Immediately after Björk releases Biophilia, Galactic Zack invites me to his East Sixth Street apartment in Austin, TX, for a listening party. We drink whiskey and smoke herb, preparing our minds and bodies for Björk’s music.

— Fuck the neighbors, Zack says as he begins playing Biophilia. He turns the volume on his stereo to full-blast and pulls his signature flat-billed cap over his eyes.

We swoon as Tesla coils provide the bass for “Thunderbolt.” When the Gameste in “Crystalline” fades and the song climaxes into a drum-and-bass cadenza, Zack falls to the floor and pulls me with him, pinning me down with his hand on my chest. Our bodies vibrate with the bass.

— FEEL IT?

— I FEEL IT.

— HOW DOES SHE MAKE SO MUCH SOUND OUT OF NOTHING?

— I DON’T KNOW.

I’m not an electronic musician. I really don’t know. But I know that Zack knows.

The previous night, we discussed literature while listening to The Carpenters’ The Singles: 1969-1973 on vinyl. In some mid-sentence claim about the perfection of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Zack stopped talking and leapt up to plug cords into his record player. He apologized for our conversation’s abrupt end.

— I’m sorry; I have to do this.

— Do yo thang.

Zack transferred a three-second sample from The Carpenters’ vinyl onto a cassette tape. He played his sample backwards and moved the recording to his computer, slowing the sound down, elongating its sonic waves. Zack chopped his sample up, repeated it, reversed it, flipped it over itself. Sonic acrobatics. He laid more tracks on top of his sample: frenetic 909 snares and 4-to-the-floor bass, hands clapping at 155 BPM. Zack turned the sample into his own, new, five-minute long track.

— Do you like it?, he asked me.

— Of course I do. What kind of music is it?

— It’s juke.

— What is juke?

— This, Zack said, pointing to his speakers. This is juke.

Now, listening to Bjork’s “Mutual Core,” Zack again jumps up and begins recording. He apologizes for the second night in a row. Again, I tell him I’m not offended. Again, I say:

—    Do yo thang.

*

To literary critics, formalism, or structuralism, is a conversation that began when people started arguing about the methods by which humans construct narratives. Narratives are, of course, tangible objects that take up space and time; the book on the corner of my desk is literally occupying a spot within this moment. Texts, like any other item, are constructed forms. Structuralists, or formalists, discuss the structure of stories much in the same way that architects discuss how people structure buildings: an I-beam is to a builder as plot is to a storyteller. Aristotle began recording this dialogue millennia ago, with Poetics. Within the past hundred years or so, some scholars who discuss literary form have called themselves “New Critics.” And according to structuralists / formalists / New Critics, literature does provide objective measurements by which readers might gauge it.

In the 1920s, Russian formalist Mikhael Bakhtin appropriated a concept called the chronotope from Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he began using this concept within literary studies. The chronotope—literally, “time-space”—manifests within a narrative as an author writes about time in such a way that it “thickens, takes on flesh,” and appears as a tangible spatiotemporal plane within his/her text; “likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the moments of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 84). Any given chronotope, Bakhtin argues, necessarily works as a generative principle of the narrative within which it appears and therefore limits the scope of that narrative; certain types of characters appear within certain types of spaces, and the actions those characters perform will be limited to what might realistically happen within that space. Chronotopes are interesting inasmuch as they might manifest within many texts from different time periods and because they exist cross-culturally. And because they signify real-world time-space, chronotopes reflect the real-world planes within which we exist.

To prove his theory of the chronotope’s manifestation within literature, Bakhtin identifies a few chronotopes, one of which is “the chronotope of the road […] and of various types of meetings on the road” (Bakhtin 98). Roads exist in literature primarily as historically bound liminal spaces wherein historically bound characters may travel from one place to another and interact with other characters who also do the same. Any given road within any particular text is informed by that text’s existence as a specific, tangible, “piece” of material made from the fabric of space-time. A road in any particular literary text, then, will be constructed in direct response to its author’s historical situation. Or, as Bakhtin writes, “In the chronotope of the road, the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity” (98).

Indeed, a road is a specific, constructured spatiotemporal plane that exists in the real world and within which travelers travel and encounter other travelers who are also traveling. Our real-world road spaces also manifest within our narratives. Of course, the motives we have for being on roads will no doubt change between our stories, and the appearance of the roads themselves—as well as our means of transportation on those roads—will change between texts, too. The historical moment determines this variation; however, a road is a road is a road. The spatiotemporal plane of the road exists in the real world, and as roads manifest within literature, we discover the narrative trajectory that roads offer to people who travel on them.

For example, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century text The Canterbury Tales, the chronotope of the road manifests as pilgrims—“sundry folk”—travel from Southwark down a pathway toward the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Along their way down this path, the pilgrims engage in a storytelling competition to pass the time, and their stories reveal historically based class, religious, and gender tensions between the characters. Additionally, in her 1991 screenplay Thelma and Louise, the chronotope of the road appears as Callie Khouri writes about the titular characters setting off on a road trip to escape the patriarchal systems that oppress them: after a man attempts to rape Thelma, she kills him. She and Louise then speed away in a blue Thunderbird. They are chased by law enforcement, which views them as outlaws on the run, and they ultimately drive their Thunderbird into the Grand Canyon, crashing the car and presumably killing themselves. The chronotope of the road for Khouri’s characters ends with death—albeit their death stands as a metaphorical escape from the patriarchy which subjugates them.

Though the road in these stories manifests in different forms and though the method of transportation by which these travelers navigate their roads differs, we should notice that between the narratives, the chronotope of the road provides a spatiotemporal plane through which characters travel in order to reach some desired destination. That destination differs between the stories, too; still, as a “set” plane of existence, the chronotope of the road actually determines the spatial narratives of these texts. Characters who enter the chronotope of the road are offered a spatiotemporal plane through which to travel to some destination, and when they reach that destination, they eventually leave the road; therefore, the chronotope disappears from their texts and the spatial narratives of their texts change.

If we think about the spatial narratives provided by chronotopes that manifest within stories, then, we can reproduce those narratives by fashioning their chronotopic spaces into existence in the real world. Of course, our real world does not exhibit a lack of roads; the spatial narratives that our real-world roads might provide are, without a doubt, plentiful. An entire literary genre called “road stories” does exist. However, certainly there are other chronotopic spaces that might be useful for us to construct in the real world—and particularly in our cities.

In my Master’s thesis in Literature, entitled Patti Smith and a Tradition of Transgression in Women’s Autobiography, I indentify one of these chronotopic planes, and I name it the chronotope of the artistic frontier. My chronotope of the artistic frontier is a spin-off of the chronotope of the road inasmuch as it provides a spatiotemporal plane through which a character might travel in order to reach a destination. However, within the artistic frontier, the destination that a subject reaches is a life as an artist.

