Mapping Community Harms

Map Summary

The Community Harms map explores the places, spaces, and policies which have limited black agency in Evanston, historically and present. Readers can click the mapped forms to find their definition and the historical, social, and/or political context behind the barriers.

Where Can I go with this Map?

This map is a collection of data points, lines, polygons, and narrative from national and local sources. First it draws on the collection of 17+ hand-drawn maps created as part of the Collective Cartography workshop run by me and my community partners between 2016 and 2019. You can click the EYE symbol by these lines to get more perspective on what they mean and why the community cartographers drew them.

Readers are invited to see how the barriers drawn by community members line up with other factors in Evanston’s social, political, and economic landscape.

Click the HOUSE symbol to see how the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation categories broke up Evanston. These geographies were borrowed from the fantastic project Mapping Inequality, which collected and georeferenced HOLC’s redlining maps in over 200 affected communities in America.

Check out the physical barriers and zoning categories to see how these visible and invisible structures divide Evanston. Click on the AQUADUCT for some consideration about physical space, and click on the GRID to learn more about the mapped zoning categories.

These layers were derived from findings in the report from the City of Evanston’s Reparations Subcommittee entitled “Evanston Policies and Practices Directly Affecting the African American Community, 1900-1960 (and Present).” This working document compiled by Dino Robinson of Shorefront Legacy and Dr. Jenny Thompson, of the Evanston History Center, outlines other historical barriers worth considering in a litany of “harms” which have kept Black Evanstonians from housing, employment, business, and leisure activities which white residents may take for granted.

Intended Use of this Map

In connection with the Community Honor Map, this map seeks to expound on the complexity of black life in Evanston. In doing so you can use this map to investigate what barriers have and still exist to limit black thriving. In contrast to the Honor map, this map is styled more for free reading; you are encouraged to read your own story into existence, using the traces on the map as clues or evidence.

Educators and students may find this map helpful as an expansion of place-based learning, and an exploration at how material and immaterial forces in our shared geography affect people’s livelihoods. Use this interdisciplinary tool to connect reading, history, civics, and the arts. Local representatives and organizers may find this map useful as the information is sourced both from technical archives as well as from citizen’s perceptions of space. As we get a better grasp of the political economies and social geographies of the harmed community, we can better examining the physical and invisible forces keeping their community from liberation.