What
story-telling
With
Anastassia Vybornova
& Trivik Verma
Format
visuals for an academic paper & poster presentation
Year
2025
The argument
The paper authored by Anastassia Vybornova and Trivik Verma critically examines one of the most persistent assumptions in urban research: that residential segregation is the product of individual preferences and choices. Scrutinising the individualistic bias embedded in computational models of the city, they argue that such frameworks obscure the structural forces: political, economic, and historical, that actively produce and reproduce spatial inequality.
Visual narrative
The visual story-telling for this paper began with the idiom of being dealt a bad hand. The primary image discusses the interconnected four spheres of perpetuation of individualistic bias – Education, Computational modelling, policy-making and public discourse. Education especially on computational methods, continues to be an elitist project, which directly shapes who get to inform policy-making and become power brokers that determines peoples’ lives within a city. This is also reflected in what is reproduced in public discourse.
The image below introduces the readers to the spatial context wherein people with multifaceted identities are shown reduced to single demographic lines — race, caste, ethnicity — as is commonplace in agent-based models. Resources, too, appear as gatekept rather than freely distributed, controlled by power brokers rather than equitably shared.
The explicit and implicit building blocks of computational approaches to segregation
I used the Schelling model with time-steps mapped by the authors as a visual explainer (or urban segregation 101) in how computational abstraction strips away the texture of lived experience. Showing both the ‘ingroup’ moving into gentrifying neighbourhoods and the ‘outgroup’ being displaced to deteriorating ones, the visual holds these processes alongside the ground reality they so often obscure.
The Schelling model (an example of other urban models) abstracts the ground reality and everyday experiences, obscuring the different processes that actually lead to segregated neighbourhoods.
The final image in a step-by-step manner reveals how spatial inequality compounds across every axis of life — labour, education, health, social networks — with very different consequences in advantaged and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. These consequences are laid out in the form of cards of a deck. Life here is a game and we can play with the cards we have and who decides who gets the cards is the core of the argument here.