I develop my chronotope by comparing Patti Smith’s 2010 autobiographical book Just Kids to Diane di Prima’s 1969 Memoirs of a Beatnik, showing that both texts include their subjects moving to urban areas. They acquire jobs at arts-based venues and live in communal “pad” spaces with other artists. They often feel that their work is pointless, not suited for the times in which they live. Still, in the “pad” spaces, the subjects are able to “woodshed,” practicing their art alongside other to-be artists. At least once, the subject leaves the urban area s/he moved to at the beginning of the narrative in order to live somewhere else, but s/he eventually returns to the city with a new appreciation of it. The subjects continue to make friends with other artists whose artistic philosophies run parallel to their own, and these other artists become their mentors.

Eventually, the tangible plane of the chronotope of the artistic frontier disappears from the narratives altogether when the subjects create art that others recognize. The subjects therefore become artists within their own rights. By moving away from the urban area s/he originally came to at the beginning of the narrative now that s/he has become an artist, the subject enters another space that s/he created while exploring the chronotope of the frontier: an artistic career, as well as the world as it exists after the artist has changed it.

*

As it manifests in literature, then, the chronotope of the artistic frontier provides a plane within which individuals can become artists. That is, the chronotope of the artistic frontier determines a particular spatial narrative for those who exist within its manifestation. Perhaps we could implement the literary study of the chronotope into our practice of constructing our urban spaces. By being aware of how chronotopic planes actually generate particular spatial narratives, we can improve our methods of achieving our desired spatial narratives for cities. And if we want our cities to be ones that produce artists, perhaps we should construct the chronotope of the artistic frontier within them.

Of course some cities already do provide the conditions under which the chronotope of the artistic frontier might manifest within the spatial narratives of their citizens. Austin, TX, is one of these cities, and Galactic Zack is an artist who currently traverses the chronotope of the artistic frontier as it manifests in Austin.

Even more interesting, though is that Zack, along with many of his fellow Austin juke artists, is queer. Austin has definitely experienced urban growth in line with what Richard Florida mentions about the “Gay Index,” which assists in the creative class’s rise within urban areas. Along with the rise of the creative class, Florida reminds us, a city becomes more corporatized. This claim therefore indicates that the “queerness” in Austin has no doubt assisted in the city’s overall urban growth and corporatization.

However, if we follow Zack and some of his fellow artists through their own chronotopic narratives of how they became artists, we find that the players in Austin’s juke scene actually resist the corporatization that has impacted the city as it has grown around them. What we then discover is an exception to Florida’s “Gay Index” rule and a re-working of how he claims an urban queer community shapes the landscape within which it lives.

In my next entry, I will explore the chronotope of the artistic frontier’s characteristics in more detail. In turn, we can more fully understand how Galactic Zack exists within Austin’s manifestation of this chronotope, as well as how this chronotope is a tangible structure that we can emulate by literally building it into reality elsewhere.

Curadoras (the curators): Crash report of time machine from 2068 in 2011. The curators, named .Avi and .Exe, suffer amnesia of their present reality in 2068 and must seek help from residents of 2011 into 2012 in recreating their memory.

In 1968, the future arrived in Mexico. Through a coordinated effort of over 250 designers, artists, writers, architects, photographers, and other creative, young, international individuals, the design strategy for the 1968 Olympics held in Mexico City served needs well beyond the sporting event. The organizers, headed by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, developed a fantastic strategy that introduced Mexico City as a modern city both locally and internationally. The graphic designers employed icons and bold colors for both the subtle purposes of branding and practical information-rich way finding features for a Spanish-illiterate audience. The campaign was pervasive throughout the City, with billboards and other elements positioned to remind residents of the upcoming Olympics hundreds of times a day, the construction of modern stadiums, and the development of a cultural corridor of public sculptures along the City’s peripheral highway. Modern Mexico was announced to the world through global advertising of the Games, and through the strong cultural program co-presented with the famed sporting events for the first time.

Mexico had overcome enormous obstacles to become Olympic host, from being the first developing country to host the Games, to deep concerns over the City’s high altitude. Further, Mexico’s position at the helm of contemporaneity came at a turbulent time in both local and world history, leading to various protests against the Games in general, and against the participation of particular countries. 1968 marked a year of global paradigm shifts: protests fueled by the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil, workers’ and students’ rights uprisings led masses throughout the globe to oppose oppressive regimes and reframe priorities, often suffering violent repercussions. Democracy was taken to task that year, its shortcomings exposed globally. On October 2 in Mexico, just 10 days before the games were to begin, a peaceful gathering of 10,000 students in a large plaza in the modernist housing complex Tlatelolco ended in a pre-determined massacre, leaving hundreds dead at the hands of the “Olympic Brigade.” The Tlatelolco massacre was a boiling point for the ongoing student protests in Mexico City that demonstrated the state of government oppression in the country. News of what actually happened that October 2 did not surface until more than 30 years later. The reports in 1968 that claimed that the attack was prompted by the protestors are now known to be untrue. The order to shoot had been given by the Presidential offices.

So what

Capsulas: At every performance, after discussing the future of the city, participants are asked to contribute more personal goals or desires to time capsules - water bottles that in the future will only be accessible as artifacts in museums (we suppose).

Today, the conflicted memory of 1968 brings to the minds of most Mexicans the powerful Olympics graphics simultaneously with the painful images of Tlatelolco. Meanwhile, the world again finds itself at a crossroads in 2011 into 2012, the likes of which have been unseen since the late ‘60’s. Protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Spain, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in the United States, and protests in Russia continue to expand even when violence erupts. In the US, it remains to be seen whether forceful political reaction against protestors will increase to the point of murder, aided by new policies limiting freedoms of speech and assembly. That no simple message exists was a conscious decision on the part of the OWS movement’s collaborators, foreshadowing attempts by the US media to twist, turn, and invert any perceived goals, to confuse the previously apathetic public. The truth is that the conditions for the average American have greatly deteriorated over the last decades, while the upper echelons of society have become exponentially better off. The political system has become enmeshed with economic interests, leading to a marriage detrimental to all but the famed top percent. Like the revolutionary separation of church and state proposed by Thomas Jefferson, the time has come to separate the state from the market. No single demand can adequately address this fundamentally ideological issue without oversimplifying its practical implications.

