Details about Specific Maps & Unit Essential Questions:
As described earlier, the first section of my unit will include dozens of contemporary maps of Philadelphia, opportunities for students to make and annotate their own Philadelphia map and to explore some maps made on 3D printers. The last section of the unit, as will be described below, will utilize digital environmental justice mapping tools to layer data over familiar neighborhoods, and do some planning and visioning. The significant section in the middle of the unit draws on a range of maps curated specifically to depict a period from pre-history through the modern moment and into the future. These maps range from archival, while others were created by artists, still others imagined by me and created by AI. I have curated a set of resources for this unit, that will be referenced at the end. This set includes the maps I discuss in detail below, supporting resources for these maps, links to the many digital maps I will print out and use on slides, and lesson outlines for all the lessons currently planned for this unit. Because this unit is Philadelphia-centric, I imagine most readers could use these ideas to create a set of maps to engage with any of these ideas using resources tailored for their own communities. The resource guide will also include links, materials lists and photos of many hands-on map projects.
The essential questions addressed by this unit: How can we use maps to tell stories about the past, present and future? How can maps share information about how land, food, air, water are impacted by humans in given time periods? How does what came before impact the choices people have now? How can we use this information to build a sustainable future?
Another key question worth considering and discussing with students. What is legacy? The future is always influenced (built on top of) the past - and everything on earth is influenced by place. These things can all be mapped. What do we want to leave for the next generation to build upon? What do we want to build? We leave a legacy regardless, so let’s work together now to make it something we can be proud of.
Students will start this journey across time by imagining Philadelphia without city blocks, houses, or even people. What were the landforms, animals (mammoths!), and geology that helped shape where humans would eventually live, hunt, fish, plant, and build. By beginning with these maps we set a tone that all human history sits atop much older environmental foundations. The rivers, soils, and valleys we see today are not just natural features; they are archives of time.
Long before the Lenape settled in the region that would become Philadelphia the land was shaped by glaciers, shifting rivers, and evolving ecosystems.
“The Last Glacial Maximum, the point of the highest glacier coverage from this current ice age, occurred approximately 20,000 years ago. At that time, Pennsylvania was a tundra, still not the forests we know today. There would have low shrubby plants, grasses, and conifers, but as temperatures warmed with the retreat of the glaciers, deciduous trees moved into the area. During this last Ice Age is where we see Pennsylvania hosting the megafauna of the Pleistocene.” 23
I used AI (ChatGPT and Midjourney) to generate imaginary paleo-ecological maps of the region using details from the two articles cited here about what the region might have looked like from sediment cores, fossil records, and geologic surveys.
Map 1: Deep Time / Paleo-ecological Map (c. 20,000 plus years ago)
Figure 3, Depictions of Imagined Paleo-ecological Time 15,000-50,000 years ago.
ChatGPT on left, and Midjourney on Right
It is thought that 15,000 years ago, the Delaware River was a braided, icy tributary draining glacial meltwater from the north.24 What is now the city’s urban grid was once part of a vast coastal plain. Imagine that mastodons and giant beavers roamed a boreal forest of spruce, pine, and early birch. Wetlands and ancient creeks carved their way through soft soils, and tides reached far inland due to lower sea levels.25
These maps are necessarily speculative but are grounded in science. If there weren’t so many other activities I want to get to I would invite students to select from one of a dozen imagined paleo-ecological maps and make a claim, based on evidence, for their favorite.
The next map on the timeline of this unit is an illustrated historical reimagining of the Philadelphia region. This map was published by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1934, not the circa 1634 time period it is meant to depict. The map visually reconstructs the landscape before colonial settlement, using Lenape place names, oral traditions, and ecological references to tell a detailed story about the land and the people. Unlike the rigid grid of contemporary maps, this version centers waterways, animals, and seasonal knowledge. It reminds us that Philadelphia was, and remains, Lenapehoking—the homeland of the Lenape people. The Lenape people have over 15,000 years of history in the homelands before the arrival of Europeans to Lenape homelands.26
Map 2: Coaquannock Map-aka Philadelphia Region when known as Coaquannock, 'Grove of Tall Pines,' at the time of first European contact.
