A Great Example of GIS Mapping Technology + Grassroots Advocacy Power to Visually Illustrate Discrimination

I just read an excellent example of how GIS software can be used to reveal discrimination in consumer services, social programs, and public utilities. This article is a long read, but it’s worth it because it gives a history of GIS software, the recent emergence of popular GIS tools, how GIS tools are visually revealing discrimination, and how non-GIS experts (like me!) are using these tools to create more understanding. The article begins with a concrete example from the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, a recently founded non-profit that provided visual maps to in a federal jury case that awarded “the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County.”  The rest of the article is here. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the loooong article: (on another note, I just discovered the Miller-McCune RSS feed - lots of great articles!)

“This democratization of GIS has spurred new thinking about its potential application at the grassroots, rather than institutional, level…

The exclusion of poor and minority communities from municipal services is but one social ill that GIS mapping can illustrate and help alleviate. Today, an increasing number of academics, attorneys, nonprofits and community groups are using maps to identify social problems, devise solutions and leverage change. GIS is being deployed to combat discrimination and inequities in education, health care access, housing, employment opportunities, transportation and law enforcement. “You’re not up to date in social justice advocacy if you don’t know how to use GIS maps,” says Anita Earls, director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, N.C.

Still, GIS is in its relative infancy as a popular science, and public awareness of its attributes and capacity is relatively low. ……. “People are jaded with statistics, and even more jaded with pie charts and graphs,” says Keith Ernst, research director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, which has used maps to identify patterns of predatory lending in low-income communities. “But if you put the information on a map, people are more willing to hear what you say. We’re visual creatures, and seeing is believing….

Historians cite ancient cave paintings of migratory game routes as a primitive geographic information system, the superimposition of data on a geographic image. An English physician mapped the location of London residents sickened by cholera during an outbreak in 1857, which he analyzed to identify the source of the disease. Advancements in photographic processes in the early 20th century enabled the creation of translucent images of geographically ordered demographic data that could be layered atop a map, a technique pioneered by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression….

Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.”