American Communities Project

The American Communities Project is a program of research coordinated by John Logan. It focuses especially on social and spatial inequalities experienced by racial minorities and immigrant ethnic groups as they moved into urban areas in the U.S.  It includes studies based on both contemporary and historical data. It also includes research on public schools, especially school segregation and racial disparities in school performance.  Links to its components are found on the sidebar.  

  • The Urban Transition HGIS is developing mapped data on U.S. cities and neighborhoods in the decades 1880-1940.  
  • Diversity and Disparities presents contemporary census data on neighborhoods and metropolitan areas.  It includes material that was originally supported by the US2010 Project.  These include MapUSA (census maps for 1940-2010) and the LTDB (which harmonizes census data from 1970-2000 to 2010 tract boundaries).  Its "Data" pages provide measures of segregation and inequality across neighborhoods for many cities, counties, and metro areas.
  • A separate project deals with the history of segregation and inequality in US Schools, with a mapping system that identifies school district characteristics and provides information on individual public schools.  
  • Finally there is the Hurricane Katrina project, which examines the impacts of this one hurricane on New Orleans and the 50-year history of hurricanes along the entire Gulf Coast.

Project Team