Mobilizing the Middle: A Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA

Patty Heyda, Z Gorley, Blake Strode

“Mobilizing the Middle: A Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA” is a project that maps the politics of inequality in the American ‘first ring’ suburb, through the lens of Ferguson and surrounding North County municipalities, Missouri. The maps spatialize and make visible the contradictions of municipal planning that do not improve life for residents, but exacerbate erosion of their rights—such as codes, revenue in tickets and fines, corporate tax structure, infrastructure design, airport noise mitigation programs, etc. The project augments the storytelling capacity of organizations on the ground working to combat the criminalization of poverty, such as Arch City Defenders and others.

If Ferguson is a mundane, American ‘middle landscape,’ it is also where Michael Brown lived and where the national Movement for Black Lives followed his 2014 murder. “Mobilizing the Middle” brings these disparate storylines into singular view to show how the ‘mundane’ actually embeds systems of violence—in fragmented suburban spaces and boring bureaucracies—that manifest racial segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and police targeting.