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[Music] it's said that a master architect would always give the advice to his students that when they were done with the mock-ups and the drawings to go ahead and take a step back and see how the building fits on that block take a few more steps back and get a sense how it visualizes within the neighborhood and then try and pull back even farther and see how it nestles into the city on today we get to speak with frank romo educator gis specialist map maker um fascinating character and a guy that very much gets this idea of pulling back and seeing how your work impacts its surroundings you might almost call them the meta mapper in a way the interesting thing is he has uh eyes on getting you the listener involved in his maps as well what follows is a portion of a conversation with frank romo we came across and started posting a project of yours a few months back um which was the black lives matter online map again this is kind of the unknowable event that's happening in 2020 it feels huge here it feels huge for us but the map that you provided gave so much reassurance that oh we're not an anomaly because all of a sudden oglala nebraska pecos texas all the way through new england and the west coast all of them were experiencing the same thing how did you come up with an idea and how did you how did you begin to think of how to visualize this well i think it starts from it starts from you know my background as community organizer and activist i've been a long time organizer and activist group grew up in los angeles california and while i was living there i did a lot of work in local community to fight for civil rights and for better access to healthy food and fight against environmental toxins in the neighborhood things like that so i have a background in organizing and a lot of my research actually is focused on this idea of race and policing and the intersection of those i had i did i did a master's thesis at the university of michigan that that focused on race and policing and urban space so i'm very familiar with the topic very uh it's very something that's very close to my heart as well so when things started to occur uh after may 25th 2020 after the george floyd incident there was just something that clicked in my mind where again because i i'm familiar with the data because i i follow these kind of movements because i know people who are actively engaged in the movement i work with community organizations in the movement there was just something this time around that felt very different and you know i've watched this happen unfortunately over and over again in my home city of los angeles across the nation over the past few years and this time it was just something felt different almost immediately you saw the major cities pop up right and you see you kind of see this wave right la chicago new york dc cities with large populations people of color but also with folks who probably have had um where you have some difficult community and police relations so you know you would expect those cities to kind of pop off the map and and voice their opinion and speak out and protest and demonstrate but then you know the next day came and the next day came and as you mentioned there were incidents excuse me there were protests that appeared in places like nebraska and south dakota and smaller cities here in michigan and so when you started to see that i was like hmm something something might be going on a little different and then you know you get into day three and day four and all of a sudden it wasn't slowing down it was ramping up and you know a lot of it culminated that first weekend you know that within that first seven to ten days there was just so many and i just said hey this is this is happening i could feel just from my experience as an organizer and being in the movement i was like this is different something's happening different here so i got to my analyst and i said let's go track these down and we had uh use some twitter information we used uh scraping of websites and we just kind of we used any information that was available to us to kind of get get all of these pieces right because we wanted to get the latitude and longitude we wanted to get local news source because again we could find information on la chicago new york but you know smaller yeah my favorite was uh halifax nova scotia or st john's and newfoundland they too right we're having protests right absolutely absolutely and so you know it started like so that's where we ended up leading up to is going worldwide because we saw some of these popping up in small cities across the u.s and so we we did you know our due diligence we pulled information from social media we pulled information from local news sources and then as far as the the mapping interface goes what one of the things that was really implemented at the very beginning was the crowdsourcing piece because we realized that we just didn't have the bandwidth to map all of these and verify all these and me as a map maker i'm very uh diligent and so you know i wasn't gonna put something on the map or we didn't have a source where we didn't have something that was very clear about where we got our information from because i don't want to mislead folks so we found all the you know 100 200 400 as it expanded all these locations and then we went to each little city and said okay let's find a local newspaper because again the local media has better understanding of the context in which this is happening and can provide us you know better feedback than maybe if it was in two or three cities surrounding the major capital then you know the capital or you know let's say here in michigan lansing right there there was protests there and in detroit and in some of the major cities but you know what about the smaller cities and how do we find out what's actually going on there and again the context