Depression Narrative Visions, Postwar Plans: The Impact of the New Deal Urban Visualizations on Urban Policy

The visual has always been important for cities.  From architecture and the landscapes it created, to images of want and rage captured by artists and photographers, to maps that documented urban social characteristics in space, images – both visual and verbal – have  shaped how cities have been experienced, imagined, and planned.  This paper takes a particular moment in time – the New Deal – and a particular set of visualizations –federally funded but locally administered– to ask how the competing visions of Chicago and Los Angeles represented in those studies influenced their development after the war.  Much has been written about the impact of the infamous Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps that redlined large areas of the city.  Much less has been written about the house-to-house surveys and maps conducted and created by the WPA, the contested landscapes FWP  authors described in their guidebooks, or many images created by federally funded photographers and artists charged with documenting America’s cities.  This essay brings those and other New Deal sources such as oral histories and community inventories together using a series of visualization techniques to ask how, together, they influenced both cities’ futures.