A photo archive documenting how infrastructure brings us together — or tears us apart

The connections that should unite us are divided by design. We're building the proof.

Divided Connections is a community photo archive documenting the infrastructure that separates us — and the infrastructure that brings us together. Every sidewalk, bench, and transit stop is a connection point. When those are divided unequally, so are we. Submit a photo, share a story, help us build the evidence for change.

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Photos submitted
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Cities documented
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Neighborhoods mapped
What we document Two sides of the same city
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Hostile design
Anti-homeless spikes, armrest benches, boulders under bridges, skateboard stoppers, and other infrastructure designed to exclude vulnerable people from public space.
Exclusionary
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Humane design
Accessible playgrounds, public water fountains, sheltered bus stops, benches without armrests, shaded walkways — infrastructure that serves everyone.
Inclusive
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Accessibility failures
ADA non-compliance, missing audio crossing signals, dead-end sidewalks, no adaptive playground equipment, inaccessible transit entrances.
Exclusionary
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Neighborhood patterns
Every submission is tagged by city and neighborhood, letting us map where inhumane infrastructure concentrates — and bring that data directly to city lawmakers.
Research
The archive Community-submitted photographs

The archive is waiting.

Be the first to document the disconnection in your neighborhood.

Contribute to the archive

Submit a photograph

Your photo joins the archive. Every submission — tagged with a city, neighborhood, and your story — helps us map the disconnection and build the case for change. All submissions are reviewed before publishing.

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Choose a photo or drag it here
JPG or PNG · max 10MB
Camera details — optional, for fellow photographers
Every photo is reviewed before it publishes.
✓  Submitted — thank you. Your photo will be reviewed and published to the archive shortly.
The map Submissions by city & neighborhood

As submissions grow, this map will show where divided infrastructure concentrates across American cities — and where humane design is getting it right. Every dot is a story. Every cluster is a pattern worth bringing to a lawmaker.

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The map fills as submissions come in

Each approved submission is plotted by city and neighborhood. Once enough submissions arrive in a city, geographic patterns become visible.

How the map works
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You submit a city and neighborhood
No exact address or zip code required — just enough to place it on a map.
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Each submission is reviewed and approved
Nothing publishes without human review. We check every photo before it appears on the map or in the archive.
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Patterns emerge by neighborhood
As the archive grows, we can see where hostile and inaccessible infrastructure clusters — and where humane design exists to point to as a model.
About Divided Connections

Why divided — and why connections

Divided Connections is an ongoing, community-built archive of photographs documenting how American public infrastructure includes — or excludes — the people who depend on it most. The name is intentional: infrastructure is how cities connect people to jobs, healthcare, parks, and each other — and that connection is profoundly unequal.

"Infrastructure is never neutral. Every bench, every ramp, every spike tells you who a city was built for — and who it was built against. This archive is the evidence."

A single photo is a story. A thousand photos, tagged by zip code and category across dozens of cities, become evidence — the kind that can be placed in front of a city council member and say: this is your district, this is the disconnection, this is what needs to change.

We document both sides: the hostile design that pushes vulnerable people out of public space, and the humane infrastructure that shows what's possible when a city is built for everyone. Because the goal isn't just to document the disconnection — it's to close it.

01 — Document
Build the archive
Community photographers submit photos with zip codes, categories, and short personal stories about what they witnessed.
02 — Map
Find the patterns
As submissions grow, we map how hostile and inaccessible infrastructure concentrates by zip code — and how it overlaps with income and race data.
03 — Advocate
Take it to lawmakers
We produce city-by-city reports to bring directly to local officials, urban planners, and disability advocates as a concrete call for change.

Follow the project on Instagram @dividedconnections and contribute your photographs to the archive.