Mexico

Sitac X: The curators attend the Simposio Internacional de Teoría sobre Arte Contemporáneo (SITAC X), whose theme this year is the Future, to ask leading expert artists and art theorists about how to reconstruct their memory of 2068. They receive a beautiful response (link to video) from conference director Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

The concerns in Mexico are linked to those in the US. Drug-related corruption supported by US demand reigns throughout the country, with either government increasingly unable to compete with the cartels in buying power or arms. In Mexico City, timeless issues such as equitable access to potable water and legitimate income occupy the minds and most days of millions of residents living in informally-constructed neighborhoods on the City’s peripheries. The class divide remains ingrained in the Mexican psyche, to the point that many ongoing city-led improvements focus on already well-served areas. These realities, along with the political sway toward capital-rich priorities, lead to a potentially bleak future; one not much better than the present. The Presidential candidates for the 2012 elections pledge grandiose improvements, but the Mexican audience appears wary of such demonstrations after years of broken promises – and systems.

However, in addition to bringing more residents’ quality of life up to 21^st century standards and fighting government corruption, there is a new element on the City’s agenda: since the period of 70 years of PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) rule ended in 2006, City officials increasingly approach notions of participatory governance and democratic processes. The beginnings of this process are awkward, and with often unimpressive and costly results, such as the little-attended citywide “Consultas Ciudadanas” (tr. Citizen Consultation) held periodically. Predictability, even if lacking, are more secure than unknown potentialities to a public with so few resources available. The systems of corruption, coercion, and self-reliance are so prevalent in Mexico after years of essentially dictatorial rule that both government and public are hesitant to jump into any collaborative engagement.

Museo del Futuro (Museum of the Future)

Curators search for help from the public at Latin America's largest university - the UNAM - from both students and professors.

However, what these budding changes signify could be a new era. The experiemental Museum of the Future inserts itself into this reality as a critical institution. The Museum looks to the year 2068 as a marker, an opportunity to imagine what Mexico City looks like 100 years after the memorable events of 1968 in Mexico City and worldwide. It operates as a vehicle to generate and collate creative proposals from the public regarding the future of the city and its institutions. Through the Museum, we construct a collaboratively developed story of what local future priorities should be in Mexico City, working with members of the public to engage and learn from their imagination. The first step to changing existing conditions is the ability to imagine an alternative, improved reality. With the Museum, we aspire to make this type of imagination a more common practice among its residents in the public spaces of the city.  And then “re-applicate” the process throughout the world with help from local actors.

The project is inspired by contemporary artistic practice involving the public in urban environments, theories of institutional critique, and by LeFebvrian ideology of visioning toward a just city, and developed as action research. Museum activities consider Mexico City realities at three scales: individual, community, and regional, and loosely follow a participatory planning process.

Curators search for help from the public at Latin America's largest university - the UNAM - from both students and professors.

(Individual) The process begins with interactive street performances by two time-traveling curators from the Museum of the Future in 2068. The two were sent on a mission to visit 2011/2012, to inform an upcoming exhibit about these historic years. However, their time machine crashed upon landing, and the impact caused amnesia in the time travelers. In this condition, they take to the streets, asking the public to help them reconstruct the memory of their reality in 2068, and looking for support in reconstructing their time machine.

(Community) The time machine, whose role is also to house a mobile museum, is recreated through a competition model from the future: local cultural groups and university students collaborate to design and build the structure, using their competitive skills toward a better shared construction. The structure, built of present-day elements, becomes a time capsule of today’s building materials and imaginations, and employs the building block of a water bottle to collect personal wishes of visitors. These serve as time capsules by individual contributors. However, unlike typical time capsules, they are immediately viewable by museum-goers so that the visions they contain are accessible daily rather than saved for a distant future.

(Region) The mobile museum exhibition presents a particular perspective on present-day Mexico City through the eyes of the Museum’s curators and a collaboratively developed image of 2068, resulting from the street performances. Prior to returning home to 2068, the curators take the mobile museum on tour through the city, stopping in distinct neighborhoods around the metropolis. At each stop, local cultural groups perform or otherwise demonstrate their own takes on the city’s future, and the public has an opportunity to respond to the story created from fellow residents’ ideas. After the tour, the second round of public input is used to modify the story of Mexico City in 2068, and the final collective vision is delivered to the City’s political leaders as a document that captures residents’ desires and priorities for the future.

Objective / Mission

La_Villa: .Exe is helped by curator .Pde in searching for clues about 2068 in front of La Villa de Guadalupe, the most important church in Mexico from street vendors such as the hat seller pictured, and visitors. Given security concerns, the duo is forced to conduct their inquiry a few blocks away from the church.

The objective of Museo del Futuro is to ignite public imagination and participation through an experimental framework. Its mission is to capture collective visions of possible futures of particular urban environments, while proposing a new institutional typology that fosters such collaborative, constructive imagination among the city’s diverse residents.

The Museum of the Future and its virtual platform function as a place for reflection about the desired future of the city, and a mirror to critically examine the present in light of memories of the past.

Get to know our curators from the future at www.facebook.com/museodelfuturo, @museodelfuturo, or email us museodelfuturo@gmail.com to learn more about the project and explore how it could grow in your community. Our website will launch soon: www.museodelfuturo.com.

Project collaborators include architects, urbanists, sociologists, and artists, including Dr. Héctor Castillo Berthier and his group Circo Volador, architect Iván Hernández Quintela, architect/planner Laura Janka Zires, MIT DUSP student Jessica Garz, and artist Jorge Navarro.

On April 6^th I participated in the “Skill Building for the Intercultural Planner: A Cultural Competency Workshop for Policy and Planning Students” hosted by the Intercultural Practice Group (ICP) of Tufts’ Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Program. I want to share some of the teachings, learning and reflecting that happened at the event. But before I get to the content of the event I want to try to think through why I—and perhaps others—went to this event and why planners should be concerned with cultural competency.

I should disclose that I am a member of ICP, but I think my reasons for being a member of the group and attending the event are the same, and will treat them as such. As a soon-to-be-graduate of a planning department, I am going to be engaging in the protection, creation and transformation of community spaces—yet the communities I will work in are likely not places I will call home. Furthermore, my interest in confronting the destruction and dispossession created by our deeply flawed economic system will likely put me to work in communities of color where the dispossession and destruction has had disproportionate impacts. So as a white male, hailing from the suburbs, waiting for the ink to dry on my diploma, I come asking: How do I make sure I am part of the solution and not the problem?

I am confident that when I stand in solidarity with people of a particular race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity different from my own, I do so out of my resolute commitment to social, economic and political justice, not some misconstrued idea of liberal white guilt. Yet that does not mean that I always have the cultural competency to understand, work with and celebrate difference. So I participate in our intercultural competency group and I go to events like this skill building workshop to get better at recognizing and celebrating difference and to learn how to convince others to do the same.

So what did the skill-building workshop have to offer?

