Explore how decisions about land, industry, infrastructure, and the environment affect communities differently.
Editorial illustration · not archival photographyExplore how eminent domain displaced working-class and marginalized communities, reshaping neighborhoods, wealth, and trust in the name of development.
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Learn how AI’s data centers connect to the longer history of American infrastructure, electrification, land use, water, public subsidy, and environmental justic
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Learn how company towns used housing, stores, scrip, isolation, and debt to control workers’ wages, mobility, and daily life, especially in coal and industrial
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Explore how railroads and highways were used to divide American cities — and why those invisible lines still shape neighborhoods today.
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Learn how the Homestead Act helped create generational wealth for some families while excluding Black Americans through violence, policy, and unequal access.
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Discover the history of African American farming, the struggle for land ownership, and how discrimination shaped opportunity in rural America.
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Explore the economic logic behind “40 acres and a mule,” and how land access could have reshaped wealth and opportunity after emancipation.
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Learn how redlining shaped modern cities—affecting housing, wealth, health, schools, and infrastructure—and why its effects persist today.
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Learn how blockbusting turned racial fear into profit, reshaping neighborhoods — and why its legacy still matters for cities today.
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Discover the history of redlining, how it shaped American neighborhoods, and why its effects still matter today — and how we can write a new future together.
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