Know Your Lines goes behind the scenes of the largely invisible redistricting process in which politicians often get to choose their voters, instead of the other way around. Who’s actually drawing the lines? What does the shape of a district mean? What does a good redistricting process look like?

CUP collaborated with the Brennan Center for Justice and design team We Have Photoshop to produce Know Your Lines, a fold-out poster on the ins and outs of redistricting and how to make it work better. If you care about political power, representation, or public policy, then you care about redistricting. 

Know Your Lines is aimed at helping communities and advocacy groups across the country to understand how they can play a role in making the redistricting process fairer, more transparent, and more accountable to the public. CUP and the Brennan Center launched the project with an outreach event for “grasstops,” the leaders of community groups who are now using this information in their own organizing work.

Learn how you can make a change with your own copy.

Resources & Links

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a nonpartisan public policy and law institute that focuses on the fundamental issues of democracy and justice.

We Have Photoshop makes: books, catalogues, fonts, flyers, installations, posters, proposals, postcards, signage, sounds, videos, and websites for people, companies, and institutions.

Making Policy Public is a program of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). CUP partners with policy advocates and graphic designers to produce foldout posters that explain complicated policy issues, like this one.

Funding Support

This project was made possible by the Nathan Cummings Foundation; public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the North Star Fund; and the Union Square Awards, a project of the Tides Center.

Special Thanks

Mike Sayer and Southern Echo, Caroline Sykora, Mark Torrey, Kate Suisman, John Arroyo, Sundrop Carter, Rosten Woo, Francis Lam

Participants

  • CUP
  • Christine Gaspar
  • John Mangin
  • The Brennan Center
  • Advocacy Partner
  • Erika Wood
  • Myrna Perez
  • Garima Malhotra
  • Justin Levitt
  • Bonnie Ernst
  • We Have Photoshop
  • Designers
  • Michael Gallagher
  • Sebastian Campos

Press

Know Your Lines
  • Art Threat
  • May 11, 2011

Who is drawing the lines? What does the shape of a district mean? And what does a good redistricting process look like? These are precisely the questions being tackled in Know Your Lines.