Racial Geography & Architectural Research: Creator Insights

Written and reviewed by Rice Design Alliance Editorial Team.

In 2018, a designer named Emily Kutil began stitching together more than 2,000 photographs that Detroit officials had taken in 1949 and 1950—not to celebrate a neighborhood, but to condemn it. Those images were part of the eminent-domain process that erased Black Bottom, and decades later they became the raw material for an immersive reconstruction that was eventually returned to the community it documented. That single project captures the argument of this piece: the built environment in the United States was shaped by racial power, and architectural research—done rigorously and ethically—can make those forces visible, measurable, and contestable. Below, we define the core concepts, untangle the federal policies that produced racialized urban landscapes, walk through a replicable research workflow, profile four verified U.S. projects, and offer an interview framework you can use with the creators behind them.

What Racial Geography Means in Architectural Research

Racial geography is the study of how socially constructed racial categories shape where people live, move, own property, and access resources. Architectural research investigates those patterns across occupant, building, and community scales—revealing how physical design, planning, and policy together produce unequal spatial outcomes.

A few definitions keep the conversation honest. Racialization is the process by which people and places get assigned racial meaning and unequal value. The built environment is everything humans construct—homes, porches, streets, highways, parks, transit. Spatial justice asks how space distributes access, safety, resources, and decision-making power, while design justice goes further, insisting that communities most affected by inequity hold real power in shaping their environments. Race itself is a social construction, but as the AIA’s Justice in the Built Environment guide makes clear, its consequences are material: in lending, infrastructure, public housing, and municipal services.

The AIA’s architectural research framework is useful here because it organizes inquiry across scales. At the occupant scale, you might ask who feels welcome crossing a threshold. At the building scale, you examine entrances, circulation, materials, and porch culture—that space between private dwelling and public life with deep roots in African American domestic architecture. At the community scale, you confront urbanism, investment patterns, and displacement.

One analytical distinction matters enormously: intentional exclusion is not the same as institutional practice, and neither is the same as cumulative spatial outcome. A highway can divide a Black neighborhood without a single engineer stating a racial motive. The AIA’s Justice in the Built Environment guide notes that effects aren’t always traceable to intent—which is precisely why researchers must document mechanisms, not just motives.

Finally, racial geography is broader than residential segregation. Segregation describes spatial separation; racial geography asks how race-making produced the entire terrain—who owns, who moves freely, whose memory is archived, and whose is demolished.

How U.S. Policies Produced Racialized Urban Landscapes

Architecture didn’t segregate American cities on its own. Between the early 1900s and the 1968 Fair Housing Act—which outlawed most housing discrimination and gave HUD enforcement responsibility—a stack of legal, financial, and planning instruments did the heavy lifting. Untangling the history of segregation in U.S. urban planning means treating each instrument as distinct.

The most common error in popular accounts is conflating two federal tools. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created residential security maps in the 1930s; the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) ran a separate underwriting and mapping operation. A 2023 Journal of Economic History study explicitly cautions against treating them as one system.

The HOLC area-description forms asked real-estate professionals to record the presence or “infiltration” of Black or foreign families when assessing risk—evidence of how racial assumptions entered administrative knowledge, in the period’s own troubling vocabulary.

HOLC Maps vs. FHA Underwriting and Private Lending

That 2023 Journal of Economic History study estimates that racial bias in HOLC map construction explains roughly 4% to 20% of the observed concentration of Black households in the lowest-rated zones—a sample- and model-specific estimate showing that HOLC surveys reflected existing local real-estate and private-lending assessments, whereas the FHA used its own mapping strategies to guide mortgage insurance. Separately, a 2021 American Economic Association study using boundary-design methods found 1930s HOLC grades associated with reduced homeownership, house values, and rents, plus increased later segregation along map boundaries.

