In 1875, there were fewer than 100 people who called the new
city of Orlando home. Fifty years later, the Old Cheney Highway still could not
accommodate an automobile from one side of Orlando to the other. The first
traffic light was not installed at the intersection of Colonial and Maguire
Boulevard—less than 2 miles from Lake Eola in the heart of downtown—until 1963.
What did the geographic transformation of Orlando look like?
I am interested in this question as a native Floridian who
will never cease to marvel at the rapidity of urbanization since the second
industrial revolution began to push agriculture to the margins with the speed
of a hydraulic piston. In the not too-distant future, I hope to see what it
looks like in the context of race. As Orlando has grown, its white citizens used
legal and extralegal means of segregating the city racially. Since 1965, most
of its citizens seem to this researcher to have made modest progress toward
integration and racial harmonization, but varying degrees of fatigue, reaction,
resentment, and even despair continue to belie the unity implied by the etymology
of the word community.
With that background, I am grateful for three recent works
of digital scholarship, the “Human Population Through Time” animation produced
by the American Museum of Natural History in 2016, Mapping Inequality:
Redlining in New Deal America from 2013, and Renewing Inequality: Urban
Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race 1955-1966 from 2018—the latter two
works come from the exemplary Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of
Richmond.
Human Population
Through Time
This presents the visualization that I am hoping to achieve,
albeit at a vastly superior production quality than I will be able to reach. After
something of a preamble 100,000 year prologue, it combines a line graph of the
human population with a pixel-density map of the major urban areas from the beginning
of the Common Era to present. The American Museum of Natural History’s
production team were a bit curious in their selections of major civilizations
to indicate with an icon superimposed over the map (why Roman and Han Empires,
but not Gupta?), but it is not too distracting. The really impressive element
is their sourcing. Anything at this scale is going to include a lot of
speculation, but they do not trust in one scholar. This is part of the World
Population History Project, and its sources and credits page is immense—more than
739 separate sources.
Mapping Inequality:
Redlining in New Deal America
The New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation made incredible
maps that color-coded America’s major urban areas in four grades: Best, Still
Desirable, Definitely Declining, and Hazardous, color-coded (no pun intended)
green, blue, yellow, and red, respectively (hence red-lining). The maps are
becoming notorious, and it will be an indictment on Americans if the work of
the people at the project do not make them more popularly-known and downright
infamous. The following excerpt describing the now-extremely-rough area of Jacksonville
I grew up in crystallizes the casual racism well:
The Panama Garden area and the southern portion of Northwest New Springfield are generally considered more desirable residential property than that in the remainder of this Section. The Section is occupied by 100% whites consisting principally of railroad men, City employees, clerical, and the lower-income salaried workers with annual incomes ranging from $1,000 to $2,500. Seventy percent of the occupants in this Section are home owners and there is no shifting of population [read: the whites are staying put and will not sell their homes to any more affluent blacks who might offer them a good price on their homes].”
Mapping Inequality is super strong in showing
powerful interactivity and model georectification—it’s fantastic.
Renewing
Inequality
I believe this will be the last major historical puzzle
piece that can show me by analogy in Daytona Beach, Tampa, and Miami what almost
certainly was done here in Orlando—the tragic preservation of inequality and segregation
through urban renewal and urban housing developments. I must confess that its
user interface is something of a cautionary tale to me of ambition; there is
just so much data to sift through it is pretty daunting rather than enticing to
this user, and I suspect I am a good bit more savvy than the median digital
humanist. Still, all that information is an absolute Fort Knox of historical
gold—it powerfully illustrates the scale and pervasiveness of the family
displacements of all races in this period.
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