The first presentation was from Tufts UEP Professor Julian Agyeman on the lack of and need for explicit cultural competency education in planning schools. He argued that planners need more than just good facilitation skills; there is more to be done in the intercultural city than just making sure all groups are represented in public processes.  Indeed, thinking about “the public” is limiting; instead, planners should consider how “multiple publics” can be recognized and accommodated.  We also need to understand how culturally competent planning is good planning for all and how embracing difference can lead to more equitable and livable communities. For those interested, Dr. Agyeman and recent UEP alum Jenn Erickson (a founding member of ICP) have just published a paper on this topic in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, “Culture, Recognition, and the Negotiation of Difference: Some Thoughts on Cultural Competency in Planning Education.”

Dr. Agyeman’s presentation was followed by a bystander awareness workshop with Maureen Scully from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Scully led us through some examples and role-play to improve our actual interpersonal skills with regard to cultural competency. How do you react when someone says something degrading or insulting? To remain as a silent bystander can be even more devastating for the victim and serves to reinforce or accept degrading norms. Instead, we learned how to be active bystanders by first creating space in the conversation with a simple comment like “ouch,” and then becoming that victim’s ally by addressing the comment.

Next was a spatial justice workshop from the Design Studio 4 Social Intervention. Kenneth Bailey and Lori Lobenstine led us through a discussion of a framework they use for understanding rights to spatial justice: Spatial Claims – the right to be and become; Spatial Power – the right to thrive and express; and Spatial Links – the right to access and connect (a paper on this can be found on ds4si’s Website).  A participant brought up how Fenway Park is often presented in the media with images of white fans only, which reduces the spatial claims that non-white baseball fans may make on the space and is compounded by historical segregation enforced by Red Sox owners and common in the city of Boston.

The day ended with a presentation from Tufts’ urban sociologist Ryan Centner. He provided us with a case study of the transformation of a neighborhood in Buenos Aires comprised of residents with varying social, cultural, legal and spatial claims on the neighborhood. Dr. Centner described this as a situation of multiple positions of knowing and trajectories of experience.  All residents of a community have their own histories with and understandings of those spaces; these multiple viewpoints and experience in a space over time represent interests that must be acknowledged and balanced during phases of redevelopment or gentrification.

For me, the seemingly disparate presentations were unified by the need for an explicit link between social and physical spaces. Physical spaces are envisioned and planned in social spaces through dialogue, debate, and listening. Without the use of interpersonal skills that recognize and celebrate difference the social spaces would be closed off to many, thus limiting the potential for our physical spaces. But as Dr. Agyeman pointed out, we need more than just good facilitation for intercultural planning. We need the cultural competency to understand how physical spaces are experienced socially—among friends, family, neighbors or strangers. The discussion about spatial justice surfaced the idea that social norms can be reaffirmed, created or destroyed by how we use our physical spaces. The flip side is also true, physical spaces themselves can affirm, create or destroy social norms.

No single workshop intends to anoint a group of planners “culturally competent,” but it was an opportunity to think about what skills for intercultural planning we need and why the skills are important.

Site 2

The Intersection

Long before Kimberly Crenshaw demarginalized the intersection, black women and other multiply oppressed people were experiencing the intersection as a site of injury.   For Jordan, in 1964 and after, the intersection was not the academic site of nuanced marketability that it has become today in our academic and non-profit industrial complexes.    The intersection was a literal and psychic place of injury that Jordan sought to transform or even eradicate in her work as an architect and visionary urban planner.   In one of the letters that June Jordan wrote to her collaborator R. Buckminster Fuller about the Skyrise for Harlem project in 1964 she focuses on the site of the intersection as one of the major problems in the impoverished urban landscape, noting that at every corner the resident emerges vulnerable to harm from at least two sides.   As a Black woman, and as a proto-queer poor single mother, as everyone she was, June Jordan knew something about being vulnerable to harm from at least two sides, and not just in the street.  In a sense the very situation of the publication of her architectural plans was such a site of multi-directional harm from collaborating forms of oppression.   As we saw the title “Skyrise for Harlem” was replaced with the cruel joke, “Instant Slum Clearance,” and on top of that the wording of the article was shifted to attribute the entire architectural plan to Fuller, Jordan’s white male collaborator.  Marginalizing June Jordan in relationship to her own theories of what the cityscape would be.   These multiple harms, maybe best described as twin harms that were predictable along intersecting lines of oppression and collaborating methods of disempowerment.   Many of us have learned from experience what June Jordan learned, which is that from the position of privilege there is no contradiction between demeaning the intellectual work of black women and then also co-opting it.   This is part of the reason that Jordan published one of her letters to Fuller in her series of essays, Civil Wars, to reclaim the theoretical work that she did in the creation of the plan, which not only included an astute analysis of the feasibility of what Esquire dismissed as a “utopian” plan in terms of the master plan of the city of New York and the agendas of the current local officials with a state in New York City and Harlem, but also an analysis of the intersection itself as a site of violence in need of reparation.

In her letter she describes the intersection as a site of “psychological cruxifiction” within the cityscape which is especially pronounced in the Harlem section of Manhattan because Central Park, which provides the only major reprieve from the grid in New York City ends at 110^th street.   For Jordan the intersection is a structuring logic as well as a physical liability for the residents of Harlem.  The impact of intersection after intersection for Jordan represents a “physical pattern of inevitability” which in her opinion actually impacts the Harlem residents ability to relate to life as possibility as opposed to struggle.   In her young adult novel His Own Where Jordan’s protagonist Buddy is also a subversive urban planner, he convinces his neighbors to combine their backyards and garden together, imagines the temporary hospitality of the hospital as a model for how the city should be structured and not surprisingly Buddy, born in to print in 1971 also has a scathing analysis against the intersection.    In the opening scene of the novel Buddy, whose father is in a hospital dying because of an accident at an intersection says:  (read from the book), then remember that Jordan has written to Fuller that the intersection is a site of “psychological cruxifiction” Buddy explains his own experience of the intersection… “you be crucify like Jesus at the crossing…”

Central Park / the grid / the intersection /

June Jordan is an architect because she believes in what she calls “the determining relationship between architectural reality and physical well-being.”   So the design of a new round and winding Harlem free of corners is based on her belief that a curved landscape will suggest the possibility of generative surprises not only on a walk through the new Harlem, but also in life in general, that it will cultivate patterns of discovery and imagination in the lives of Harlem’s children and adults, situating them as dynamic participants in an ecology of urban living, not just everyday targets of moving harm.   In our contemporary appropriations of the concept now called “intersectionality,” many of us have departed from the actual site of the intersection as a place of harm, and moved towards intersectionality as a description of complicated identity formation which departs from the use of the metaphor by Kimberly Crenshaw, but without the visionary potential that Jordan offers us with her literal spatial plans about what to do about the intersection.   What we do now with intersectionality is to describe ourselves by our pedigrees of oppressions and flip those oppressions into self-identifications that we use to navigate those same oppressions, forgrounding grids of fragmentation and injury on our bodies and in our paths.  But Jordan’s injunction through her vision of a round existence says that we are more than that.  We are more than crucified, we are possible.   Beyond mitigation of harm, Jordan’s work to create a post-intersection Harlem affirms a revaluation of life where we are the more than the inverse of our liabilities, more than the sum of our uses to the machine, where we are priceless, and cherished and about to be surprised by what we imagine and create as we move.