Covenants, Exclusionary Zoning, and Urban Renewal Clearance

Lending was only one channel. Racially restrictive covenants—deed restrictions barring sale or occupancy by race—locked individual parcels, while exclusionary, low-density zoning priced whole districts out of reach. Mid-century urban renewal then cleared “blighted” neighborhoods through eminent domain, and highway siting carved through communities that maps had already devalued. The Library of Congress treats urban-renewal mapping—documenting demolition, business relocation, and displaced residents—as a related but distinct record set from HOLC materials. The architectural impact of redlining, in other words, compounded alongside separate legal and planning instruments: maps shaped credit, covenants shaped occupancy, zoning shaped density, and clearance erased what remained.

Methods for Researching Race and the Built Environment

Good work in critical architectural studies follows a verifiable sequence. Here’s a workflow you can adapt:

1. Frame an operational definition. Before mapping anything, define your terms. Columbia GSAPP’s preservation study, for instance, defined a historically African American neighborhood as a census tract with a majority African American population in at least four of the five decennial censuses from 1970 through 2010. That specificity makes findings checkable.
2. Cross-reference municipal archives. Deeds, covenants, fire-insurance maps, urban-renewal files, and area descriptions establish the official record.
3. Spatialize historical polygons in GIS. Digitize HOLC boundaries or renewal areas and build crosswalks to modern census geography.
4. Pair with current estimates. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009–2024 ACS 5-year data covers census tracts and block groups—but these figures are estimates with margins of error, so report uncertainty and consult Census comparability notes.
5. Ground-truth with testimony and fieldwork. Oral histories, street-level building analysis, and community review catch what datasets miss.

That last step isn’t decorative. Quantitative layers can show where disparities sit; lived testimony explains how they operate—who was displaced, which porch hosted which gathering, what a demolition felt like from the inside.

Archival Records, Historical GIS, and Street-View Data

Historical GIS research on urban segregation typically starts with digitized repositories like the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality, which pairs HOLC maps with their area descriptions, alongside fire-insurance atlases and census tract estimates. At the largest scale, a 2023 JAMA Network Open study analyzed 164 million Google Street View images collected November 1–30, 2019, across 59,231 urban census tracts and found predominantly White neighborhoods generally showed fewer dilapidated-building indicators and more green space—cross-sectional associations, not causal proof.

Oral Histories, Counter-Mapping, and Building-Scale Fieldwork

Recorded memory and counter-mapping challenge official absences, while archaeological thinking treats physical traces as evidence. Fieldwork at the building scale—entrances, materials, street edges, signs of adaptive reuse—documents architectural exclusion that archives never recorded, especially where colonial or municipal records silenced the people they governed.

Inside the Workflow: U.S. Case Studies in Spatial Inquiry

Four verified case studies show what social-equity projects in architecture look like in practice—and how the choice of medium shapes what becomes visible.

Texas Freedom Colonies and Central Texas Black Space

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, led by Andrea Roberts through UVA’s Center for Cultural Landscapes, combines GIS analysis, archival research, engaged ethnography, and oral histories into an atlas mapping development and ecological threats to historic Black settlement landscapes—co-developing resilience strategies with descendants. UT Austin’s Black Space Project takes a complementary tack, documenting Black contributions to the built environment in Austin and Central Texas from the first Black families’ arrival in 1839 to the present. Both treat Black placemaking as a cultural landscape worth stewarding, not just a problem to measure.

West Adams Immersive Mapping and Detroit’s Black Bottom

In Los Angeles, Luke Quezada’s West Adams: Mapping Racialized Space (USC, Spring 2023) fused public records, archives, and community interviews with 3D capture, a 360-degree cylindrical screen, giant-format video, and spatial audio—making racialized space something you stand inside. In Detroit, Emily Kutil created Black Bottom Street View in 2018 alongside students and community members, rebuilding the demolished neighborhood from Detroit’s 1949–1950 eminent-domain photographs before donating the project to Black Bottom Archives in 2019. A GIS atlas reveals patterns; immersive media restores presence. Each leaves something out—which is why the strongest projects combine them.

