Browsing by Subject "Urban Geography"

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    Sensing Place: House-Scale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City
    (2018-09) Gardner, Tia-Simone
    In May of 2016 the University of Minnesota Law School Published a report titled “The Rise of White-Segregated Subsidized Housing.” Focusing specifically on Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, the report outlines how the market for federally subsidized housing led to the creation of white segregated housing via the invention of the artist loft, what they term Politically Opportune Subsidized Housing (POSH’s). As a non-white artist working at the intersection of cultural production, community-based practice, and urban planning, this article was not a surprise but rather provided valuable data sets that evidenced a social phenomenon that remains largely disavowed and sublimated beneath layers of passive conservatism known by the colloquium “Minnesota Nice. This project weaves together an interdisciplinary study that brings together practices of black feminism, geography, and architecture. Through the construction and attempt to locate an informal house, the epistemic, political, economic, and affective contexts of intersecting disparities in each of these areas became clear, particularly as problems that relate to living in cities. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach, I focus on understanding the formation, production, erosion, and/or annihilation of, a black sense of place through zoning and housing policy that continues to negatively impact Black people and also the ways that Black women and women of color have and continue to work against these policies by creating loopholes within these systems for themselves. Using a tiny house built by me and my friends/collaborators, I explore the question how and for what purposes does housing policy affect the production of Black spaces and how might we understand and respond to the politics of gentrification, ownership, and cultural production as labor. Further, I ask how time affects the way we think about, create policy around, and therefore are allowed to inhabit our homes.
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    Visualizing patterns in U.S. Urban population trends
    (2009-01) Schroeder, Jonathan Paul
    With the completion of the U.S. National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), it is now feasible to assemble a large dataset of historical census tract population statistics and boundary data in order to investigate patterns in long-term urban population trends. The present study makes use of this new resource to achieve a broad but concise overview of population trend patterns throughout major U.S. urban areas since 1950. This work thereby makes both methodological and substantive contributions to multiple fields of research, with much of the work dedicated to the development and assessment of new techniques to address two key methodological challenges. The first challenge is to construct a time series of census tract data, which requires linking data through time even where tract boundaries have changed. I present a few relatively simple areal interpolation techniques that can be used to address this problem. Two case studies indicate that a novel technique, cascading density weighting, should be effective both in the present setting and potentially elsewhere. The second methodological challenge is to identify an effective visualization strategy for investigating patterns in long-term trends. I present here a new conceptual framework that identifies a group of mapping techniques--trend summary maps--that should be most useful for visualizing patterns in trends. I provide an overview and assessment of several types of trend summary mapping techniques, and I introduce a novel technique, bicomponent trend mapping, which combines principal component analysis with bivariate choropleth mapping. This technique has several useful advantages not only for visualizing urban population trends but potentially in many other settings of spatio-temporal data visualization as well. Applying the new techniques to historical census tract data enables the central substantive contribution of this research: an overview of population trend variations throughout major U.S. urban cores. This overview supports the standard narrative of recent urban population dynamics--growth on the outskirts, decline in the cores, and some regrowth in centers--but it also reveals many regionally and locally unique patterns, indicating both divergence among cities and increasing heterogeneity within them.