there is very different because in some cases these were a lot of allies who were speaking up in in some of these cities which are you know we're predominantly uh not people of color and predominantly folks who maybe have not participated in this kind of action or movement before that's where i think we saw the real like whoa or the aha moment where i was like wow there are thousands and thousands of people who are standing in solidarity with this movement and then you know as it progressed i started to stay up to like two or three in the morning to kind of watch with how things were going and sure enough there was stuff going on in australia and in berlin and in in on all these different continents and i was like wow this is really happening so that's kind of how we got started with the project and it harkens back for me too well i suppose the the beautiful thing is this is something that's indicative of our age and is can apply a different texture of understanding to things that had never existed before but i think you know in the past it was one of those things where you know in the in the late 60s early 70s there might have been turmoil and bombings and fires and this that the other but walter cronkite's not going to report that to you it that happened in saskatoon he's not going to mention what happened in rural idaho but all of a sudden when you have a layer of understanding that expands it it's the old clay cliche of sometimes a capacity of a greater number ends up becoming something totally different once you reach kind of this critical mass of an amount it takes on a whole different quality of of of impact but also it kind of takes on a whole different historical significance which in the past we never had the tools to kind of collect and display uh the information all in one place which is a huge right i agree i agree 100 i think you're absolutely right about that critical mass and i think that's kind of what i felt kind of in my bones or in my my thought process i was like well this is going towards a peak of a critical mass and that's when i knew that we needed to start documenting it and to your point you know in the past we didn't have some of these technologies so you would get the reports of chicago new york la right you know sioux falls south dakota or wherever else you might not he might not be able to know that even happened yeah and you know if you're not if you're not in tune with it or know somebody who lived there and now it it's different and so one of the things we wanted to do was also provide the opportunity to crowdsource information because as i said we didn't have really the bandwidth to keep up as it was happening yeah and so on the map we allowed folks to click on a point either two ways we allowed folks to either click on an existing point that didn't have a validation for instance didn't have a news source didn't have other information for instance we had a hunch we had a lead that there was a protest or a demonstration there but there was no valid source so we had the point there and allowed folks to click on the point then it redirected them to the survey and they were able to give us information hey do you have an image hey do you have a source and they and we we gathered image that excuse me gathered information that way and then the other option was hey click on this button and add a point to the map and we allowed folks to add into the map and in doing that it was the same idea do you have an image do you have a date do you have a source and in that way we were able to kind of double up we had our analysts working internally to spot check and verify while at the same time we were trying to collect data from folks who were actually out there and i think to your point about like this critical mass and this technology one of the things that we really felt was that the technology really allowed people to feel more engaged because when somebody goes whenever somebody looks at a map the first thing they do is look at their home or their city or someplace that they're familiar with right it's a part of orient it's part of orienting themselves but it's also a part of hey this is what i'm interested in so this is my experience absolutely absolutely and so by putting the points on the map or allowing folks to put their own points on the map it allows them to feel empowered about participating in that demonstration or showing their support for that movement because some folks might not be out there in the streets but they might be documenting it and might want to help document it so ever just like with any other movement everybody has their own role and so for me i felt that my role was to try to bring folks together show them the visualization and try to engage people in whatever way they could so if they wanted to submit uh photos if they wanted to submit new points on the map they could do so and then the goal is that everybody can look back and say hey look that i added that point sign up or hey i was at that protest in you know birmingham alabama i was at that protest there there's a sense of of pride there's a sense of also this historic moment like hey i was there and i think that brings a lot of folks together in solidarity two the i for me it's still that whole thing of breadth i mean it's it's true that quantity makes a different quality but the thing for me is it always gets down to well it's easy enough oh it's you know those cities cities you know they're just rebellious and they just you know there's always problems in cities well this contradicts that it it contradicts the fact that this is just some small urban problem that people complain about this starts to stretch it out and it almost it's rolling it open to a level i think that's uncomfortable but was never perceived in the past and that's two i think we get down to legitimizing people's experience in the urban setting another project that you you guys