posted by Amy Hillier

on November 2, 2007

I attended the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference (ACSP) in Milwaukee two weeks ago where I presented research about Mapping Du Bois. It was encouraging that scholars were excited, not just about the teaching and community engagement but about the scholarship potential of this project. I gave a presentation about what the Mapping Du Bois project can teach us about the potential of GIS in planning history. Planning and urban historians focus on so many spatial processes, like segregation, gentrification, redlining, deindustrialization, etc. But the methods they use are rarely explicitly spatial. The most exciting session I attended at ACSP was about SUPAR, the new charter School for Urban Planning and Architecture that was started by an adjunct faculty member at UWisconsin-Milwaukee's urban planning school. A bunch of SUPAR students attended the session and talked about their interests and projects.

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History conference in Portland, Maine was exciting in its own way. I presented about "The Making and Re-making of The Philadelphia Negro." I'm trying to learn as much as possible about how Du Bois conducted his original student--how he collected the data, how long it too--and the traditions that influenced him, including the Social Survey Movement. Then I described our efforts to recreate the survey which, I hope, will tell us more about how Du Bois did his own research.

I'll also be presenting on the migration, immigration, and racial residential patterns within the Seventh Ward later this month in Chicago at the Social Science History Association.