The revolution will be Mapped

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http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture_society/the-revolution-will-be-mapped-1650

The Revolution Will Be Mapped

GIS mapping technology is helping underprivileged communities get better services — from education and transportation to health care and law enforcement — by showing exactly what discrimination looks like.

By: Bob Burtman | December 28, 2009 | 05:00 AM (PST) | comment
Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities.Bill Bamberger


To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks.

Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw from this office, are dressed in their everyday summer attire, T-shirts and shorts. But when they begin pulling maps off printers, Parnell and Joyner step decidedly out of the last century. "Our daughter tells people we work for the CIA, because what we do is so hard to describe," Parnell says, only half-joking. Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race. The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not.

The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.
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But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked, says civil rights attorney Reed Colfax, who represented the Coal Run residents. "We could articulate the case in words," Colfax says. "But when you'd put up the maps, they'd stop listening to you and look at them say, 'Is this really possible?'" The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when residential discrimination was supported by law, have been reinforced under the cover of such contemporary land-use mechanisms as annexation, zoning and extra-territorial controls.

To produce the maps, the institute employs geographic information systems technology, a computer-based tool for organizing, analyzing and displaying data in a spatial or geographic context. While the maps seem simple, producing them is anything but. Data must be collected from a host of sources, including government databases, door-to-door surveys and Global Positioning System devices. The data is digitized, analyzed, converted to images and layered together in various combinations. Once the exclusive province of government, industry and academia, GIS technology has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, paralleling exponential gains in computer power and capacity. Affordable, user-friendly GIS software, online-mapping systems and the explosion of government data available on the Web have combined to speed the spread of GIS into the public arena.

This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level. University of North Carolina School of Law Dean Jack Boger has worked with the institute on some of its municipal discrimination cases and concluded that the phenomenon of exclusion knows few geographic boundaries. "This is a problem of nationwide scope," Boger says. "The evidence is, in effect, irrefutable." The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. "You're not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don't know how to use GIS maps," says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.

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