Minneapolis Panorama

Minneapolis Panorama is a visual record of the Lake Street and West Broadway corridors in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The panoramas establish a visual baseline to track and evaluate the future transformation of the Lake Street and West Broadway corridors.

The images for the Lake Street panorama were taken on Thursday, June 4th, five days after the initial protests. The West Broadway images were taken on Thursday, June 11th. 

While protest affected areas throughout the Twin Cities, the Lake Street and West Broadway corridors stand out. These streets represent historic corridors, cultural destinations, and economic centers for many of Minneapolis’s most resilient residents.

The reconstruction of Lake Street and West Broadway will bring capital, people and new ideas to the corridors. How will their transformation impact the needs of those who are the most disenfranchised? We will answer this question by providing a visual diagnostic of physical change over time and and using the panoramas as tools for public engagement. 

This is a collaborative effort between Fernando Burga PhD, and Masters students Robbie Seltzer and Blake Slette at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities' Humphrey School of Public Affairs Masters of urban and regional planning program. 

The panoramas were not produced automatically. They were assembled by coalescing hundreds of photographs in Adobe Photoshop. Deliberate choices were made to consider where each image overlaps with the next in order to provide a comprehensive view of Place. For this reason, the panoramas capture the experience of walking down Lake Street and West Broadway. They are not a technical record of the streets, but rather a collage of memories. In some cases background buildings are repeated, in others foreground objects were eliminated.  his was done in order to continuously depict all of the buildings along the corridors.