Which leads us to site 3…

The Wire and Treme are two of the most sophisticated television shows dealing with urban issues ever. Honestly, the qualifier “urban issues” is hardly needed. They are two of the most sophisticated televisions shows period. Sociology, Law, and Urban Studies departments around the country teach the shows. Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson wrote:

Though scholars know that deindustrialization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply intertwined, they must often give focused attention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, The Wire can be more creative. It can weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor.”

Beyond a cross-disciplinary approach, what The Wire does right is to show that low-income blacks, working-class ethnic whites, the police (cough*right-wing paramilitary organizations*cough), suburban white educators, politicians, and journalists are all, in Chaddha and Williams words, deeply intertwined.

Yet, despite a short storyline regarding harborfront development, The Wire largely ignored one of the major trends of urban America through the 90s and 00s: young, hipster, often white (and often seen as gentrifiers) moving into the city. (In Baltimore, this trend was partially encouraged through the problematically named “urban homesteader” program.) Though not the province of traditional urban studies, this group is having a profound effect on both the lived experience of American urbanism and on media depictions of the city.

With Treme, Simon introduced a few characters who could be said to belong to this group: Steve Zahn’s trust-fund musician Davis McAlary, Michiel Huisman’s drug addled Sonny, and Lucia Micarelli’s adorable busker Annie. At the same time, these three characters (with the exception of Annie) are often played for either laughs or as less-than-sympathetic characters. Davis, especially, is persistently shown as an outsider to the culture that he tries so hard to fit into. In one episode he gets punched for trying a little too hard to fit in with the black culture he moves through.

At the same time, these portrayals of this group are hardly surprising. Between the irony and the privilege, showing a sympathetic, dramatic hipster character in a city ravaged by natural and man-made disaster would be a challenge, to say the least. With that in mind, it makes sense that Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen’s Portlandia plays them for laughs instead.

Portlandia, I would argue, is one of the three best portrayals of urban America on TV today (along with Treme and the new, Chicago-based political series The Boss). Despite the sketch comedy, it is also a highly engaged, thoughtful portrait of a place. The following is a short excerpt from an interview between Carrie Brownstein and Marc Maron on the WTF podcast:

MM- How would you characterize it? I mean, obviously the show Portlandia skews it all pretty well. The full range of the types of people that are there, but it is a weird combination, no?

CB- Yeah, no it’s a combination of sort of hypersensitivity, a little over analytical, um, privileged for the most part…

MM- White?

CB- It’s pretty white, yeah, and I don’t… I’m careful now to note that I love living there, but I’m definitely… it’s a self-conscious city, it just doesn’t have a sense of self yet the way that Seattle or San Francisco does. You go to Portland and there’s a part of it that just seems too ephemeral, which I can see that that would be alienating.”

Throughout, Carrie speaks about the importance of finding “what’s local about this place?” At the same time, Portlandia speaks not only to the local, but also to a national (and international) subculture; in essence positioning Portland as a hipster Mecca, over the similar claims of Brooklyn, Seattle or Minneapolis (or New Orleans).

So, in ten years, will there be courses at Harvard exploring Portlandia in the way that there are for The Wire? Probably not. But, if we’re seeking to understand contemporary urbanism, there should be.

To probe at this question Caesar exposed four modes of practice that must be engaged and, in his words, “disrupted” if we want a more equitable outcome.  Those modes of practice are: ownership, design, intelligence, and framing.  While I recommend that you view the presentation (concise 20 minutes followed by Q&A) to see the real-world examples of “disruptive practices,” below are the four patterns and an excerpt from the speech to give you a sense of what he means:

Ownership –> Personal Digital Commons

who is actually supplying all of the information from where the value is coming?

Design –> Designing for the Margins

we have to be purposeful about it – it’s not enough to say we’re going to design something and we hope other people will be able to benefit from it

Intelligence –> Inclusive Knowledge

how are we going to incorporate and engage with all those different ways of knowing and making meaning out of the world?

Framing –> Collective Framing

you have to meet people where they are, you have to reflect back to them their own intelligence, and you have to do it in a powerful way for them

It’s important to note that Caesar is a Professor of the Practice of Community Development.  His primary focus is in examining how technology can be harnessed to create real democracy and community engagement.

Yes, you read that correctly – Caesar is a professor of community development practice.

While learning how to practice something may be implicit to learning about the thing itself, Caesar doesn’t risk leaving meanings to be inferred.  He describes design as “not a neutral thing; it’s intentional,” exposing its implicit values, and he believes that we “have to be purposeful about it.”  He asks community developers to be clear, as in, “what is it, the value, that we operate out of right now, that we have to pay attention to as we look at this new city?”

I couldn’t agree more that the implementation of a particular community development initiative – that is, its “end product” — is but a small piece in the practice of community development.  And this needs to be explicit.

Implementation in its pure sense is concerned with putting the necessary resources together and identifying the skill sets required to create and maintain the product/plan/project. How community development is practiced determines who participates and how, who sets the agenda, and what information is considered legitimate.

The practice, therefore, is concerned with questions (addressed or not), such as: who will be a participant or partner, what role will they play, will there be a pre-set agenda, which sources of information will be used to determine needs and demand, will final implementation be held accountable and by whom, how and when will it be re-evaluated, and is there a desire to use this process to achieve other goals beyond product/plan – such as relationship or skill building?

Many civic leaders believe that they “don’t have the time” to engage thoughtfully in the practice of community development – even if they believe (or maybe especially if they believe) their intentions are progressive.  In places that are particularly impoverished, elected leaders just want to achieve results.  (Even in more affluent places, like Washington DC, the single-minded drive for results caused former Mayor Fenty to lose re-election.)  And this motive is understandable considering term limits and the sense of urgency to impact chronic poverty or an unsustainable fiscal situation.

So how might cities be helped by a much greater devotion to the practice of community development at a national level?  What form might that take?  Who would be involved?

