It’s hard to believe that the fellowship is coming to a close! It feels like little time has passed since June, yet at the same time I feel like so much has changed, both in my relationship with Right to the City as well as my own scholarly interests.
For the first few weeks of the summer, work was admittedly slow. My role within Right to the City, as well as the part my research work with the membership census would play in the Homes For All membership assembly, weren’t entirely clear at that point. But upon arriving in Atlanta for assembly prep and connecting with the rest of the staff, I felt much more at ease and had a greater understanding of how my work would be acting as an aid for the member organizations as they began to consider what a 10-year strategy for the land and housing movement would look like, and how keeping a record of their collective victories in the form of digital maps would help member groups better visualize the widespread change they were participating in and ensure that the histories of their respective struggles would be recorded– that the legacy of their work wouldn’t be erased.
While I am certainly proud of what I was able to produce ahead of the assembly, I’m certainly more excited about what’s on the horizon. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, HFA member groups participated in a couple of collective mapping projects over the course of the assembly– one charting victories and key turning points in their campaigns from 2016-2018 on a timeline, the other mapping strengths, weaknesses, and campaign themes on a map of the United States. We’re still waiting on the documentation team to transcribe every Post-it note, but once that’s been completed, I’m looking to use that information to create ArcGIS story maps, charting their successes over time, as well as help strengthen the existing member census maps. Additionally, I’m also looking to work with people within the HFA network who expressed interest in aiding in the creation of more interactive maps to create a platform that allows members to add any campaign updates as well as photos, videos, and audio clips directly onto a map (pending the approval of those managing the map). While this framework certainly has its limitations (the flattening effect persists), these types of maps are striving for something greater than the static membership map currently on our website. There’s so much to the story of our member groups than what that graphic is capable of communicating. With more interactive visualizations, you can get closer to understanding the work that they’ve been doing, as well as how it fits into the local and national landscapes. Now that we have ArcGIS, RTC/HFA has the potential to do justice by their member organizations and the years of work that they’ve put into their campaigns better than the previous dots. Additionally, I’d like to consider putting together something similar to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s Narratives of Displacement and Resistance oral history map, which plots sites of displacement with interviews of evicted tenants, with organizers/tenants tied to our member organizations, adding a deeper human element to the network of dots.
On the other end is my Baltimore research, which I started when my work at RTC was getting slow. This was a really exciting opportunity for me. Prior to this summer, I had done informal research on the city and its cyclical history (both in terms of development interests as well as devaluation of predominantly black neighborhoods and their residents) which I’ve explored in a number of my papers over the years (the generational damage done by redlining and general disinvestment from West Baltimore, the parallels between the aftermaths of the 1968 and 2015 uprisings, and the damage done by national media outlets and popular depictions of Baltimore to the public’s capacity to understand the context from which the uprising arose), but this was the first chance for me to dedicate time to compiling this information in a more comprehensive manner. Pulling from datasets, research papers, and historical accounts, I had been able to piece together a more complete story of a struggle that speaks just as much to national trends of disinvestment as it does to the local tensions faced in the city’s modern development plans.
However, one thing I failed to accomplish over the scope of the summer was the incorporation of that human element into mapping the state of Baltimore in 2018. This has always been a priority for me, as I’ve seen how news outlets, HBO’s The Wire, and more privileged residents of Baltimore City and County fail to communicate the systematic oppression that has run rampant in East and West Baltimore. It’s only through personal accounts, like interviews in the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising 2015 archive or stories shared in the podcast “Baltimore: The Rise of Charm City,” that the true Baltimore (at least the Baltimore with which black residents operate within) comes through. You feel the pain. You see the places in which people are organizing for equitable development without relying on the state. And, as seen this week with Mayor Catherine Pugh’s commitment to HFA member Baltimore Housing Roundtable’s plan for an annual $20 million investment into developing affordable housing through community-controlled land trusts, you see how their organizing is contributing to monumental shifts that were previously unheard of. Luckily, I’ll be interviewing Terrel Askew, an organizer with United Workers (one of the groups partnered with BHR), later this week about the work that went into this historic victory and his own relationship with Baltimore, but it would have been nice to have done more of this over the summer.
But in some ways, I feel that this outcome worked out in my favor. This win helped me remember to look at the positives. Yes, black Baltimoreans have largely been set up for failure, and while it’s important to record the histories that drove us to the current moment and refuse to let these injustices be forgotten, but it’s just as vital that we record the beauty in their resistance, a future that gets brighter with each passing day of organizing. It’s important that any work I do on Baltimore makes space for both. I plan to continue my research through the school year, and as part of that I’d like to focus more attention on capturing the voices of those who are organizing for a Baltimore that serves the needs of all of its residents.
Beautiful final reflection, Stephanie! I’ve been really proud of the way you’ve taken some of the slow periods at RTTC as an opportunity to hone your research and mapping skills around a topic and place that mean so much to you (i.e. Baltimore). But I’ve also been excited by the ways you’ve interrogated mapping as a practice that works best when instrumentalized in support of other, qualitative research. I envision the final map you create for RTTC as being “read” a little differently than other maps — rather than simply capturing the geography of the movement, it will help show definitively how widespread and rich the movement is. Seeing all of the activity mapped demonstrates that all corners of the nation are facing a housing crisis and that those same corners are organizing to resist profit over people. More than that, though, the other qualitative assets you’re hoping to add — audio, video, interviews, etc. — have the potential to emphasize the re-em-“place”-ment (vs. dis-“place”-ment) of these communities through activism. That is really what the right to the city is about — not just the right to exist and occupy space, but the right to self-determine and claim a place as home. By the way, my friend Denise was one of the people who spearheaded the “Preserve the Baltimore Uprising” site. I’m going to share this with her!