Coercive Cartography: How Maps Shaped Social Policy and Atlanta’s Early Public Housing, 1933-1940

Katie Marages, University of Georgia

A 1933 report to the General Council of the City of Atlanta included eight maps created by the City Planning Commission. Each map illustrated the report’s findings on various social issues such as crime, disease, and substandard housing. Powerful for their graphic simplicity and succinct presentation of information, the maps made a compelling case about the current social and physical conditions in Atlanta. Yet the maps’ true value, power, and purpose were not likely to be immediately apparent to most viewers. Atlanta Georgian reporter Tarleton Collier touched on some of the power and purpose embedded in the maps when he writes: “You are impressed by the unanswerable evidence that bad housing and squalid settings breed disease and crime.” Collier highlights the public’s acceptance of maps as unbiased and factual and demonstrates that maps are accepted as compelling evidence. However, he does not discuss how the public’s acceptance of maps as a mode of impartial and factual documentation allows them to operate as a tool to form public opinion, shape policy, and gain support for early public housing in Atlanta. Using the eight maps discussed above in addition to maps that appeared in the first three annual reports of the Atlanta Housing Authority, I will argue that maps were visual rhetoric and were fundamental tools used by the Atlanta Housing Authority to promote the acceptance and creation of early public housing in Atlanta. Other scholars of public housing have used maps to illustrate their studies but have not analyzed maps to understand the vital role they played in public housing’s early history across the United States and especially in Atlanta. This paper will use maps as an analytical tool to understand their vital role in shaping policy and making public housing a reality in Atlanta.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 21. Mapping Atlanta's Historical Geographies of Race, Class, and Justice I