Boston: Past, Present, Future (Spring 2026)

“All … maps make arguments. They all have an implicit politics … Cartography … becomes radical when it embraces the inherent uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity of both our data and the world itself … values that provoke more humanizing and responsible maps.”

– William Rankin, Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World

As part of our explorations in American Historiography, Division 3 (9th/10th grade) students investigated the past, present, and future of Greater Boston, asking questions such as:

  • How and why have our neighborhoods changed over time? How might they continue to change?

  • How do institutional oppression and institutional privilege shape our lives and our neighborhoods?

  • In what ways have people in Boston taken action together to build more just communities, and how might this continue in the future?

Students then worked to communicate their learnings through oral history projects (past), micro memoirs (present), and speculative fiction projects (future), bringing all these projects together into interactive maps of Greater Boston. We hope these maps inspire you to ask what role you can take in building more just communities, wherever you live.

For any questions regarding this project, feel free to reach out to teacher Eric Fishman at efishman@meridianacademy.org.

Map 1 - Boston: Past (Oral Histories)

During our unit on redlining, housing justice, and the histories of Boston, we learned the importance of community histories and oral histories. They can bring forward voices that have been undermined and silenced by the systematic racism, classism, and ableism built into our cities. At the conclusion of the unit, we interviewed longtime community members about how their neighborhoods have changed over time. These oral histories take a variety of approaches to understanding how institutional oppression and institutional privilege have shaped the rights, options, and decisions of people in different neighborhoods throughout Greater Boston.

To navigate this map: every diamond is a different interview. When you click on one, you will see the date of the interview, who the interviewee and interviewer are, and where the interview took place. Below these four pieces of information, you will see a link to the audio recording of the interview, followed by a description, and finally the full transcript of the interview.

These oral histories are overlaid onto a 1930s “redlining” map of Boston commissioned by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a U.S. federal agency, which was created in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. These maps were used for decades to determine which neighborhoods banks would give loans to. This “redlining” resulted in profound inequalities in terms of which neighborhoods received investments and which were excluded, based on HOLC mapmakers' perceptions of racial, ethnic, and class divides. 

To learn more about histories of housing (in)justice in Boston and around the country, see these resources.

Map 2 - Boston: Present (Critical Micro Memoirs)

Next, we wrote memoir vignettes, investigating how our own lives have been shaped by the places we live, and how institutions and ideologies shape our own rights, options, and decisions. This is the critical micro memoir project! This project was an extension of our learnings about housing (in)justice. First, we gathered inspiration by analyzing mentor texts from Ross Gay, Sandra Cisneros, and Eula Biss. Then, we took our own experiences in our own communities relating to housing (in)justice, and wrote memoirs both retelling and reflecting on the experiences. We call these “critical micro memoirs” because they reflect on systems of power; we use critical theory to read the “text” of our lives.

You can explore our micro memoirs in the map below, along with contemporary data relating to housing affordability and land usage. Click on any of the diamonds to view a student’s micro memoir.

Map 3 - Boston: Future (Speculative Fiction)

This map holds our speculative fiction stories, written after our unit on the climate crisis. In this unit, we discussed the historiography of the climate crisis, and read the speculative fiction novel Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell, which helped us to talk about the storytelling and the future of climate justice. We also touched on how environmental justice is connected to disability justice, learned about different ways that people around the world are fighting the climate crisis, and did our own self-guided research. As a conclusion to the unit, we wrote speculative fiction pieces imagining the future of Boston's neighborhoods over the next twenty to forty years. In each of these stories, characters grapple with the effects of the climate crisis, even as they also take action with others to survive, protect each other, and build liveable futures. These fiction pieces are set in the same neighborhoods as our oral histories and micro memoirs.

To select a specific speculative fiction, simply click on the diamond next to the title. This map also contains data about power plants and large facility greenhouse gas emissions, as well as data from the federal Environmental Justice Index.