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Center for Spatial Research

The Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University in New York City is an urban research hub linking design, architecture, urbanism, the humanities with data science. It focuses on using data in the service of social justice; building maps and other visual tools to help scholars, students and collaborators understand cities and their inherent issues from conflict to inequality.

Million Dollar Blocks, 2006 - It cost 17 million dollars to impression 109 people from these 17 blocks in 2003. We call these million dollar blocks. On a financial scale prisons are becoming the predominant governing institution in the neighborhood. Project team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora, David Reinfurt, Sarah Williams
Million Dollar Blocks, 2006 - Incarcerating people from these blocks in Brooklyn facilitates a mass migration to prisons in upstate New York. 95% eventually return home. Project team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora, David Reinfurt, Sarah Williams
Million Dollar Blocks, 2006 - Lines connect blocks in Brooklyn with the prisons upstate to which residents were sent. Project team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora, David Reinfurt, Sarah Williams
Million Dollar Blocks, 2006 - Added up block by block, it cost $359 million dollars to imprison people from Brooklyn in 2003. Project team: Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora, David Reinfurt, Sarah Williams
Homophilly: This project excavates the history of a term coined by researchers Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton in an influential 1954 study of friendships in a public housing project in Pittsburgh. “Homophily” is “the tendency for friendships to form between people ‘of the same kind.’” Credit: Aerial view of Terrace Village under construction, photograph, Allegheny Conference on Community Development Photographs, 1875–1981, Detre Library & Archives, Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh.
“Homophily” began as a formal explanation of social life in a housing complex. Today is has become an algorithm that shapes social dynamics in digital space, driving everything from targeted advertising to movie and book recommendations to predictive policing on the streets of Chicago. It perpetuates a social world in which positions are reinforced and concentrated rather than challenged or hybridized. Credits: Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm, 2019. Project team: Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, in collaboration with: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.
In Plain Sight presents anomalies in population distribution seen in nighttime satellite imagery of Earth and census grid counts produced by governments worldwide — revealing places with bright lights and no people and places with people and no lights—thus, challenging our assumptions about geographies of belonging and exclusion. Credits: In Plain Sight by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko with Columbia Center for Spatial Research at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
In Plain Sight: The KOV mine, in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is operated by Glencore, an Anglo-Swiss mining company. Credit: In Plain Sight. [Video Still]. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, and Robert Gerard Pietrusko with the Center for Spatial Research. The installation is conceived and designed for Dimensions of Citizenship, the US Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Chicago.
In Plain Sight: A high-voltage power line supplies electricity for the KOV mine from the Inga Dams 1700 km to the west. Cities, villages, and towns along the pathway of this power line cannot draw from it Credit: In Plain Sight. [Video Still]. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, and Robert Gerard Pietrusko with the Center for Spatial Research. The installation is conceived and designed for Dimensions of Citizenship, the US Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Chicago.
In Plain Sight: Glencore operations form a bright global network, disconnected from nearby settlements in the dark. Credit: In Plain Sight. [Video Still]. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, and Robert Gerard Pietrusko with the Center for Spatial Research. The installation is conceived and designed for Dimensions of Citizenship, the US Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Chicago.

The Center first gained international attention in 2003 with its “Million Dollar Blocks” project. Working in collaboration with the Justice Mapping Center, it documented, mapped and created visualization strategies that showed the neighborhoods where the majority of incarcerated people in New York City came from. Unsurprisingly, they uncovered a very few, mostly poor, urban neighborhoods. The costs of incarcerating people from single city blocks are in the millions of dollars; money that could be pro-actively invested in the communities themselves.

Other projects have included data mapping social media in China to examine the intersection of censorship and activism. In 2016, out of an interest in how conflict makes, unmakes and remakes urban spaces, they created a very high resolution, interactive map of the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo. Data for the maps is taken from satellite images over a number of years, from before the war in 2012, then again in 2014 and 2016.

By harnessing data to create new forms of visualization, the Center hopes to encourage new lines of thinking about urban issues, inequality and conflict. Listen to the episode below.

SOCIAL DESIGN INSIGHTS

65 | Data, Design and Social Practice

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00:24:50

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Credits

Social Design Insights would like to thank all those who make our weekly show possible: Baruch Zeichner, our Producer and Sound Engineer, Donna Read, for producing our video content, and Leah Freidenrich, Director of the Curry Stone Foundation. Our theme music for 2018 is "Alright With Me" by Reggie Young from his album "Young Street." The break music is "Biza" by Juluka from their album "Ubuhle Bemvelo."