Looking Glass: Visualizing Urban Disenfranchisement

Project creator, Adrian Jones, details his Looking Glass app (featured in a recent 90.5 WYEP segment/article) that provides unparalleled views of Pittsburgh’s East Liberty and its remarkable African American history. By using Augmented Reality (AR), app users are able to see “an alternate city” where Pittsburgh’s Black residents were able to thrive and feel welcome for generations in the mid-20th century, but was then lost to decades of developer influence:

“I imagined a camera that was able to unearth the history buried within a gentrified neighborhood.” – Adrian Jones

Looking Glass draws heavily on the photographic work of Teenie Harris, whose documentation of Black life in Pittsburgh lives at the Carnegie Museum. The app is also intended to be collaborative, being built off of open source tools and open to editing in a Wikipedia like fashion.