As part of the ongoing Urban Transition Historical GIS Project, a team of researchers led by PSTC sociologist John Logan are reinvigorating the historical archive to create a new, comprehensive understanding of racial segregation patterns in the United States. 

A project of the Spatial Structures for the Social Sciences (S4) program, the Urban Transition Historical GIS Project uses historical census microdata to analyze contemporary social patterns and neighborhood dynamics on a variety of spatial scales. Since the project began over 10 years ago, researchers have successively created publicly accessible GIS maps of 39 major U.S. cities. 

With funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, the project’s current phase, “The Century Project,” specifically seeks to recreate the spatial neighborhood trajectories of African American and Hispanic communities throughout the 20th century. The ability to measure segregation patterns at this micro scale has allowed researchers to better understand the origins of racial segregation. Specifically, researchers have traced the evolution of segregated communities as they shifted from smaller ethnic enclaves to much larger districts at the beginning of the 20th century. 

“The roots of segregation are not in the events and policies of the 1920s and 1930s, as previously argued, but much earlier,” says Professor Logan. “We need to acknowledge that there has never been a time in U.S. history when African Americans were not residentially separated from whites and concentrated in the worst housing and in the most dangerous and least healthy neighborhoods.” 

In addition, the Latino community has largely been excluded from historical narratives of racial segregation, as the Census did not officially recognize Latino as a distinct racial identity prior to 1980. However, the Century Project seeks to address this disparity by using available secondary data such as language spoken at home and/or parent country of origin to produce new, historically accurate maps of communities that would be categorized as Latino today.

“We are preparing now to study their transitions over time, decade by decade, from a largely rural population in 1900 to the current situation where Latinos are nearly as segregated in metropolitan areas as are African Americans,” says Professor Logan. 

The project’s publicly available research findings are intended to help current and future researchers alike more substantively grapple with critical urban questions, including the ongoing implications of racial segregation within most major U.S. cities. 

“I hope that the Urban Transition HGIS Project will advance to the point where all the resources for studying these issues will be more easily accessible to the research community,” says Professor Logan.