In the sphere of technology, Caesar’s work again fills a gap that many aren’t addressing.  Certain technologies, in particular the Internet and mobile devices, have been conceived of as great tools for democracy – a means for increasing access to information and the ability to provide input and perspectives from any location.  To some extent this is true, but there is slim evidence to show that it has disrupted inequitable patterns of wealth distribution, residential segregation, or political power.

Caesar’s work isn’t thinking about technology as simply an input that achieves greater efficiency and accessibility; he sees technology as a way to shift power.  How can technology eliminate the need for representational public processes and support direct public engagement at a city scale?  How can people be compensated for, or at least empowered by, the data their existence provides?  How can technology help us measure the effectiveness of programs based on the things people care about but are hard to measure?

Again, I recommend that you watch the video to hear more directly from Ceasar and to see some of the great real-world examples he cites. While the Richard Floridas and Ed Glaesers of the world offer up their recipes for urban vitality, we ought to pay more attention to the thinkers and practitioners examining how we practice community development.  That’s if we want to see a different outcome.

sought to revise and revive one’s experience of local monuments.  Many a New Orleans monument has skidded out of sync with contemporary mores, if not out of the local consciousness.  Not content with these prominent displays of anachronism, we wonder what these monuments bring to our city today.  Can these hunks of bronze be shifted, if only in our imaginations, to bring awareness to contemporary issues?

Bruce Lee in Mostar

My participation in the show was based on a joking post I had made on Neighborland, a wonderful website for civic participation, about changing the Robert E. Lee statue at Lee Circle in New Orleans to a Bruce Lee Statue. My joke had a basis in a couple of different ideas, the first of which is the general annoyance that many northerners such as myself (both living in the south and outside it) have with symbols of the confederacy, especially in a majority African-American city like New Orleans. The second was the knowledge of a Bruce Lee statue that had been installed in the city of Mostar, Bosnia following the war there.

Marx: "How much will it cost to remove the statues?" Engels: "Sit down, I'll tell you"

In Mostar, a city divided ethnically and religiously and largely destroyed during the break-up of Yugoslavia, a contest was held to find a monument that was acceptable to the inhabitants following the fighting. Bruce Lee won (I’ve been told that Brittany Spears was second, but can’t confirm that). Seeking to find any kind of meaning, the folks who put on the competition decided to claim that the Hong Kong Person/American actor was a symbol of ethnic solidarity (though later one ethnic group claimed that the statues fighting stance faced their section of the city). Still, the somewhat ridiculous image of Bruce Lee standing on the town square in Mostar had stuck with me.

Once I had been approached to turn the joke into a proposal for the show, I began to think a little more about the role that monuments play in our urban spaces. Several years ago, I had read a book by a sociologist named Jennifer Jordan entitled Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond. The book sought to understand how spaces in a city like Berlin became memorialized, given the twentieth-century history of the city. In a city where all spaces have historical meaning, how do some become “authentic” spaces of collective memory? In the past, in a city like Berlin (or nineteenth century New Orleans, or post-revolutionary Tehran) memorialization was essentially a monopoly of the state. In our increasingly radically decentralized neo-liberal cities of today, the task of spatial memory falls increasingly to what Jordan terms “entrepreneurs.” In essence, the ways in which a space becomes memory is dictated by those who care the most about creating that memory, and who have the resources to promote that view.

I began to become uncomfortable with completely removing one monument in favor of another, no matter how much I may personally disagree with the collective memory that that statue promotes. Indeed, while I was living in Berlin in the early 2000s, there was a significant push to remove the monuments of the DDR (East Germany). The government of Berlin (which, like Germany as a whole, is dominated by the West, based on both economic and demographic issues) was moving to remove communist streetnames and monuments from the East of the city. Ossies (people from the East) pointed out that a similar movement to remove symbols of the authoritarian royal Prussia was not even considered. In the end, the Easterners managed to preserve their streetnames and monuments only if the name was ethnically German, a compromise that seemed designed to please neither the right nor the left.

So, how could I, an outsider to New Orleans in any number of ways (not the least of which is the fact that I don’t live there), propose to remove one monument for another?

In the end, I decided to suggest an expansion of the monument, rather than a removal. I proposed to add statues of other famous Lees (the most common surname in the world). Harper Lee, Spike Lee, Bill “the Spaceman” Lee (for all the Red Sox fans), Stan Lee and any number of others could be added, creating a monument for any number of identities while also promoting a certain sense of humanity as a family and encouraging residents to think about the emotional and political power that a representation of any human being carries.

Some additional reviews of the show, as well as some of the other entries are available here and here.

* Update: After writing this piece, I learned that Lee Circle had transformed over the last week as someone painted an impromptu memorial to Trayvon Martin on the base of the Lee Statue. 

Friday, April 6th

For our second LabCamp gathering (read about the first here), Social Agency Lab collaborators traveled to St. Louis to stay and work with Rebuild Foundation in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Rebuild Foundation is a “a not-for-profit, creative engine focusing on cultural and economic redevelopment and affordable space initiatives in under-resourced communities” — in short, they are helping communities value and express their own needs by developing spaces for neighbors to interact and create.

Social Agency Lab was lucky enough to stay in the first complete St. Louis home that would serve as one of these spaces, 3619 Blair, which will be a community kitchen for the Hyde Park neighbors as well as a home for the Rebuild Foundation’s team. During our stay, we were honored to help inaugurate the 3619 Blair house as a public venue, as we helped cook the Rebuild Foundation’s first public dinner there and share it with friends of Social Agency Lab and Rebuild.

We chose St. Louis as the site for Labcamp 2 based on the Preservation Research Office competition to reimagine the former Pruitt-Igoe public housing site. Pruitt-Igoe was a federally-funded housing project constructed in the early 1950’s at the height of high-rise public housing developments. It was demolished 20 years later in what architects and urban planners now consider to be “the death of modernism,” or the point at which human scale and neighborhood-type development began to reemerge as the favored template for creating attractive, safe, and wholesome environments.

As we considered our approach to the competition, we knew that we needed to go beyond this basic understanding of what Pruitt-Igoe means to professional architects and planners, and take a step toward understanding what the demolition meant to the residents of Pruitt-Igoe and St. Louis at the time, and toward realizing residents’ visions and hopes for the future of the city.

With deep roots in the Hyde Park community and a dedication to involving community members of all ages, Rebuild Foundation was an unbelievably gracious and important partner in allowing Social Agency Lab to work with students from the their Urban Expressions program on developing a vision for the future of Pruitt-Igoe.

During a day-long charrette on Saturday, we worked with Matthew, Shallen, Malik, Myasia, Knaya, Justin, and Anyiah, all students at the local Holy Trinity school.

