urban Renewal,” AI Collaboratory, June 18, 2022, https://ai-collaboratory.net/2022/06/18/june-18-2022-measuring-the-impact-of-urban-renewal/.
“Making Data Matter,” a film produced, shot, and edited by Jonna McKone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz6UsXiLSYQ
See also, Cathy N. Davidson, “‘Measuring the Impact of Urban Renewal’: DH that Counts,” HASTAC.org, March 22, 2023. https://social-political-issues.hastac.hcommons.org/tag/richard-marciano/