Description
An introduction to the critical cartographic approaches of Radical Atlas of Ferguson USA (Belt, 2024) a book that spatializes political systems of structural inequality, told through the lens of Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is where a Black teenager named Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer in 2014—and where the movement for Black Lives radiated in the weeks after. In over one-hundred maps the atlas reveals contemporary tools of exploitation and disenfranchisement in the built environment that underscore the events ten years ago and show why little has changed today.
Maps draw from across interdisciplinary urban theories and data/design sources to visualize contradictions of municipal politics—in tax structures, corporate incentives, housing, franchise models, even landscape—that do not improve life for residents but exacerbate erosion of their democratic rights.
The presentation highlights how to depict the city as a contested political economic space.