Figure 4 Philadelphia Region when known as Coaquannock, 'Grove of Tall Pines,' at the time of first European contact, (WPA, 1934)
There is so much to observe and wonder about in this Coaquannock map (which is easier to do on-line). Students can situate their frame with some familiar geography (our rivers) and peer at the land through an imagined Indigenous lens. Place names that are still in use as street or neighborhood names today, will be familiar to some students. Kingsessing (“place of large shells”), Wingohocking (“a favorite spot for planting”), and Manayunk (“where we go to drink”) offer a sense of rootedness and relationship to land. Some names refer to trouble: one now-buried stream is labeled “the creek where we were robbed.” Because the map was not contemporaneous to the time it depicts, it provides fodder for the essential question we will ask about all maps: who is this map for? It appears to be an artifact of memory and resistance, but it was not made by Lenape at all. Despite this we can see clues to seasonal foodways, waterways used for drinking and fishing, and the presence of wooded areas that provided both shelter and sustenance. As we begin to move through the history of Philadelphia, students are challenged to ask: who drew the map? Whose worldview does it represent? What has been preserved, altered, or erased? An article, titled “Coaquannock Map Shows Lenape Land Before William Penn”, written by a local author and historian (and former geography teacher) fleshes out this time period, framed around the story of this map, will be an additional resource to offer students context, specific details about food and farming, and additional images from this period.27 Students will make some choices about how they might introduce this map in their Atlas.
The next map, is drawn from William Penn’s original vision for Philadelphia, reflects much changed layout from Coaquannock map. Published in the late 17th century, this formal plan laid out the city as a carefully gridded structure, oriented between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. It is both a document of colonial imagination and a blueprint of power. Penn envisioned a "green Country Towne" with public gardens, wide streets for ventilation, and wooded parcels left intact to prevent fire and disease. The plan reveals the ambitions of a Quaker settler with utopian ideals, yet it was built on land already inhabited and shaped by the Lenape people. In the resource guide to this unit will be additional maps, primary and secondary text, and a set of questions to frame observations and student reflections, as we start to see familiar street names, and a grid that still exists. Another version of a map of this new city, has a reference key naming many places by their association to food. Students will be guided towards this and several sources detailing the routes from farms to markets, the butchers and other trades.
Map 3: Colonial Plan of Philadelphia (1683)
Figure 5 Scull, Nicholas, George Heap, and William Faden. A plan of the city and environs of Philadelphia. London, W. Faden, 1777. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005415/.
This map invites us to examine how early city planning was linked to public health. There is a long excerpt in the Teaching Resources Set detailing William Penn’s early experiences in urban London. His design for Philadelphia allowed for agriculture and open space, reflecting Penn's experience with bubonic plague and devastating fire. He was somewhat conservation-minded in ruling that one acre of woodland be preserved for every five acres cleared. The placement of homes along the river for both "health and Navigation" suggests both food access via water and the importance of avoiding polluted urban cores. But the map also signals a colonial claim, an assertion of control over land and people that laid the foundation for future systems of segregation and exclusion. In contrast with the Coaquannock map, this map speaks to organization, planning, ownership, and expansion.
Map 4: Du Bois’ Seventh Ward Map (1899) W.E.B. Du Bois’ map of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, published as part of his landmark study The Philadelphia Negro, is a stark visual record of racialized space at the dawn of the 20th century. It is a masterpiece of research and documentation. DuBois went door to door to interview and meticulously map the residences, churches, and businesses of Black residents in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. These maps were a key component from his groundbreaking sociological study. This map - I need to still figure out how to present in way that allows for close examination -might at first glance seem colorful and decorative, but its careful and clearly detailed research reveal patterns of overcrowding, poverty, and segregation that were already deeply entrenched in Philadelphia’s Black communities. Du Bois argued that…” the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”28. Visualizing the social and economic conditions of the Black community and neighborhood, was a radical act: it challenged pseudoscientific racism by documenting reality from the ground up.
