How Mapping Can Help Us Understand Social Injustice
In light of recent events, social inequality and how cities are planned have been in the public eye. Are architects and designers working towards fair, resilient, and sustainable cities? Or, are we contributing to an environment that perpetuates deep social and economic disparities?
If we look at how architecture and design schools form their students, we too often find designers that are trained to serve their own egos as opposed to serving the community.
Geographic Information System (GIS), in addition to all of the available data and innovative tools used to visualize it, make unequal opportunities and discrimination more and more evident. Mapping, when used correctly, can be very helpful to identify problems in an urban system.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, there was a lot of speculation regarding its transmission. One common villain to blame was density. However, acquired data disproved that theory very quickly. These two maps reveal how density and COVID-19 cases relate in different parts of the city.
