Presenters: Susan Lucas and Roberta Mendonça De Carvalho

Redlining began in the 1930s when the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) produced housing security maps that were used to assess mortgage underwriting risk (Lloyd 2016). Neighborhoods with large African American populations were considered the greatest underwriting risk. Redlining is now acknowledged as an oppressive racialized system that caused long-term social and economic problems in African American neighborhoods (Jackson 1985). Improving urban sustainability is an important contemporary public policy goal that addresses social, economic and environmental injustice. Studies suggest that the idea and practice of sustainability is itself racialized. As a racialized practice sustainability negatively impacts already disadvantaged neighborhoods, such as previously redlined neighborhoods. The goals of this workshop are threefold. First, to enable participants to connect the historical legacy of redlining to current debates about the racialized nature of sustainability and understand how oppressive racialized power systems overlap and interact. Second, to show participants how to find and use publicly available data and free cloud-based data visualization tools to describe, map and quantify sustainability for a selection of Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Third, to help participants compare variations in sustainability across formally redlined and never-redlined neighborhoods and arrive at conclusions about how one historic (redlining) and one contemporary racialized system.

Register

If you require an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at diversity@pitt.edu by July 21

This workshop is a part of the 2021 Diversity Forum.