I am a visiting lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University and the Geospatial Project Coordinator at the National Zoning Atlas. My research focuses on questions at the intersection of sub/urban geography, racial capitalism, housing, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). This frequently involves multi-method investigations into residential segregation and the racially uneven geographies of sub/urban development. Recent examples of this work can be found in Urban Studies, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Urban Geography.
I also like to produce urban datasets that assist researchers and organizations working on similar questions. For example, along with coauthors, I have recently released historical housing unit, urbanization, and land-use data in consistent census tract boundaries from 1940 to 2019 for the entire Continental US in the Nature journal, Scientific Data. This data product—called the Historical Housing Unit and Urbanization Dataset v2010, or HHUUD10—allows users to investigate the historical geographies of urban renewal, housing unit loss and gain, sub/urbanization, and land-use and environmental change. You can learn more about it here.
My current research project looks into the federal, New Deal-era “redlining” mapping program operated by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). As part of this effort, I have tabulated the variables in the HOLC maps’ “Area Description” sheets and made the tables, GIS files, code, and write-up available for download at Open Science Framework and Environment and Planning B. You can learn more about it here and check out the interactive map below.
Zoom into a city and click on one of its HOLC neighborhoods to see its attributes. You can toggle the basemap by clicking the layer icon on the lefthand side. All variables used to populate these attribute tables are available here.
Map Zoom
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this work. I can best be reached by email: scott.markley@cornell.edu