related to detroit is there's as one that still has family in the detroit area i am very sensitive when detroit slander happens um and i have to say um it's it's a lot more complicated and people's lives are a lot more complicated uh we always seek to kind of boil things down and make it simple in black and white but the the texture and quality of life um how the kind of warp and woof of things intertwine is a lot more complex um you did a murals project in detroit and it always hits me when you think of especially young people that this becomes the iconography that imprints itself this is what you see on the bus this is what you see going to work this is what you see when you're coming home from school and these all become points in your life that are geographical reference points and can you talk a bit about how you came up with this idea because this gives you if you want to get into the skin and deep into detroit and understand look at its art look it's it look at the aesthetic that it kind of wraps itself in how did this get going absolutely i appreciate you bringing up that i mean everything you said is absolutely right i think these uh images of the city and of people's daily lives become part of who they are right if you ask somebody to draw a mental map of their neighborhood or their route to work they probably put that mural on the map it's somewhere here and it looks kind of like this one of the things that i always do with my students is have them first draw a mental map of their neighborhood to see like how they envision themselves in the urban space etc so wow i think that's i think that's absolutely right you you see you see these things every day it tells a lot about the artist it tells a lot about the people it tells a lot about the heart of the city and me coming from los angeles very similar i think folks folks get taken aback when i say this but i say it a lot is that detroit reminds me a lot of los angeles and you know it's sprawling it's very car centric you have these murals everywhere you know there's a lot of commonalities there and so being from los angeles um i i saw a lot of murals and also even in my community in mexican-american community murals are very much a point of pride and a point of showing showing your ethnic background showing your heritage showing your history and you see that here in the same in detroit as well where you have folks who are um showing their history showing the history of the city showing uh the victories through uh people who are who have been part of the civil rights movement who have fought for for justice and you know there are points of empowerment and one of the reasons why i did the project in detroit the murals in detroit project was because murals in themselves have a transient kind of property because they are on buildings that may not whoever the artist may be it is highly is often unlikely that they own the building which they are printing on and what that what that entails is that if somebody sells the building somebody decides to paint it or something happens to the building if it gets demolished all of a sudden that art is gone and now that mural that you've seen every day going to work for the past five years is gone when you go to work and how does that make like a community member feel i know for me i'm like oh man i really love that mural i'm sad that it's gone yeah and which starts getting us back to that whole thing of cities and those kind of layers of change that happen um as you kind of address it building the building but you know as we've been seeing you know re-peopling gentrification however you would like to term it you end up with these kind of washes of people groups that kind of come into a city and wash out some that endure and impact and then others that kind of and that i guess that was the thing with the murals map was all of a sudden for me as an old head when i saw images of mr malcolm or if i saw dr king there was something deep down that really felt grounded to me it it really kind of it made me feel stable at home or the the one that that really caught me was somebody had done a mural and it included aretha and then her dad cl franklin the late great minister and there was something that's like that's the deep roots i i understand with younger heads when i come in and do like a cool geometric pattern with contrasting colors but for for us i guess for older people like myself it's the thing of seeing jesus ne t to harriet tubman next to dr king and so on and so forth and that was to me was the thing of a storytelling that you would never get you know just by walking the streets and maybe as neighborhoods change you know the people that were rooted in that understanding maybe that leaves too um it it seems like you've made something that really it's about art but it's also about time and people moving it's a bit about all those changes which i guess you just say la if you want an instance of a city that's constantly remaking itself absolutely absolutely i i think i think you're you're absolutely right you know the project tries to you know we don't we wanted to be fun we wanted to be exciting and we let folks um take pictures and they could hashtag murals in detroit and things like that and then we can add it to the map and i mean you can see though this is kind of also where that kind of crowdsourcing idea comes from like even in the protest map it bleeds through because again with the protests with the murals with the artwork with regards to the black lives matter movement we added that to the protest map afterwards because um it all kind of blends together right there is this history and i'm a i'm an urban planner but i consider myself very much a geographer and there's there's this history of space right the the the fight the struggle the overcoming of certain things that happen in those spaces need to be recognized and the the murals the maps what we try