Maps show racial breakdown of American cities

Detroit: Red represents White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot represents 25 people

Washington, DC: The east-west divide of the nation's capital can clearly be seen

New York: The dots are so dense they almost cannot help but be separated - yet the Big Apple still has clear pockets of ethnicity
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These are the maps that show the racial breakdown of America’s biggest cities.

Using information from the latest U.S. census results, the maps show the extent to which America has blended together the races in the nation’s 40 largest cities.

With one dot equalling 25 people, digital cartographer Eric Fischer then colour-coded them based on race, with whites represented by pink, blacks by blue, Hispanic by orange and Asians by green.

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I thought this was pretty neat. Not sure what to make of it, but thought I'd share.

people like to live with their own kind.

The island of red in the area of blue in the DC map is Capitol Hill, where it's kind of expensive and became trendy about two decades ago. So that's why the whites live there.

I looked at NYC. I don't really know NYC. There's a similar area in Kings where a small enclave of whites lives in a sea of blacks. I can't figure out what it is. It seems to be centered at the intersection of Nostrand Ave and Empire Blvd, which looks like every other neighborhood in Kings.

Every (upper middle class) white person I know who lives in a city says they like it because it's diverse.

what would be cool (and very very arty) would be to convert a 4 color process image (CYMK) into a racial map and overlay it on a city to show what kind of diversity you would really get if you were to interpret an image's CMYK components as groups of 25 people of a certain ethnicity.

I'll see if I can mock up an example and upload it later.

Thats great glatt - thats one thing I was hoping for. Some one who lived in or knew a city to make it ore personal or explain what some of the areas are like.
I also wonder what Chicago or Tempe might look like.

See how freeways affect more than just traffic...

This is the blob of whites in the middle of Detroit.

Lamplighter;685264 wrote:

See how freeways affect more than just traffic...

In Philly's case the boundaries long preceded the highways, in fact they dictated the location of most of them. Sorely needed I-476 took 50 years to get built, because the rich fuckers had the clout and lawyers to fight it, until the old guard died off.

Weren't those routes of travel there long before highways?

But even so once the freeways are in, neighborhood (racial) boundaries are often set in concrete (pun intended).

The trouble in Philly is the ones that don't follow water, are mostly elevated highways, which makes it harder to keep the riff raff in their place.

That's my point exactly... and such attitudes go both ways

But neighborhood (racial) boundaries were often set in concrete long before the freeways came.

Or just tear down the poor peoples houses to build 'em. Urban renewal money bolsters highway funds, a win-win for the city.

monster;685273 wrote:

This is the blob of whites in the middle of Detroit.

I thought so for a while, but Wayne State is relatively small; and as a cultural center, the Cass Corridor was also a large player in the civil rights movement. It's actually the tiny dot of not-blue further south-southwest, which is small enough not to show clearly on my edited map. I'm more struck by the solidity and length of the white/black split down 8-Mile road.

The main blob of whites is Hamtramck, a city notable for its diversity and recent influx of middle easterners. The two statistics I heard about it, which I've not verified at all, were that in total, students at the Hamtramck highschool spoke something on the order of 60 different languages, and that it was the largest Iraqi population outside of Iraq. A more solid, wikipedia-verified statistic, puts its population at 41% foreign-born.

I feel like these maps are sort of weirdly politicized and not informative enough: red, blue, and yellow on white doesn't give a even range of visual information; a person's address of record is only one part of their story, or the story of their community.

At one time, Hamtramck had had more bars per capita than any other city in the US.

They needed them at lunchtime and shift changes.;)

Hamtramck was where I thought initially because of all the Polish culture there, but when i tried to map it, that was showing as the area to the east of the "white" blob. But I bow to your superior knowledge -I'm too scared to go to Detroit :lol:

I am not sure what the point of this observation is other than "gee whiz". Other than during the 60's when the government introduced forced busing in an attempt to introduce integration what is the motivation of these observations. Should we have forced relocation?

Yes, force all politicians to live in blue collar neighborhoods. Oh, and no sneaking out to second homes. :haha:

I think xoB is on the right path, but instead of politicians being relocated
it should be the Federal Emergency Management Administration employees.

For example, if FEMA supervisors had been distributed one/block throughout New Orleans
right after Katrina, the entire city could have been rebuilt in just a year or two.

If not at least their trailers would look like this.

monster;685431 wrote:

Hamtramck was where I thought initially because of all the Polish culture there, but when i tried to map it, that was showing as the area to the east of the "white" blob. But I bow to your superior knowledge -I'm too scared to go to Detroit :lol:

So this came up at lunch today and I mentioned this thread, and my friend who works in Hamtramck said it has been predominantly muslim for the last generation. The Polish have moved out and only the (Packzi) bakeries remain. The call to prayer is the predominant sound feature in the district.

Can't remember how the racial dots were divided/defined, but as muslim is a religion not a race, could still be that's what's causing the blob. They ain't black. In the main.

The 2000 census for Hamtramck
Polish 22.9%
Black or African American 15.1%
Yugoslav 10.5%
Arab (Excluding Iraqi and Lebanese) 8.2%
Asian Indian 5.4%
Ukrainian 3.2%
German 2.9%
Albanian 2.8%
Bangladeshi 2.7%
Irish 2.2%
Italian 1.8%
Russia 1.4%
American 1.1%
French (except Basque) 0.8%
Lebanese 0.7%
Scottish 0.7%
Mexican 0.6%
Pakistani 0.6%
Macedonian 0.5%
Iraqi 0.5%

During the election, the SBS website (for the multicultural channel) had a page where the ethnic breakdown for each electorate could be seen. I can't seem to find it, so I think they've taken it down (damn!)

xoxoxoBruce;685733 wrote:

The 2000 census for Hamtramck
Polish 22.9%
Black or African American 15.1%
Yugoslav 10.5%
Arab (Excluding Iraqi and Lebanese) 8.2%
Asian Indian 5.4%
Ukrainian 3.2%
German 2.9%
Albanian 2.8%
Bangladeshi 2.7%
Irish 2.2%
Italian 1.8%
Russia 1.4%
American 1.1%
French (except Basque) 0.8%
Lebanese 0.7%
Scottish 0.7%
Mexican 0.6%
Pakistani 0.6%
Macedonian 0.5%
Iraqi 0.5%

Which just goes to show how meaningless it all is. I wonder if the 2.2% Irish were actually born there?

Well that was 2000, and in 2004 they passed an ordinance in response to the broadcasting of mosque prayer calls, so the 2010 results would be interesting to see.

The originals are huge images, but they give very detailed information.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

Do you know where to find the large images of the other cities?

The Chicago one is the original, done by Rankin in 2009. The rest are by Eric Fischer, who was inspired by the Rankin map of Chicago.

You can find the Fischer group here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624812674967/detail/

Click on the map you're interested in, then Actions/All Sizes.

Cool. thanks.

Thanks sharing. It's geat