Mapping Evanston's Segregation Geographies
Evanston, IL, USA
By Jason Brown
segregation, race, participatory, community, equity
This project compares qualitative and quantitative data from participatory mapping done in Evanston, IL to chart local segregation patterns.
In the past year, Evanston, Illinois has begun a program to pursue reparations for its black residents, starting with specific funding for housing, with planned campaigns for schooling and business community repair. With this effort, Evanston becomes the first city to initiate a localized reparations program that seeks to repair for the longstanding damages of slavery, with subsequent (and compounding) oppression seen through Jim Crow policies and attitudes, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and police brutality - struggles which have come to fuller light in the past few years.
But, reparations - repair - is not merely a numbers game. For true social repair to occur on the community level, as Evanston is attempting, there must be a socially recognized story of place and space. As a community artist and organizer in Evanston for 5+ years, I organized a series of workshops to map local understandings of equity, and I called this workshop Collective Cartography. This project here is an off-shoot and compilation of significant findings of Collective Cartography, while comparing it with historical, institutional controls of space. Lastly, I show a few maps to contextualize what this means in terms of residential and school access patterns.
This first map is derived directly from findings of the Collective Cartography project. I simplified patterns from over 17 maps to get these 5 significant barriers that were either repeatedly mentioned by cartographers, or stuck out as unique, telling markers of division in the community. As these were observations directly from residents and workers of Evanston, I call this Perceived Barriers. These are barriers that mark the everyday lives of the cartographers. Cartographers were encouraged to be imaginative with their drawing and labeling, hence we have names like the “Rio Grande,” right in Evanston.
While I have included the basic definitions here, I have also compiled these stories on a clickable webmap so that residents can search for there familiar place and see what barriers may be nearby. On this website, I also include more of the richly storied context that was Collective Cartography. Each line has meaning as a “barrier,” but it was also the product of a lived conversation. I hope to capture that context here:
Website: https://geocommunetrics.squarespace.com/perceived-barriers
This was not an easy selection and translation process. Collective Cartography as a program sought to give the power of mapping “back to the people,” so now it was my job as an arbitrary authority to take that power back and highlight select findings. To inform this selection and curation process, I immersed myself in a document that has been a key part of Evanston’s reparations project, the Policies and Practices Directly Affection the African Americans Community. This allowed me to get a historic and spatial context to review my own collected maps from Collective Cartography.
This research led directly to the development of my second map. This map is a similarly complex compilation of sources, but institutional, rather than individual stories. As Proscribed Barriers, these mapped lines are handed down by seated authorities and constructed into the built environment through actual material or functioning policy. Included here are known layers from HOLC, familarly “redline” maps, (thanks to Mapping Inequality, which has made these shapefiles far more accessible), as well as zoning maps from the City’s database, and additionally drawn physical barriers: a water canal and raised train tracks.
What’s interestingly clear about this map is how institutional barriers tend to clump together and compound their effects. Train lines here are parallel to commercial corridors, and a historic line, now gone, leaves a swath of industrial and commercial space in the west. But what does this have to do with race, with segregation?
To figure this out, I simplified and combined the findings from the Perceived and Proscribed Barriers maps to create Protracted Barriers. This is a zone in which many of these lines intersect, converge, and create a dense place of barriers. This should be suspicious. What is here? Well, its proximity to downtown shouldn’t be too surprising, but neither is its proximity, and indeed circumference to the historic black community. Through mapping the Protracted Barriers, we see how historic institutional barriers have informed, and perhaps colluded with social barriers to sort-out Evanston’s population.
This is made most clear on two more maps: charting the black and white populations in reference to residential zone patterning. I utilized Census 2010 population numbers to created a random-point density map to imagine the presence of individual black and white Evanstonians at home. What is suspicious here is the clearly disproportionate presence of white residents in R1 zones. In Evanston, R1 zoning is the lowest density, single-family zone, and truly a proxy for Evanston’s suburban mythos as a “City of Homes.” Historic homes with large yards and separate garages speckle the lakeshore and the northwest corner of town. Meanwhile, two-family and larger multi-family homes find their place on the south and west sides of town. Noticeably, this is also where the black communities have come to live. But why? More research on this is needs to be done. But, it’s clear that the patterns outlined by our Perceived, Proscribed, and Protracted Barriers follow with the lived reality of Evanston’s segregated neighborhoods.
Lastly, I wanted to look at another system effected by Evanston’s historic segregation: schools. In the 1960’s, Evanston pursued a desegregation plan by bussing white students in to the historic 5th ward (what comprises most of the Protracted area), and busing black students out. These efforts, besides putting undue pressure on black families also ultimately shut down a school which had been a core of the black community, Foster School. It failed to be replaced by magnet school which drew almost exclusively white attendance. Thus, a major redistricting happened, and the 5th Ward is without a school, as students are bussed throughout town, across 5 schools. Although Evanston has proudly been the northern suburb of Chicago to which many families migrate to raise their kids in its “good schools,” this privilege is not granted to the communities that have been black since the early 1900’s.
This last map is complex and layered. But, as a living, clickable map, I hope that users can turn layers on and off to see how the distribution of population, public and private schools, and administrative borders contributes to a continually sorted-out city. In this way, all the above maps contribute to Evanston’s growing consciousness about how its community has become segregated, and what patterns need to be addressed as the city moves towards social, racial, administrative, and economic repair.