Adam Paul Susaneck wanted to know where all the trolleys went. American cities during the first part of the 20th century were brimming with streetcars, with an estimated 17,000 miles of track laid across the country, but have long since been dismantled in nearly every metro area. 1

Studying that history led him to learn more and more about housing, highway construction, urban planning and white flight. It didn’t take him long to realize that, while the way that these topics are taught often separates them into distinct phenomena, they are very much related. 2

Most posts take the form of two juxtaposed images: one archival photo of public housing or public transit, and one photo of the current empty lot with an outline of what the old structure would look like over top of the empty space.

• 1. “At one point, Chicago had a robust rail network that had been kind of eliminated and torn down over the course of, you know, 50 plus years,” says Sorrell. “And so, it’s good to kind of not only visualize it, but for younger generations regardless if you live in Chicago or not can see the impacts to the communities that are served.” The aim of the account, as Susaneck sees it, is to point out how intentional, poor and racist planning created urban segregation. He’s specifically interested in making explicit how highways reinforce that segregation and how highway expansions continue to swallow underinvested communities whole, driving displacement and disinvestment.
• 2. “It just kind of became a rabbit hole of like, well, the trolleys went away, because we put all this money into highways,” says Susaneck, an architect in New York City. “Well, why do we do that?” His research eventually led him to start a social media account and newsletter called Segregation By Design. In it, Susaneck uses archival photos, aerial photographs and maps to show in vivid detail the destruction of Black and immigrant neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal and highway construction that happened around the middle of the 20th century. Susaneck describes the project as “an atlas of redlining, ‘urban renewal,’ and environmental racism.”