to do is try to acknowledge that and kind of make commit it to collective memory because as you've said with regards to the murals if there is a change in population and all of a sudden somebody wants to take a mural down that one of the ones that i was really sad that came down with um you know famous boxer joe lewis there was a real nice mural with him and you know it it's no longer there that it's it's a it's a new painting but it's for like an advertisement and um i was really sad to see that go and you know i'm not i'm not i'm not from detroit but i know who joe lewis is and i know that he has a great impact on this city and to see that go i was like oh man but you know what made me happy was that we cataloged it and i have that image forever now on on the on the site and you know it's great to be able to say hey we still have you know this history is still here because you never know what that kind of image of somebody who has overcome of somebody who is a champion of somebody who has succeeded you never know what those kind of uh visual cues how they could inspire somebody that's right change something or or the how they can hamper someone we've we've had um discussions about especially and listeners don't take this wrong um i think in some older countries especially there is a batch of iconography of old titans of industry of uh people that had were ridiculously wealthy and made some beneficial donation and they become the people that indeed those statues start to turn into almost a weight i i can't see myself as a titan of industry um i would love to build a library for someone but at the same time it feels like uh there needs to be almost a process of kind of can we diminish some of the past things that don't fit the present model they don't fit the present circumstance and be able to move on still utilizing we're not trying to edit history but can we have something that's progressing in the direction of beneficial for everybody but also specific to us i always love that when um authors or filmmakers will make the comment that they're so stunned that they'll realize that it's when i started getting really detailed and unveiling stuff about my own self that's when people started to understand me it wasn't by generalizing that you were able to reach an audience but it was by being super specific that you could make connections with other people and i i guess that's that's a piece of what i get out of the mural project was it's so specific that you start to feel the people behind it um and and not not in that kind of just neutral we should do something on this wall type way but it it it starts to convey um life i guess you know what you've really done is you've kind of pointed to um you started to make maps this meta tool you've started to use it almost as i don't know it's it's beyond television it's beyond anything because it's getting into the specifics of people but then giving us something transcendent at the same time how do you do that exactly because it's pretty impressive i i appreciate that i mean that that might be the kind of compliment i've ever had so i appreciate that because i mean maps let me say this one last thing regarding the murals is that you're absolutely right you know i mean murals in themselves that you know how they have come about and things like that they are exactly what you're talking about they are of the people right they are from the experience the lies the background things that the people value in that community are what go up on the murals and and so you know it's not just about hey this is a beautiful image of dr king hey this is a beautiful image of aretha franklin hey this is a beautiful image it's about a sense of pride and it's about a sense of like yeah those are our people and that's what we stand for and those are the values that we like to uphold and i think that in that same way you know mapping is a rep a visual representation in any other way as like you said in another medium as in tv or in websites or anything like that mapping is a medium that can that a lot of people are familiar with but don't really grapple with the nuances of maps i think maps are so uh ubiquitous now that everybody you know everybody has a phone in their pocket we have google maps we have all these different mapping softwares and maps have over the past 20 years have become so much more integrated in the average person's life but i think people fail to recognize that because they just pull up maps and then you know they pull up google maps and they're good to go you know i remember when we had to have the gps in the vehicle and i remember before that when we had the large map books in the vehicle and you know that was the way we navigated but maps have become so much more prominent in people's lives that i think there's this moment where you as a map maker have to kind of like you said transcend that and say hey this isn't just your everyday map like how can i get to you in a different way how can i get to you on an emotional level how can i get to you on a personal level to your point right the more personal and specific you are the more people care about it the more people are moved by it and i think that comes from me kind of as an organizer the community organizer as someone who has worked to bring communities together to fight for justice to have that sense of pride right i think it's all aimed towards the same goal which is trying to create this collective consciousness that somebody can be proud of or in other terms where there is an issue this collective consciousness like hey we have to do something about this so i i think like mind maps i really try to use them as organizing tools as a way for folks to get into the discussion because a lot of the discussions that you know the murals of detroit project is great but a lot of the discussions that we are trying to have about the murals in detroit project you know lead