Redlining Maps and Terrains of Sustainability
Interdisciplinary Mapping of Racialized Redlining to Present-Day
Sustainability Agendas in Human computer interaction (HCI)
In this work, we ask how historic redlining, a US government run, racially discriminatory practice of assessing and mapping property values for federally subsidized home loan eligibility in the 1930s, is tied to current issues of sustainability. We frame redlining as a historic data practice, tied to ongoing exposure to environmental harms and difficulty building generational wealth in African American communities in Indianapolis. To address this, my collaborators and I made maps to ground interdisciplinary discourse between the authors: two who research sustainable human computer interaction (SHCI) and one who researches sustainable food systems, including issues of food security. Our maps, which combine historical redlining maps and contemporary sustainability issues facing Indianapolis, helped us explore the ongoing impacts of redlining across our disciplines. We develop the term ‘sustainability’ for HCI across racial, socioeconomic, and environmental tensions and reflect on how SHCI’s emerging posthuman emphasis on human/non-human relations are associated with human/human challenges like redlining.
Redlining map of Indianapolis which we drew from in our consequent map making processes.
Publications:
Biggs, Heidi, Shellye Suttles, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2023. “Redlining Maps and Terrains of Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Mapping of Racialized Redlining to Present-Day Sustainability Agendas in HCI.” In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. Vol. 18. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581491.
Project Description
In this project, my collaborators and I used map making and duoethnography, a research method when two different researchers from different backgrounds discuss their cross-disciplinary understanding of an issue, to think through how historic redlining relates to present-day sustainability issues.
This work was inspired by wanted to continue to press on the possibilities and limits of posthumanism as a method for ecological thinking and sustainability research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Posthuman methods ask how we might decenter the human and design for human/non-human collaborative survival and entanglement. However, this theoretical lens has been critiqued for erasing human different, Indigenous epistemologies, and colonial histories.
So I wanted to know how it meshes (or clashes) with other sustianbility agendas. In this project, my collaborator was an agricultural economist who deals with sustainable food systems in Indianapolis so her lens on sustainability was that of socioeconomic sustainability. She asked questions like, can this family sustain their basic needs? Can they afford food? Do they have access to food? While my training and research, which has historically be influenced by thinking about sustainability in relation to environmental issues and posthuman framings, made me think about how treatment of non-humans (like rivers or soil) in Indianapolis intersects with treatment of African American and low-income humans.
Here are some of my maps I made in Photoshop, or by painting, drawing, and photography. I am a designer and posthuman researcher so my maps using making and material practices to try to find intersections between food security, more-than-humans, pollution, and redlined areas.
This is another type of map I made in Illustrator — it broke down every single redlined tract so that I could make maps out of keywords from the redlining documents (g).
These are maps made by my agricultural economist collaborator in R. She used census data and used R studio to create variables and test out intersections of Black poverty, Black food security, and Historic Redlining. In map (c) she finds connections between Black poverty, redlined neighborhoods, and proximity to water.
In this project, we discuss the tools, datasets, and disciplinary practices, and definitions of sustainability that guided our map making process, finding overlaps and gaps in our approaches.
Our maps provided geographic orientations, but also a collaborative reorientation and sensitization to our different disciplines, relations to data, and definitions of sustainability. We were also curious how histories of racialized data practices lay the groundwork for disparate outcomes in climate changed futures and automated data ecologies.