Monday, October 22, 2012

Project 2- In Plain Site: We are Milwaukee Street

The City of Milwaukee is the second most segregated city in the United States. A method to finding this information is by using the Dissimilarity Index, which is a measurement used to quantify segregation. It is based on scale of 1-100, 1 being a perfect integration to 100 being completely segregated. It compares neighborhoods of a city by race, mainly black and whites. The Dissimilarity Index of Milwaukee is rated a 79.6. This means that 79.6 percent of an individual race would have to move so that each neighborhood reflects the racial composition of the city as a whole. If you told someone who lived in the City of Milwaukee this information, I guarantee they wouldn't be surprised by these numbers. Its common knowledge. We know the segregation because we know the city. We know which neighborhoods are good and which ones to stay away from. Even if someone isn't from here, they would soon find out because in the wrong direction, a certain number of blocks can put you in a neighborhood you may not feel welcomed in. We are segregated by the boundaries of our neighborhoods cooping us up by socioeconomic status and race. 

With this final image, I wanted to erase the boundaries and unify the City of Milwaukee as one. One city where the sharp neighborhood lines dividing us become foggy and unclear, morphing the neighborhoods together. These pictures were taken all over the City: Glendale, Whitefish Bay, Eastside, Riverwest, Bayview, Cudahy, and several parts of Central Milwaukee. These neighborhoods range immensely with differences in socioeconomic status, crime rate, education, and race. If you look the piece, squint your eyes once. Blur your vision and understand. See how the sharp differences in the transitions fade. They become unapparent and unimportant. The differences evolve and the neighborhoods look like one, making a normal, non-segregated street as if the Dissimilarity Index was just a made up measurement.

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