Interview Framework: Questions for Project Creators

Community-engaged architectural research lives or dies on method, not inspiration. When you interview project creators, structure the conversation around evidence and power:

• Research question formulation: What question started the project, and who helped frame it? Did residents or descendants shape the inquiry before the archive did?
• Source conflicts: Which claims came from official records, which from descendant testimony—and what happened when they contradicted each other? In a 2022 Architectural Histories interview, scholar Itohan Osayimwese discusses the limits of colonial archives and how archaeological approaches can address what those records refuse to say. Ask creators how they handle that silence.
• Adaptive outputs: When evidence shifted mid-project, what changed—the map, the building analysis, the exhibition? A team that never revised anything probably wasn’t listening.
• Decision-making power: Who held veto power over what was published, mapped, or demolished from the narrative? The AIA’s Engaging Community guide (second edition, December 2020) emphasizes divergent voices, trust, and genuine partnership—use it as a rubric, not a press release.
• Stewardship after publication: Where does the data live now? Who maintains it? Kutil’s donation of Black Bottom Street View to Black Bottom Archives is a concrete answer worth asking every creator to match.

These questions separate participatory design from tokenism. A project that consulted residents after the map was finished isn’t community-engaged; it’s community-decorated.

Data Governance, Descendant Stewardship, and Preservation Ethics

Spatial justice in architecture doesn’t end when the map publishes. Data ownership, informed consent, community veto power, and archival return determine whether research serves descendants or extracts from them. Descendant-led preservation—the model behind the Texas Freedom Colonies Project—treats community members as authors and stewards, not subjects.

Preservation itself carries a double edge, and the best available evidence demands care. Columbia GSAPP’s Preservation and Social Inclusion study examined ten cities—Atlanta, Birmingham, Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.—using secondary-data spatial analysis from 2009 through 2016. It found local historic-district coverage to be a significant predictor of its economic-displacement measure in New York, Oakland, and St. Louis, but no statistically significant link for National Register designation. Critically, the study states its method cannot demonstrate causality. So the honest claim is narrow: in some cities, local designation coincided with affordability pressure, and the mechanism remains unproven. That nuance matters—historic designation can protect cultural memory, raise stakes that push residents out, or both, depending on local policy context.

The ethical takeaway for practitioners: pair any designation strategy with affordability protections, return research products to community archives, and establish governance terms—who consents, who can withdraw, who benefits—before fieldwork begins, not after publication.

Navigating Methodological Limits and Causal Claims

Redlining alone doesn’t explain present-day neighborhood conditions, and credible research says so. Four guardrails help.

First, geographic mismatch is endemic. The 2023 JAMA Network Open study found roughly 60% of 2010 census tracts crossed HOLC areas with multiple grades; it assigned a grade only when one covered at least 50% of the tract. Any tract-level claim inherits that approximation. Second, ACS 5-year figures are estimates—report margins of error, especially at block-group scale.

Third, disclose regional bias. The SCI-Arc research guide explicitly frames itself as an orientation emphasizing Los Angeles and Southern California. A Texas archive, a ten-city sample, and a Detroit photo collection each illuminate different things; none is a national model. Fourth, distinguish inference types. The AEA study’s boundary design supports stronger causal claims about HOLC map edges; street-view and cross-sectional studies show associations only. Conflating them is how good evidence gets overstated—and discredited.

Conclusion: From Documentation to Spatial Justice

The throughline is simple to state and hard to practice. Racial geography names the terrain; architectural research supplies the multi-scale tools—archives, historical GIS, census estimates, oral histories, building-scale fieldwork—to read it. Methodological discipline keeps the claims honest: separate HOLC from FHA, report boundary mismatch, and never dress correlation as causation. And ethical governance determines who benefits when the work is done.

The field is moving from documentation toward living preservation. On June 29, 2026, UVA’s Mellon Foundation-supported Out(sider) Preservation Initiative, founded by Dr. Andrea Roberts, announced eight second-cycle grantees—descendants, artists, educators, and local leaders across Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and California. Your next step: pick one project from this article, study its methods, and interview its creators using the framework above. That’s where spatial justice becomes practice.