Next City, August 14: Chicago segregation mapping project makes real-life connections
As a high school student living in the Englewood neighborhood, on Chicago’s south side, artist and photographer Tonika Lewis Johnson noticed the continuity of several of the city’s street names on her daily commute to Lane Technical College Prep High School, located on the city’s north side. The character of the streets, however, varied widely going from south to north.
“I definitely noticed those inequities. Because if you get off the train stop at Addison and take the [westbound] bus, essentially from the lake going all the way to Western [Avenue], you run into the exact same streets that exist in Englewood — Paulina, Damen, Winchester, Wolcott,” says Johnson. “I just recognized that, oh, these are very different and it just stuck with me.”
Eventually, those impressions manifested themselves in the Folded Map Project, an installation of photographs, a video of interviews with participants of the project and a map display of the city on exhibit till October at the Loyola University Museum of Art, which is free to the public.
“I wanted to create an example of what it looks like to have a direct conversation between people who have been segregated from each other, to see how they struggle with hearing each other describe their neighborhoods, to hear how sympathetic most people are, people who are living in a privileged Chicago and people who are not,” Johnson says.
Many residents of Chicago’s predominately white north side never venture further south than downtown or Soldier Field. Newcomers are often warned away from venturing to the city’s predominantly African American south and west sides. One goal of the Folded Map Project was to address and challenge this circumstance.
“I wanted to remind people who are in a privileged Chicago that you’re living in a small, small fraction of Chicago and you are not allowing yourself to break down stereotypes that you have,” says Johnson. “And that is actually what is perpetuating the issue in Chicago. Chicago is highly segregated and it remains that way because of people getting instructions of where they should or should not go and where they should or should not live.”
