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Mar 26

Undesign the Redline: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—Collaboration and Care in Mapping Displacement

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Virtual

This event is part of the Undesign the Redline at Barnard.

Summary

Founded in 2013 around a table at the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project was formed among community activists with the intention of documenting evictions and tech-led speculative displacement in San Francisco. Now with chapters in Los Angeles, New York City, and the Bay Area, the project uses a variety of modalities that employ technology and storytelling to build tenant power in anti-gentrification fights. AEMP embraces a connected approach to housing, data, and cartographic justice that foregrounds mutual aid, embeddedness, and accountability.

In this session facilitated by two long-time members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, participants will explore the use of media and technology to liberate narratives of displacement, dispossession and resistance from forces that flatten them. Mainstream digital media traps the lives and stories of displaced folks in statistics, numbers in a chart, dots on a map— all masquerading as the “empirical truth.” During this session, we will discuss media and research practices that complicate the totalizing forces of maps as well as leverage them as tools to reveal hidden histories, build community power, and give form to landscapes of injustice. 

Map of San Francisco bay area, with densely packed with red dots. The title reads, "Narratives of Displacement and Anti-Eviction Mapping Project"

Presenter Bios

Ariana Faye Allensworth is a visual artist and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work builds upon interests in photography, spatial justice, and the politics of the archive. She has over 10 years of experience as a cultural producer and arts administrator, specializing in arts education and social impact strategy. She currently works as a Senior Designer at IDEO and has previously held positions at The International Center of Photography, The Center for Cultural Power, Youth Speaks, and Cultural Engagement Lab. Ariana is a founding member of the New York City chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. 

Terra Graziani is a researcher and organizer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work focuses on the dispossession and resistance of tenants in California cities and how policing and state violence are used to control people’s relationship to land. She founded and helps run the Los Angeles chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and is Researcher at The Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA. 

Readings 

  1. Tensions and Lessons from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project by Terra Graziani and Mary Shi (with a focus on pages 7-14, folks are encouraged to read the full article)
  2. https://artwashing.antievictionmap.com/
  3. https://www.worstevictorsnyc.org/map
  4. https://shelterforce.org/2018/08/22/eviction-lab-misses-the-mark/  
  5. Residual Black Data by Romi Morrison, (Folks are encouraged to listen to the full lecture, we’ll be focusing on the content covered from 09:15-21:25)  https://vimeo.com/354276852  

Reading/Discussion Prompts

  • Romi invites listeners to consider, “What are we making inherently unknowable by making the world more measurable, familiar, and predictable?” In your experience, what are examples of ways of knowing the world that, in Romi’s words, “are discounted because of their inability to be neatly measured or efficiently accounted for”?
  • During their lecture, Romi invokes the research of Rob Nixon who coined the term “slow violence” to describe the attritional impacts of oppressive forces on communities. In what ways do or don’t the maps and creative projects explored in the readings give visibility to slow violence? 
  • How might the mapping practices explored in the readings be stretching or pushing up against the traditional rules of cartographic design and/or knowledge production? 
  • What present day legacies do you see of redlining in the Worst Evictors and Art Washing map? As we think through redlining as a process, how can we also name the current day practices of real estate that have a similar impact/enact racial violence? 
  • What does the Eviction Lab article surface about extractive research practices? Have you ever encountered any aspect of this dynamic in your work or life?