Together, these students, Social Agency Lab members, Rebuild Foundation staff, and Michael Allen of the Preservation Research Office toured the now-forested Pruitt-Igoe site, learned about the history of public housing in St. Louis, brainstormed about good things and problems in St. Louis, and finally built some ideas about how the Pruitt-Igoe site could become a good place that would help bring people together and make St. Louis a better place in the future.

Some of the projects focused on creating spaces to imagine and hang out, places where the students could be free to have fun and be themselves. Knaya created an amusement park that included rides but also a library and comfortable indoor environments to sit and talk.

Justin created a “Bluetopia” where everything was blue and winter didn’t exist, a place that was dedicated to the imagination.

Other projects focused on addressing some of the problems that students saw in their own neighborhood environments, like stray animals. Malik addressed this issue by making the site into an urban wildlife park, with animals separated by type across a large, swiftly flowing river.

Anyiah created a pet store and shelter where stray animals could be adopted and pet owners could get everything that was needed to keep their animals comfortable and happy.

The last feature that recurred in the students’ ideas was aesthetics and comfort; how to turn the city into a beautiful and comfortable place with the assets we already have. Shallen had a special interest in working with recycled art, and expressed her artistic vision by proposing a sculpture garden.

Myasia and Matthew revisited the original public housing idea of Pruitt-Igoe, but incorporated elements of comfort. Myasia designed a new edition of Pruitt-Igoe with swimming pools and shopping areas.

Matthew designed a homeless shelter and pet shelter with a “TV in every room.”

For another perspective on Social Agency Lab’s visit to St. Louis and our project, visit the Rebuild Foundation’s blog, where Shallen has written a detailed post about our day at Pruitt-Igoe.

Social Agency is currently working on next steps for collaborating with Rebuild Foundation as we move on from this single weekend event. In the meantime, all of the Social Agency Labcamp participants owe a huge thanks to: Dayna Kriz, Charlie Vinz, Gina Martinez, and Theaster Gates of Rebuild Foundation; Donna Lindsay, Ms. Betty, and Ms. Blackman, friends of Rebuild in the Hyde Park community; Michael Allen of the Preservation Research Office; and all of our student partners on the competition team, Matthew, Shallen, Malik, Myasia, Knaya, Justin, and Anyiah.

For more information or to participate in a future LabCamp, visit the Social Agency website or facebook page.

Site 1

The Bottom of the Barrel

Skyrise for Harlem

When June Jordan imagined “Skyrise for Harlem” the architectural plan that will be the model for this ritual of recitation and resituation, she was scraping the bottom of the barrel.   After witnessing the Harlem riots in 1964, June Jordan abruptly found out that she was a newly single mother. She also offers frankly in a reflection in her first collection of essays, Civil Wars,  “There was no money.  Those days I didn’t eat.”  Her son Christopher had to stay with her parents because she could not feed him. Sometimes friends dropped off milk and eggs and scotch and cigarettes.  The money that she eventually got from selling her article about the architectural plan “Skyrise for Harlem” a plan in collaboration with her close friend R. Buckminster Fuller, was the only money that she had.  On December 24th 1964 the money finally came and she was able to get Christopher back and assemple a semblance of Christmas.   There was no money.   Those days I did not eat.   Some of June Jordan’s cousins have gone on record saying June Jordan was dramatic.  She exaggerated.  But I have seen the records of June Jordan’s phone getting cut off, I have seen the medical records that show the impact of poverty on her physical and psychological health.  And knowing that for June Jordan who loved and admired her parents, but who also experienced abuse growing up in their home, I trust that it was really dire circumstances that had her make the difficult choice to send her son to live with her parents at this particularly dire economic time in her writing life.

This is important to state because for those of us who know anything about her June Jordan is a miracle.  It is as if her life and her smile were sent out of the sky specifically to inspire us.  She was a poet, skilled to create a language for living that contradicted the logic of global capitalism that institutionalized itself during her lifetime, but she was an architect because she built an ethical life out of difficult decisions everyday.  Skyrise for Harlem, came from the very bottom of the barrel, the place where as womanist process theologian Monica Coleman and many others say, we make a way out of no way.  Like Jordan’s tangible architectural work and blueprints, Jordan’s work as an architect, building something out of space filled by an empty belly is forgotten.  As my partner Julia and I have travelled the country interviewing, honoring and documenting the work of innovated black queer feminist elders we have found that some of our genius elders have been couch surfing past middle age, face homelessness and worry daily about where they will house the priceless vessels of brilliance that are their bodies, and where they will keep the priceless boxes of archival materials they have saved from a life deciding to build something bigger than what capitalism would imply.

So the bottom of the barrel is a place, and I say it is a site of intervention.  What does an architect who is accountable to the bottom of the barrel, who can give an account of what that rock and hard place space of choosing feels like, what does that architect imagine and build?  And what happens to those plans in the context of capitalism?  If you were to flip through the April 1965 issue of Esquire Magazine, the source of just in time money that allowed June Jordan to have Christopher home by Christmas, where June Jordan’s article and the plans for Skyrise for Harlem appear you would see the most expensive cars and liquor and clothing advertised.   Not bottom of the barrel but top shelf, enticing the imagined audience of white men with disposable wealth.  And maybe if you thought about the difference between the audience for these ads and the bottom of the barrel Harlem existence June Jordan was navigating as single mother you could predict but probably still never understand the violence of the editorial revisions the staff of Esquire made to her piece.  June Jordan created a vision and an article called “Skyrise for Harlem” but here between the top-shelf scotch and the pall mall cigarettes and the newest Pontiac and the Italian leather shoes you will see a title June Jordan never approved, but consented to when she signed the paper that gave her the money to have Christopher home by Christmas.  The bottom of the barrel.  If you look you will see the title, not Skyrise for Harlem, but Instant Slum Clearance.

This instant.  We were never meant to survive.  Because that is what happens at the bottom of the barrel.   You don’t get a say.   But this triumph.  On the bottom of the barrel what Katherine McKittrick calls a more humanly workable definition of life is being created.   So visionary and transformative and dangerous to the unsustainable sponsors of Esquire magazine that it must be made into a joke.   This is what happens at the bottom of the barrel the unglamorous and frightening space where housing is a basic need, where it is obvious how love and life and imagine suffer how home is impossible when whether you have water depends not on whether you go pump some, but on whether you can convince an absentee landlord to imagine you as human.  June Jordan published a plan for Harlem generated from and accountable to the bottom of the barrel which is a place where we should not have to live, but is also an ethical space, a space of knowledge, a space of clarity about what life requires.   So as architects of discourse and as builders of a movement, what do we know about the bottom of the barrel?  How is that place of knowledge, clarity, injustice and violence reflected in our work?  What everyday choices would we make if we were accountable to that place?

