A sign designates Poindexter Village’s future location, currently the site of apartment buildings. Credit: Yusuke Kita | Lantern Reporter
In the space where a community once lived, only fragments of memory remain. At Ohio State, those fragments are being transformed into immersive 3D landscapes that restore depth to places long erased from the map.
The Ghost Neighborhoods Project by the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, or CURA, is a digital reconstruction that resurrects the lost streetscapes of Black communities destroyed by highway construction.?
According to the project’s website, the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highway Act systematically fractured and erased vibrant Black communities to make room for interstate highways.?
Poindexter Village, built in Columbus in 1940 as the nation’s first public housing project for African Americans, followed this same pattern of destruction, according to the website.
The center, collaborating with the James Preston Poindexter Foundation and Ohio History Connection, creates digital 3D models of lost landscapes of the neighborhood.
“The project is about developing a workflow that allows us to take the data off the maps and build 3D urban models of neighborhoods as they looked in the past,” said Harvey Miller, director of CURA and principal investigator of the project.?
Miller said the team uses machine-learning techniques to pull building information from Sanborn and historic fire-insurance maps, to then shape that data into 3D models. The process is still partly manual but is now being streamlined through ongoing automation efforts.
“Most of the time, researchers are just modeling for the contemporary environment, and even when they do historical environments, it’s just the simplest extrusion from the map into a geometric form,” Summer Ha, a graduate research associate at CURA, said. “Our goal is trying to accelerate from maps to 3D models with roof geometry as well as door and window openings.”
In addition to maps and photos, residents’ memories also help correct and complete the 3D models, Miller said, filling in details that the documents leave out. However, these insights can only emerge through sustained trust-building with the community.
Miller said they build trust by spending time in the neighborhood, visiting regularly, joining community events and listening before asking for anything in return.
“They are very proud of the neighborhood and anxious to tell stories,” he said. “Engagement moves at the speed of trust, so you can’t be impatient.”
“We tend to think about the scientific part, but we often miss the social part of it, so it’s important to hear their voices,“ Ha said.?
Miller said the models are scheduled to be displayed in the Poindexter Village Museum, which is set to open in 2028. It will be housed in the two remaining historic buildings of the village.
“We have to recognize that when we made decisions to build urban highways through neighborhoods, there was a human cost,” Miller said. “It deeply affected these neighborhoods, and it still affects them today.”
Ha said it is important to acknowledge what others gave up then, for it to be what it is today.?
“Whatever we see around us now, we tend to take it for granted,” Ha said. “We rarely think that what we enjoy today might be something others sacrificed for us.”
While the project currently focuses on three Columbus neighborhoods: Poindexter Village, Mt. Vernon Ave. and Hanford Village, Miller said they plan to expand their work based on community input about which sites should be reconstructed next.
Miller said future work may explore additional themes, including historically significant churches, the neighborhood’s rich funk music heritage and the Green Book locations that once served Black travelers.
“We hope that once our techniques work efficiently, we can scale them to entire cities and enable a new domain of urban historical science,” Miller said.
