Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs

Animated Maps

Some of the core maps from Citizen Brown are presented here as short animations.  The maps were composed in ARC GIS and animated in Powerpoint.  The first shows the spread of new single-family construction and municipal incorporation in St. Louis and St. Louis County from 1900 to 2000.  Single family homes (in red) are mapped by parcel, by year built.  Beyond the inner suburbs, the pace of residential subdivision and construction generally preceded municipal incorporation (shown here in yellow). The second map traces the same developments--the history of home construction and municipal annexation and incorporation--in and around the African American enclave of Elmwood Park.  Here the pattern, as the neighboring municipalities of Overland and Olivette add no residential development and annex new territory, is the effective quarantine of Elmwood Park. The third map traces the same development for Meacham Park.  Again, neighboring municipalities (in this case, Kirkwood, Crestwood, and Sunset Hills) surrounded and isolated the older African American enclave. This isolation was sealed by land-use zoning, in which the municipalities neighboring Elmwood Park and Meacham Park used hard boundaries (highways, rail lines, creeks) and industrial or commercial zoning to create buffers between tracts of white- and black-occupied housing.  For both Elmwood Park and Meacham Park, isolation from conventional suburban infrastructure and services eventually led to plans for redevelopment.  The last two maps document the pace and pattern of redevelopment in both settings.
 
 


 

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