Data Action by Sarah Williams

Author:Sarah Williams [Williams, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: activism; advocacy; Africa; API; architecture; Beijing Olympics; big data; cities; citizen; civic change; China; civil engagement; collaboration; collectivity; corporations; data; data analysis; data development; data science; data sharing; data visualization; democracy; design; Digital Matatus project; DIY; Ebola; environmental data; environmentalism; geography; Google; governance; government; graphic design; hacker; hacking; hacktivism; information science; Japan; justice; Manila; Nairobi; open data; policy; political science; politics; pollution; population; power; public; public good; social change; social justice; sociology; statistics; technology; transparency; urban design; urbanism; urban planning; urban science;
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

4.11 This Million Dollar Blocks map shows prison expenditures in Brooklyn, NY in 2003. The bright red blocks show where over a million dollars was spent in just one year. Source: Maps created by Eric Cadora, Laura Kurgan, David Reinfurt, and Sarah Williams, courtesy of Spatial Information Design Lab.

The images are at once alarming and captivating because they scale prison policy down to the size of a city block—something that everyone can understand (figure 4.13). Visualizing the data at the scale of the block was an important method for contextualizing the vast sums of money spent on incarceration. The maps show million-dollar blocks as bright red on a black background (a combination rarely seen on maps), which marks the issue as alarming at first glance. Maps showing race and poverty were presented alongside prison spending, allowing those who read the maps to connect incarceration to high levels of poverty and racial segregation. The causes underlying the million-dollar-block designation are multifaceted, of course, and there is no single answer. These maps were developed not to provide a solution, but rather to discuss the issue and present a message: we spend millions of dollars to incarcerate people in the United States, and the cycling of people in and out of prison has become a big business.23

The message was delivered using multiple forms of communication. At a 2006 exhibition of the Architecture League in New York City, maps of New York (New York), Wichita (Kansas), New Haven (Connecticut), New Orleans (Louisiana), and Phoenix (Arizona) were presented to the public (figure 4.16). A video seen upon entering the exhibition showed the flow of those incarcerated from their homes in Brooklyn to prisons in upstate New York, which amounted to a mass migration of people. The video asks the public to imagine if just “one million dollars was spent on resettlement rather than imprisonment,” what the communities might look like. While the video did not suggest a policy action, it was meant to teach the public about a topic, ask them to rethink it from their own perspective, and ultimately provoke a debate on mass incarceration and its effects on the communities once home to the incarcerated. The Architecture League exhibition helped the project gain recognition of the larger arts and architecture community, and was included in the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008. Now part of MoMA's permanent collection, the maps have been widely exhibited, discussed and disseminated (figures 4.12 and 4.13).

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