In recent years, anthropologists have questioned the status of “the thing” and in that process new questions about anthropological design and the relation with “object-oriented” disciplines have emerged. In the anthropological corpus, “the thing” has shifted from being a non-existing other, a material tool or a technology product of sociocultural relations,  to a key player in (re)producing social, cultural and political dynamics. Therefore, anthropology is starting to pay close attention to the behavior of objects humans make as an entry point in understanding what being human is. This shift of perspective has opened new collaborations, new points of dialogue, between anthropological design and design-based disciplines. In these new “para-sites,” to borrow George Marcus’ term, it is not at all uncommon to find crossings between anthropological knowledge and urban planning, computer design, policy making, marketing practices, art, and architecture among other disciplines. How are these crossings, this cross-pollination, shaping the way we see, feel and understand the world and our place in it? By bringing together a group of experts who work at the intersection of anthropology and design-based disciplines, this panel explores the ways in which new methodological practices and theoretical stances are both reshaping the design of anthropological projects and design processes in other fields.

Preliminary abstracts should be sent to Zakcq (zlockrem(at)socialagencylab.org) and Maria (mvidart(at)rice.edu) no later than March 31. Please contact us as soon as possible with your intention to submit.

from flickr user J▲hn Steven

A little over a year ago we opened this space on the Internet to start a conversation. We decided to call it Plurale Tantum, which translates literally from Latin to mean, Plural Only. We started Plurale Tantum because our respective experiences and educations had raised, and continue to raise, a number of questions related to the planning, design, and development of physical spaces — questions that we felt weren’t being taken on directly in urban discourse. We wanted a place to start digging into those questions, and to developing them further. We also wanted to start documenting ideas and observations that we felt somehow shed light on our questions – even if we couldn’t always put a finger on it.

Our first piece was posted at the end of January 2011, after which we posted 43 pieces, had 18,313 all-time views, and received a number of comments that encouraged us to continue these conversations.  Last October we took a bit of an unintended hiatus. Between the four of us there were two cross-country moves, three new jobs, one new grad program, a baby on the way, the founding of a new collaborative, and more. All in all, we got a bit wrapped up. But we hated being away, and are happy to say: we’re back.

Before going forward with Plurale Tantum, this post looks back into the past year of writing in order to understand how it all ties together, what questions we were actually trying to get at, and what it all means for how we should move forward with this space. Below, you will find a recap of the theory behind the Plurale Tantum, a summary of the major themes we found that our posts fall within, and an articulation of where we want to go from here.

…..

Back in July 2011, one of our founding authors, Sara Zewde, wrote a piece titled, “So… What IS Plurale Tantum? Reflecting on the theory behind the blog.” If you don’t have a chance to go back and read it, here is an insert that captures the essence of her post:

“This website, Plurale Tantum, contributes a virtual space for ideas on the urban design of cities and how they condition – and are conditioned by – the multiplicity of social identities that inhabit them and the potential of this discourse to inform planning and design… The phrase [Plurale Tantum] communicates a belief that urbanism does not have a singular narrative and should be articulated through various perspectives….

We know that there is no shortage of models for participatory planning. Yet these models largely focus on one dimension – planning as a political process. As long as discourse around participatory approaches to  physical form remains underdeveloped by comparison, the diverse needs and issues of urban communities will not be adequately addressed… The investigation of cultural spatial practice has the potential to inspire new aesthetics, approaches to sustainable design, and also lends itself to inclusivity and social justice, as an approach for popular education and community engagement.”

Our posts, in one way or another, serve to develop this much needed discourse. And they do so through four core themes:

from flickr user Diodoro

1. Questioning the Conceptualization of Identity: One of the main questions we asked in our writing over the past year was: how are various identities shaping and being shaped by physical space, and how are they represented? Be it through political movements, through advocacy, through film or other media, and of course in spatial practice and urban policy more broadly, how are social/economic/cultural identities expressed, celebrated, fabricated, protected, or ignored in physical space?  Why does this matter?

2. Temporal Tensions:  Another theme that found it’s way into our posts was what we like to call “temporal tensions.” How do the past, present, and future in a particular place (and for people in a particular place) relate? Madeline Nusser observed in one of our conversation pieces that we (humans) often “create a strong cultural memory of a place.”  In some cases that memory is a “myth”, in others it’s the truth.  Spatial narratives are everywhere in cities, but what brings meaning to those narratives is often how they have been created, communicated, and changed over time. So, whose story gets told? Whose history is celebrated and whose is forgotten?  What are we asked to remember? And what are we allowed to forget? As Zewde stated in PT’s very first piece: “urban planning and design are critical to the showcasing of history and culture, as they shape the physical space of the experience”

3. Methods: We had a few posts that touched on the methods that are employed in spatial practice, and this is a theme we’d like to develop even further in future posts. How should planners and designers who are interested in celebrating multiple identities (be it race, class, gender, sexuality) approach their work? What can we learn from the methods of other disciplines? Guest author and anthropology grad student Marcel LaFlamme pushed us to think about this through a concise but provocative piece on Carrington, North Dakota. What is working in using our current methods, what is lacking, and how might we adopt new tools or practices to understand the people and places around us?

4. Observations and Reactions: Sometimes we come across something that we feel the urge to share through PT. It may not fit neatly into a big idea, but we find it compelling. Maybe it’s the observation of desiring lines in our neighborhoods, or, we may just want to share observations of weak (or awesome) spatial practice, or, we may feel the urge to respond to an idea or research we read elsewhere on the web, or, we may decide to share ideas from a conference we attended.   We had a few posts like this last year, and will continue to use the space in this format, too.

So, yes, we think design and planning practices need to be more true to the multiplicity of identities, histories, and experiences that exist in cities. That’s not to say that every space needs to be everything to everyone; but it does argue that current spatial practices in cities seems to, more often than not, reflect a singular social, economic, and cultural discourse, and that to begin introducing more plurality into spatial practices, we need to move beyond the paradigm of participation-as-a-political-process.

While we don’t (yet) hold the solutions to many of our own questions, we hope that Plurale Tantum, as a project, allows for an honest and dynamic discourse on urban space and identity. We, the four core authors, will continue to post with pieces that fall into our core themes above (of course, we may find that other themes evolve out of our thinking/writing, too!), but we’ll also be engaging guest authors who can help us dig into the ideas and questions we find most compelling.  In the coming months, for example, you’ll get to read a series of three posts on race and landscape, which we’ll be cross-posting with landscapeurbanism.com.  We’re excited about these forthcoming contributions, and encourage others to reach out to us and take part in the conversation.