Figure 6 Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt). "The Seventh Ward of Philadelphia." Map. Philadelphia: Published for the University, [1899]. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:gb19h9947
This map marks a new way to tell stories about people. William Penn maps to plan for a future and the Coaquannock map was made to preserve the past. Du Bois maps a present defined by systemic inequality. The Seventh Ward map becomes a spatial argument, bolstered by a map, and detailed records to call for change. This map of one ward in Philadelphia became even more powerful when placed alongside Du Bois’ infographics created for the 1900 Paris Exposition, which used charts and maps to highlight literacy, land ownership, and progress among Black Americans.
These will appear along with a few excerpts from his writings, and his photo, found in the Yale archives in the Teaching Resource Set for this unit. Du Bois also tracked the proximity of tenement housing to industrial zones and noted disparities in access to fresh food and sanitation, documenting conditions where health and survival were shaped by the built environment. In his own words, “The shadow of hunger, in a world which never needs to be hungry…”29
There is an ArcGis Story Map called “The Ward”30 which provides easy to access resources to connect to Du Bois’ work in Philadelphia. There is an interactive component which allows the viewer to search for detailed data on every resident who was interviewed. This tool is overlaid on the modern street grid of Philadelphia, and both exposes the challenging lives of the residents of the seventh ward at the turn of the last century, and the power of a tool like ArcGis Story Mapping to reimagine how a powerful story from the past can be relevant to the future. Du Bois knew that to tell the truth about race in America, one had to first map it, and use the map to tell a story. I imagine my students will have a lot of feelings about this map, these stories, and the issues this map lays bare, which are very close to home.
Map 5 Philadelphia HOLC Redlining Map (1937) This map, produced by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1937, used color-coded grading to assign property value and perceived investment risk to neighborhoods across Philadelphia. Green indicated “best,” blue “still desirable,” yellow “declining,” and red “hazardous,” a classification that included Black, Jewish, immigrant, and working-class communities. This practice known now as redlining was a formalized system of racial exclusion which limited bank loan and insurance access, reduced home values and public investment for generations.31 This map will be one resource among several others that will support discussion, analysis and consideration of the impact of redlining on current conditions. There is a website called Mapping Inequality32which takes this exact HOLC map and superimposes it on a modern-day map of Philadelphia. This overlay will be another exposure to the power of digital overlays to expose socio-political issues.
Figure 7 Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Record Group 195. National Archives and Records Administration. Also: Nelson, Robert K., LaDale Winling, et al. Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. University of Richmond, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=11/40.011/-75.162&city=philadelphia-pa.
Alongside these maps we will also look at excerpts from an article aptly titled “Repercussions of Racist Maps Still Impact Neighborhoods Today” which offers numerous sources, images and insight into how these policies have impacted the many modern-day Philadelphians who today did not benefit from housing wealth accumulation specifically because of policies that this map depicts.33 This HOLC map speaks directly to the geography of opportunity, and of deprivation. Students will be directed to contemporaneous accounts that highlight how redlined areas were also disproportionately close to industrial corridors, flood-prone zones, and areas lacking in fresh food markets or park space. These were neighborhoods where meat and produce vendors were sparse, where smog hung over streets, and where pollution from tanneries and factories settled into homes. This was not accidental. The map makes visible how race, place, and policy were (and are) intertwined. As we see that the legacy of redlining continues onto this next map image, which is part of a project by Erica Fisher, who used census data from 2010 to plot a racial overlay on multiple cities. A hauntingly beautiful image emerges, as a dot representing 25 people sorted by race depicts an image of racial segregation at a point in time. Student will use these materials to try to grapple with what is revealed when someone ask questions and use data and maps to discover separate and unequal as planned, spatial phenomena, not as accidents of history.
Figure 8 Erica Fisher: 2025. Flickr.com. 2025. https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4982041458/in/gallery-jweiss3-72157625013440068/.
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