Is Your Neighborhood Diverse? Check the Map

Did James Rouse achieve one of his goals of making Columbia a fully integrated city? Decide for yourself.

A new map released by the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service takes racial data from the 2010 U.S. Census and represents each citizen, by race, as a dot on the map.

Each race is represented by a different color, blue for white, green for black, red for Asian, yellow for Hispanic, and brown for other races.

Taken together the dots show a visual representation of the racial makeup of cities, towns and the country.

In the map above, I've centered the zoom on Columbia, showing the racial makeup of Columbia's villages and neighborhoods.

The map itself was created for the Cooper Center by Dustin Cable in July 2013.

This month, Wired.com called the map  "The Best Map Ever Made of America's Racial Segregation". In the article, Wired writes that every city tells a different story, but in some the segregation can be surprising.

"In the Midwest, though, the racial divide can be shockingly exact. In Chicago, bands of whites, blacks, and Latinos radiate out from the city center like sun beams. In St. Louis, a buffer of a few blocks separates a vast area of largely black citizens from another of white and Asian ones," reported Wired.