The Pitzer course Organizational Studies 180 will have a guest speaker – Scott Markley, PhD, Research Director at National Zoning Atlas – on the HOLC “redlining” maps of the 1930s. This guest lecture is open to the consortial community and will be held at the Broad Performance Space, Pitzer College.

Talk Description: An expanding body of research has sought to connect the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) “redlining” maps from the 1930s to a wide array of present-day social injustices in the United States. The assertion has been that these federally produced maps helped entrench emerging co-geographies of racial segregation and value that have continued to reproduce racial-spatial inequities through time. However, the historical record is more complicated. In this talk, Markley reevaluates what these maps and their accompanying field notes can (and cannot) tell us about the inter-generational transmission of racial inequality. Markley proposes that HOLC’s “redlining” documents should not be read as literal prescriptions about where the agency believed real estate investments should and should not be steered but as part of a larger, state-backed spatial data science initiative that was about imposing order and predictability onto the housing landscape.

Mon Feb 23, 3:30pm-4:30pm

Broad Center Performance Space. Light refreshments served.

FMI Contact: marilyn_grell-brisk@pitzer.edu