Abstract
This chapter explores Open Data through a historic lens, reviewing public history projects in the United States that are visualising historic mechanisms for maintaining racial segregation in U.S. cities during the first half of the twentieth century. The layering of data (housing covenants, demographic data, historic maps) reveals the relationship of these mechanisms—specifically racial covenants and federal government “redlining” maps—to current inequality and segregation. These projects not only serve to increase the transparency of private and governmental housing policies that have served to racially segregate American cities but also demonstrate how historic data, provided openly to the public, can inform contemporary discussions around equitable urban development.
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Abbreviations
- HOLC:
-
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation
- GIS:
-
Geographic Information System
- OCR:
-
Optical Character Recognition
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank several people for their contribution to the case studies presented in this chapter: Kirsten Delegard, Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, and Penny Petersen (Mapping Prejudice); Joshua Poe (Redlining Louisville), James Gregory (Segregated Seattle), and Robert Nelson (Mapping Inequality).
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Bakelmun, A., Shoenfeld, S.J. (2020). Open Data and Racial Segregation: Mapping the Historic Imprint of Racial Covenants and Redlining on American Cities. In: Hawken, S., Han, H., Pettit, C. (eds) Open Cities | Open Data. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6605-5_3
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