RED
LINING

landscape architecture design studio: PLAY SPACE; Washington University; spring 2018


Professor:
Eric Ellingsen

Students:
Virginia Eckinger, Sebastian Jin, Natia Kapanadze, Lauren McDaniel, Nicholas Oriss, Haihan Qu, Simiya Sudduth,
Dongzhe Tao, Xiaoxi Yuan

Drone video: Yi Zhang
Rough editing by: Shuying Wu

This action is part of a pedagogic method that is framed as a DIALOGUE OF DOING. The action took place starting at the former site of Pruitt-Igoe Housing, and walked across the historic Mill Creek Valley.

The action is partly in response to:

︎”Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts.” Read more

︎White men make up a smaller slice of the American electorate with each election. Yet they maintain outsized power in Congress and state legislatures. A new decade dawns with a crisis of representation that threatens the integrity of representative democracy itself.  We’re in this mess, in many ways, because of gerrymandering. This was the decade that the gerrymander — perhaps the oldest political trick in the book — pushed American politics into a dangerous state of anti-majoritarianism, grounded in racial fear and identity politics, that may take at least another decade to overcome, assuming we ever do so.“ Read more

︎“ What is redistricting and why does it matter?
At the conclusion of the 2010 national census, congressional seats will be reapportioned to each state.  The states with a shrinking population will lose congressional seats and states with a population boom will gain seats.  A massive effort to redraw state legislative and congressional lines will take place according to each state’s laws. The party controlling that effort controls the drawing of the maps – shaping the political landscape for the next 10 years.  In 38 states, governors and state legislators play a determining role in the redistricting process.  ....REDMAP (REDistricting Majority Project) is a program of the RSLC dedicated to winning state legislative seats that will have a critical impact on congressional redistricting in 2011.” Read more