Module 5: Place Based Observance
[VIDEO]:
Let’s do a quick activity together.
If you have a piece of paper handy and something to write with, please grab those now. If not, no problem, your imagination is enough.
Close your eyes and visualize yourself in a place you know well. Perhaps it is a room in your house or the park where you walk your dog. This place might be the train or bus station you wait at every morning on your way to school or work and return to every afternoon or evening.
Mark this place at the center of the sheet of paper.
Now feel yourself rise into the air as you might do if you had your own jet pack or wings. As you get higher, you can see that your starting point is placed within a wider landscape. Slowly rotate and look across this landscape, taking in a quarter-mile or a few city blocks in each direction. What, for you, are the key features in this landscape? Are parts of this landscape immediately clear while other parts are not so easy to visualize? Sketch a map of this landscape on your sheet of paper. If you were to take a stranger for a walk through this place, where would you take them? Draw this path on your map. Are there places you’d avoid taking them because you do find them unpleasant? Perhaps they are dirty or noisy or considered dangerous.
Mark these places on your map!
Having a sense of place means being familiar with the physical, social, and aesthetic qualities of a space.
This sense includes an awareness of the inequalities of a place. This is more than noticing the different features or qualities of a place. It is an internalized sense of belonging or not belonging, senses that are guided to some extent by the long history of inequality. You might want to make annotations on your mental or drawn map that point to this sense of place.
Inequality is not abstract.
We live in ways and environments that sort us according to our differences. This sorting secures, for some, inheritances of privilege, while, for others, it extends legacies of dehumanization. While our cities promise opportunities for the democratic encounter they are, often engines of inequality. Those of us who live in cities know these geographies well. We know where the wealthy neighborhoods and institutions are located and where disinvestment has abandoned places and lives. These are the places we euphemistically refer to as being “on the other side of the railway tracks” or that we simply dismiss when we say, “there is nothing there.”
The civil rights movement called on us to reconnect what the ledgers of inequality have sorted.
This shift will require an equitable redistribution of resources and opportunities. Your 400 Years of Inequality anniversary observance is an opportunity to move along pathways forbidden by the sorting affected by the ecology of inequality. This is why it is especially powerful that each of our observances is of a place and is dedicated to the futures of all who live there.
You and your observance team will determine where you will actually hold your event and how you will speak both the history of that place and invoke the histories of other places important to you and your community. To help develop a place-based observance, think back over the stories you have told and heard as you worked through the earlier modules in the on-line course. With little effort, you will recall at least a handful of places that were referenced in those stories. Make a note of these places. Working with the other members of your observance team, collect historical and contemporary photographs of these places and write the stories that belong to these places.
We would love to see these places and stories.
If you feel comfortable doing so, please share your written, audio, or video responses to these questions and post a photograph of a place you thought and wrote. When you are done, and if you are comfortable doing so, please share your response. Click below to post this response on the private M.O.O.C. Flipgrid. The password is: iamfrom400YEARS
Let’s do a quick activity together.
If you have a piece of paper handy and something to write with, please grab those now. If not, no problem, your imagination is enough.
Close your eyes and visualize yourself in a place you know well. Perhaps it is a room in your house or the park where you walk your dog. This place might be the train or bus station you wait at every morning on your way to school or work and return to every afternoon or evening.
Mark this place at the center of the sheet of paper.
Now feel yourself rise into the air as you might do if you had your own jet pack or wings. As you get higher, you can see that your starting point is placed within a wider landscape. Slowly rotate and look across this landscape, taking in a quarter-mile or a few city blocks in each direction. What, for you, are the key features in this landscape? Are parts of this landscape immediately clear while other parts are not so easy to visualize? Sketch a map of this landscape on your sheet of paper. If you were to take a stranger for a walk through this place, where would you take them? Draw this path on your map. Are there places you’d avoid taking them because you do find them unpleasant? Perhaps they are dirty or noisy or considered dangerous.
Mark these places on your map!
Having a sense of place means being familiar with the physical, social, and aesthetic qualities of a space.
This sense includes an awareness of the inequalities of a place. This is more than noticing the different features or qualities of a place. It is an internalized sense of belonging or not belonging, senses that are guided to some extent by the long history of inequality. You might want to make annotations on your mental or drawn map that point to this sense of place.
Inequality is not abstract.
We live in ways and environments that sort us according to our differences. This sorting secures, for some, inheritances of privilege, while, for others, it extends legacies of dehumanization. While our cities promise opportunities for the democratic encounter they are, often engines of inequality. Those of us who live in cities know these geographies well. We know where the wealthy neighborhoods and institutions are located and where disinvestment has abandoned places and lives. These are the places we euphemistically refer to as being “on the other side of the railway tracks” or that we simply dismiss when we say, “there is nothing there.”
The civil rights movement called on us to reconnect what the ledgers of inequality have sorted.
This shift will require an equitable redistribution of resources and opportunities. Your 400 Years of Inequality anniversary observance is an opportunity to move along pathways forbidden by the sorting affected by the ecology of inequality. This is why it is especially powerful that each of our observances is of a place and is dedicated to the futures of all who live there.
You and your observance team will determine where you will actually hold your event and how you will speak both the history of that place and invoke the histories of other places important to you and your community. To help develop a place-based observance, think back over the stories you have told and heard as you worked through the earlier modules in the on-line course. With little effort, you will recall at least a handful of places that were referenced in those stories. Make a note of these places. Working with the other members of your observance team, collect historical and contemporary photographs of these places and write the stories that belong to these places.
We would love to see these places and stories.
If you feel comfortable doing so, please share your written, audio, or video responses to these questions and post a photograph of a place you thought and wrote. When you are done, and if you are comfortable doing so, please share your response. Click below to post this response on the private M.O.O.C. Flipgrid. The password is: iamfrom400YEARS
