ABSTRACTS FOR THE PLACEMAKING EXHIBITION
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Urban Archives: The City as Spectacle, Laboratory, and Text
by Giorgia Aiello, Tom Dobrowolsky, and Irina Gendelman
Our audiovisual presentation focuses on everyday, ephemeral urban texts such as graffiti, public art, signage and architecture in the city of Seattle. Through visual ethnography, we document urban materiality in order to decipher the hidden discourses of the street. We are particularly interested in the relationships of power that are embedded in urban communication practices. We look at issues of transience and marginalization in Seattle’s neighborhoods. We examine networks of visual political expression (e.g. graffiti, political yard art, flyers) and we analyze the city as a diverse spectacle of interwoven signs and competing narratives that vie for visibility in placemaking.
Keywords: urban communication, digital archiving, linguistic landscapes, geo-semiotics, visual ethnography, visual communication
Placemaking in Western US: 50 Years of Chinese Immigrant Dis/Place/Ment
by Karen Bancroft
Placemaking often occurs by the exclusion of individuals and groups of people. US history is filled with such exclusions, as illustrated by these posters. They show how Chinese immigrant laborers were indispensable for the westward US expansion in the late 1800s. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants mined, laid railroad tracks, cleared land for farming, and were part of the fish-packing process in this country. Their presence has been all most totally erased from western US memory (nearly every western town in the US during the later half of the 1800s had its own Chinatown). Chinese laborers were the first, but not the last, ethnic group to this country to be federally excluded from immigration. This exclusion ushered in all the anti-immigration acts of the twentieth century.
Keywords: Chinese immigrants, 1875-1925, Chinese Exclusion Acts, “The Chinese Must Go,” anti-Chinese violence
The Salishan HOPE VI Evaluation Project
by Kathy Durning Brennan with Christine Stevens and C. Tom Carlson
Salishan is an ethnically diverse public housing neighborhood managed by Tacoma Housing Authority. With HOPE VI grant funding from HUD, the neighborhood is in the midst of a redevelopment to create a mixed-income community that will include a blend of subsidized rental units, low-income senior apartments, and affordable and market-rate home ownership housing. The Salishan residents are being relocated to either new on-site housing or to off-site housing. This poster describes residents’ ties to the Salishan neighborhood through photovoice interview findings. In addition, resident relocation outcomes are displayed using GIS mapping. Program and policy implications are drawn.
Keywords: public housing, photovoice, GIS, relocation.
The Grief of Losing Place
by Barbara S. Bruce
Grief is not only personally unavoidable; it is universal, crossing all ethnic, religious, and generational boundaries. Time, landscapes, and people have inseparable interweaving ties that mutually define place. The rending of these attachments may produce anxiety, loneliness, depression, and helplessness. Memory constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs these past mental images throughout the process of grief resolution. The consistency and stableness that a landscape provides becomes an historical reference point that binds a person to a certain place in actuality and time, fostering a strong self-identity, and strengthening the community social framework. This larger-than-life banner depicts how the loss of the attachment to place may create unprecedented grief.
Keywords: place attachment, attachment-loss, grief, memory, landscapes
Voces Comunitarias: A South Park Photovoice Exhibit
by Julio Cruz, Kindra Galan, Kyla Frajman, Alyssa Palermo, Selena Frajman, and Charlie Smith The South Park Violence Prevention Collaborative (SPVPC) is a grass-roots effort formed in 2005 in response to gun violence in South Park. The collective assets of activists, artists, doctors, public health and social workers, and other volunteers created opportunities for South Park residents to engage in respectful conversations about public safety in their community. The photovoice project and an exhibit of photographs by youth, which was coordinated by Antoinette Angulo, is one of the outcomes of this effort. The photographs in the Placemaking Exhibit were selected from a larger body of work.
Keywords: photovoice, South Park, violence prevention
"We write not only about different things; we also write differently:" Queer Youth and Knowledge of Place
by Joseph Dial
This poster displays excerpts from (1) high school seniors' essays on queerness and (2) the literature of queer space. It attempts to show how the differing language and cultural norms of queer and straight society affect queer youths' sense of place. For example, compare the different meanings, for queer youth, of "boy," "girl," "school dance," "prom," "boys' showers," "dressing up," "going out," "dating," "my boyfriend," "my girlfriend," "my partner," "husband," "wife." Through writing, queer youth negotiate these differences and construct their knowledge of place.
Designing Disruption: A Typology for Architectural Resistance
by Yamani Hernandez
This nine-foot-long banner is a visual synthesis of the findings of a master of architecture thesis that draws on critical theory to investigate existing precedents and possible new directions in activist architecture. It investigates the parallels and disparities between activist art and activist architecture, and demonstrates the precedence and potential for architecture to inspire public debate and instigate social action as a direct activist act. It uses an analysis of selected case studies and interviews with activist practitioners in the fields of art, architecture, urban planning, and community organizing to explore how architecture incorporates the tools of subversive art and community activism for calculated resistance. The study and resulting banner describes the findings of eight fundamental characteristics of the process and four possible building types of direct action activist architecture, which is directly relevant to matters of place and power.
Keywords: architecture, resistance, public space, activist art
“They had tons of space to move their arms:" Youth Perceptions of Segregated Spaces in Their Education
by Katie Johnston-GoodStar, Ratnesh Nagda, and Lori Markowitz
These posters explore place-based disparities reported by students of a local middle school that houses both regular and advanced learning programs. The program demographics convey largely segregated learning spaces for mostly students of color and mostly white students in the two programs respectively, resulting in physically and socially separated spaces for the students. To raise greater awareness about the spaces, as well as intervene to bridge the separation, the school recently received Archbishop Desmond Tutu and hosted a group of South African students. The South African students engaged as peer facilitators for a five-day transformative education curriculum exploring issues of social justice and apartheid, and involving multiple forms of learning. Using in-depth interviews, student perceptions of psychological and geographical spaces were explored. Preliminary findings are reported in this presentation.
Keywords: education, segregation, South Africa, African American, advanced/gifted learning
Planning and Cultural Diversity in White Center, WA
by Michelle Kondo
Increasing cultural diversity poses an emerging challenge for planning, as can be revealed by language and other participatory barriers in the planning process, questions about representation and use of ‘cultural translators,’ the role of grassroots organizations, and culture-based zoning and regulatory conflicts over architectural style. In these posters, I wish to summarize a grounded understanding of these challenges for planning in a neighborhood such as White Center, which is home to multiple—dozens—of ethnic and cultural groups. I also hope to reveal a means to use cultural difference as a resource in democratic communication.
Keywords: culture, diversity, planning, public participation, democracy.
Social Distance and Physical Isolation: Race, Health, and the African Diaspora
by Clarence Spigner
This audiovisual presentation illustrates how health inequality, like “race,“ is socially constructed by time and place. In most nations (except Cuba), people of black African descent are more socially distanced and physically isolated. In turn, Africans in America experience inadequate health similar to blacks in Britain. Latin America’s Africana negra are marginalized due mainly to discrimination. The Caribbean’s pivotal role in the slave trade has left a legacy of poverty throughout the 24 islands. Africa herself is the poorest nation on earth. Commonalities of inequality characterize the social distance (discrimination) and physical isolation (segregation) that represent color-codes for health within the diaspora.
Keywords: race, health, racism, disparities, diaspora
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