Drawing Lessons From a Segregated History
A series of books, each conceived of from a design student’s encounter with the local environment.
Harvard professor Daniel D’Oca’s design grad students recently traveled to St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, to develop a deeper understanding of the impacts of racial zoning ordinances in the classroom. The result? A series of books, each conceived of from a student’s encounter with a local resident, activist, or member of Forward Through Ferguson. Each book in the series tells the story of various policy instruments that were used to create racial division and unfair housing situations, hoping to illuminate how the region’s unique heritage of segregation led to the racial inequities in the metro area today. The resulting projects include comic books, manuals that break down complicated financial concepts — like tax increment financing — and K-12 pedagogy textbooks outlining the history of segregation in St. Louis. The characters in Rube Segovia’s graphic novel The Tracers conclude in the end of the story “If old planning rules created this mess, maybe we can change things now.”