the zones:

The answer to why two adjacent neighborhoods in Durham can look completely different from one another — in terms of maintenance of infrastructure, availability of public funding, access to green spaces, and overall quality of living — lies in how the city was divided almost a century ago. To fully understand the disparity that exists in the city today, it is helpful to turn back the pages and examine a document from the era when major urban planning decisions were made.

 

The Residential Security Map of Durham from 1937 depicts how city planners quite literally drew lines between neighborhoods, dividing certain communities into vague classifications that ultimately led to their economic decline. The interactive tool above features a digitized version of the 1937 map and congregates available information to compare the historical policies made for neighborhoods to their current states today.

 

By clicking on a neighborhood, you will be presented with a pop-up displaying a side-by-side view: on the left, the original document made by city planners to describe the neighborhood with statistics on racial composition, rental value, buildings, and income of residents; whereas on the right, you will be able to view the modern-day condition of the area by moving around a virtual representation powered by Google Maps Street View.

 

Centralizing these different data sets in one unified resource allows us to make direct observations on the correlation between the historical categorization of neighborhoods and their states today, as well as compare different neighborhoods — painting an overall clearer picture of the visible impacts of red-lining on Durham’s neighborhoods today.