Coffee & Viz: Infrastructures of Oppression: Mapping Racism in the Built Environment

This presentation features research produced in Spring 2022 in DIY Cartography, a graduate-level research seminar at NC State’s College of Design led by Professors Tania Allen and Sara Queen, which examines the history of racism in our built environment. The featured maps highlight the structural disparities of today overlaid with patterns of confederate memorial erection to expose a palimpsest of institutionalized racism.

As part of a public reckoning with the legacy of infrastructures that perpetuate racism across America, there have been loud calls for dismantling the 2,474 confederate memorials scattered across the landscape. Using data compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Allen and Queen began mapping attributes of the memorials, then used GIS, RAWGraphs, Tableau, and Adobe softwares to overlay memorial data with diverse measures of physical, societal, political, and economic structures that manifest and support systemic racism and ongoing oppression with aims to spark discussion and initiate change.