to well what about gentrification and what about the prices and what about the you know and so we start to get into conversations that are uncomfortable for folks when i look at my work about the black lives matter movement and people who have been killed by police and some of the work that research i do around that again it's a very difficult topic for a lot of people to get into so you know in some way the map is a nice pretty easy visual thing for folks to see and get their attention and then once you have people's attention you say okay let's talk about what's really going on here and now as we start to have that conversation the map becomes a tool uh like a organizing tool to kind of get folks on the same page and see the data and then be able to have those deeper conversations to hopefully make change again it's getting back to if you can tap into the individual oh my gosh all of a sudden there's this tapping into the collective at the same time that it's like you were saying it's if you can get them all of a sudden you have to wrestle with your little cellular role in this giant organism which is amazing and you too it right it reminds me of uh uh author uh brian mcculloch pointed out something that was so fascinating to me was here we are in the internet age and the whole premise for it was going to be oh it's decentralized you could be anywhere you know it distance won't mean anything anymore just the opposite the internet is thrives on cartography depends on it from delivery to how they're doing your demographics when they scrape your data all all of this stuff is still i mean there's this kind of uh simplistic approach to modern technology of like well it's just you know we just exchange packets and things just whip around through the ether but it gets back to oh no we have to have a common foundation of understanding and one of the one of the things you can't get past is geography it is a reality it's a reality and it's something that is infused through everything so yeah the uh it's it gets me to this point of saying like maps again are always going to be essential it's just a debate yeah it's an innate thing absolutely i mean maps have always been essential in you know in war in times of prosperity and time you know through through all through over the centuries you know maps have been there to you know whether they were hand drawn and now they're digitized or whatever but maps have always been a tool and you know you you look at certain uh countries and you look at you know especially through war times i think it's a really good example how countries in the past have used maps to for propaganda right i think that's that's a very very common tool and you know in kind of the same similar way not necessarily with those uh connotations but in today's world like you know maps are a medium to communicate information and now one of the things that we get into nowadays as you've seen probably with the recent election and things like that with the without even going into any political any any political jargon or anything like that the end of the day you know you're we're on election night we're all looking at a map and we have five different versions of it from five different stations and you're asking yourself whose map is correct and a lot matters absolutely absolutely and so many things are so dependent upon where somebody draws a line or how many people are enumerated i mean that's how redlining started in communities of color to say okay we're not gonna um you know bank and um city governments would say we're not gonna lend and we're not gonna invest in this area and uh the difference of somebody drawing a line on this street or on that street could make the difference between how much access you have to education how much access you have to upward mobility how much access you have to healthy food and it is amazing to see how important maps are in changing people's lives and so i think you know the one the one thing that i really try to do with my work is harness the power of the map because maps just like anything any other tool can be used in in good for good or for bad like you know they could be used and be efficient and uh factual or they can be misleading and they can lie to you and i think for me i really want to try to harness the power of the map so that folks can feel empowered so folks can feel like they are seen right because again when somebody sees themselves on the map they're like hey that's our city hey there we are that's right i remember i was there and there's this again this feeling of empowerment the feeling of being seen and i think that there there's a lot of power behind it especially in this age where more people are making maps it's really important that we do it intentionally and don't just spin something up that is that is kind of wonky or kind of oh yeah i just slapped it together and let me throw it out there because you know in today's age it'll still get a lot of rotation and likes and etc etc but you know there is there is a responsibility of the map maker to also be an educator in that regard and help people become more map literate and help people be able to critique maps better and say hey that doesn't look right something doesn't look right because if we just allow folks to ingest data without being critical then we're going down a bad path and it doesn't matter you know whether that's with literature whether that's with um you know education or anything else but we need folks to learn how to be critical of the maps that are out there especially because there's so many on so many of similar topics yes and amen to frank romo our thanks to him and our apologies for this almost criminally edited down version of a discussion with him we hope to air more in the future too thanks so much for listening uh please feel free to contact us at new projections cast at gmail and we'll catch you next time thanks [Music]