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Urban Archives: Building public memories of everyday places 434 words

Some scholars argue that we live in an increasingly placeless world. Market forces can destroy and rebuild decontextualized places of consumption, creating a “geography of nowhere” (Zukin, 1991; Kunstler, 1994). Superstar cities compete to attract the investment capital of globe-trotting elites who are not tied down to one particular geographic region (Guyorko, 2006). Urban centers, therefore, become luxury commodities, which are attractive for their unique character but at the same time can be easily substituted. In this process, cities essentially become global neighborhoods that require intense marketing in order to gain a competitive edge in attracting high-income buyers. The resulting rapid development threatens alternate histories embedded in the materiality of the cities.

In this essay, we discuss how the Urban Archives – a digital archiving project that we have created and developed -- contributes to documenting, preserving and telling the story of places that tend to get ignored, overlooked or marginalized in the processes described above. We use the city as a laboratory to research diverse and often unconventional forms of urban expression in an attempt to understand the complex relationships of power that exist in our everyday surroundings. Urban Archives combines technology and institutional infrastructures with the study of vernacular urban texts.

While institutional archives tend to focus narrowly on traditional forms such as “historic” architecture or official documents, the emerging types of populist documentation on the Internet lack consistent annotation, or metadata. We combine emerging technologies -- folksonomies, structured metadata, geolocation-- with accessible media – mainly photography and physical artifacts -- and academically-rigorous methods to map landscapes and annotate their semiotic content.

We view the everyday, material aspects of space as manifestations of underlying cultural values and beliefs: the "landscape [as] a mirror" (Jakle, 1987). We actively explore the meanings of public, private, and liminal spatial narratives in order to actively participate in the shifting (re)definitions of public spaces. By documenting the quotidian and ephemeral communication in the urban environment, we glean insights into our local histories and cultures.

In this chapter, we highlight several case studies as examples of the Urban Archives project. We discuss the geographically unique narratives of cultural histories of places such as Seattle's Aurora Avenue and the Central District. We investigate networks of visual expression (e.g. political graffiti and advertisement) in both static and mobile forms (e.g. billboards and signs to cars and buses). Not only do these networks yield temporary and permanent artifacts, but their participants range from official authorities to illicit actors. In sum, we analyze the city as a diverse spectacle composed of interwoven signs, competing stories, diverse actors, and social boundaries in constant flux.

Urban Archives - the short history

We started the Urban Archives as graduate students at the University of Washington. Tom was in the Information School and Giorgia and Irina were in the Department of Communication. The three of us were interested in the study of the urban environments, ethnography and visual communication. We were particularly fascinated with the ephemeral artifacts that are often overlooked or ignored by the institutional collections and by conventional scholarly research about the city. We began gathering our data by exploring the city on foot, observing the everyday images that form Seattle's cultural landscape in a cacophony of visual signs. Our tools were most often digital cameras and our early collections consisted of graffiti and ghost signs. Once our eyes got adjusted to seeing the city as a hodgepodge of communicative genres, we began to compile a list of categories that could organize the multitude of texts, which compose its visual landscape – graffiti, ghost signs, prohibitive architecture, official signage – the list seemed at once incomplete and likely endless.

Realizing the potential for our collections we recruited a small team of undergraduate research assistants to brainstorm ideas, asking them to think about how the city communicates and what possible communicative genres of the city they might want to explore. Our students were quite creative in generating ideas, for example LeeAnn Robinson had the inspiration to document instances of what she called Yard Art. She found fascinating contemporary examples of the way that people use the private property around their own homes to carve out a space in the city as a venue for public expression. In other instances, we asked students to study particular areas of the city. For example, in the case of Aurora Ave project, we assigned a group of students to photograph the street signs and to conduct archival research in order to situate the new data into a historical context. At the same time, as in the case of the Ave Mural, we continued our own research alongside the undergraduate students learning from one another and sharing our findings in later classroom instruction and through the Urban Archives.

Students seemed energized by the question of “how does the city communicate?”, by the opportunity to craft their own urban communication categories for the project and most of all by the sudden academic license to explore the aspects of their urban environment that have previously been disregarded as derelict or irrelevant. Like us, they sensed that there was something important to discover in our lowbrow explorations of the city alleys, walls and among urban decay. Like us, they were eager for these unlikely places to serve as their temporary laboratories and to bring them into the space of the academy.

The following quarter, when over a dozen undergraduate students signed up to help us with data collection, we realized that in order to keep track of our growing data, it was imperative to get organized. We needed a repository for the digital images and we needed a system for the information about the images, or the metadata. The University of Washington Libraries’ Digital Collections was our logical solution and fortunately a willing collaborator. They had the server space to hold our image collections, they had the database infrastructure already in place and they were looking to build their digital collections. It was a symbiotic relationship. Aside from the storage space and infrastructure, we were excited about the idea of having our archives publicly available online. In order to house our images in the library’s archives, we needed a controlled vocabulary for the metadata, which further allowed us to think through the process of categorizing urban texts.

Yard Art

Aurora Avenue

Another example is a study about Aurora Avenue, the busy thoroughfare that cuts across several neighborhoods in North Seattle, which was conducted by a group of undergraduate students (Naraelle Barrows, Arin Delaney, Edith Fikes and Ingrid Haftel) under Giorgia Aiello’s supervision. While the political yard-art project was based on XXX and XXX, in this case ethnographic fieldwork and visual data collection were combined with research in historical archives. A busy thoroughfare lined by run-down motels and strip-mall businesses, and an urban area that is considered an eyesore by many, Aurora Avenue is never featured in popular travel literature about Seattle (cf. Aiello & Gendelman, 2007). However, the thoroughfare is also a living, yet fast decaying slice of Seattle’s visual landscape and, more broadly, U.S. history. Part of former U.S. Route 99 (now Highway 99), Aurora Avenue used to be Seattle’s only “speedway” (Dorpat, 1988) until the completion of Interstate 5 (I-5), which has been the West Coast’s main highway since 1968. Aurora Avenue saw its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when most of the businesses and neon signs that line the road – in particular motels – were built in midst of the post-war economic boom and in sight of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. The neon signs that line the road mark Aurora Avenue as an area with history and a nostalgic, kitschy character. Neon signs of businesses such as the Pink Elephant Car Wash and Puetz Golf are examples of well-kept landmarks in Seattle’s vintage Mom&Pop commercial landscape. On the other hand, places like the Villia del Mar Motel (Figure X) or the Bridge Motel – which was given over to the development of townhouses and turned into a huge site-specific installation by local artists before being demolished in the summer of 2007 (Edwards, 2007) – remind us that the era that originally conceived the majority of these neon signs is over. Over the past two decades or so, Aurora Avenue’s motels have been mainly homes for transients and settings for a variety of crimes. City authorities and neighboring home-owners have pushed and welcomed the uptake in development – and the razing of these establishments – on Aurora Avenue. Our interest in documenting and studying Aurora Avenue, then, was sparked by an exigency to confer an enhanced degree of visibility and permanence to urban spaces that are most often kept hidden in the public presentation of a city. By the same token, going into this project we were quite aware that the texture of decay and the “Americana” retro aesthetic of neon signs also constitute the appeal of places like Aurora Avenue, which however are most often also destined to vanish. In addition to including nearly 200 annotated images in the Urban Archives database, we researched the history of Aurora Avenue’s development in the local municipal archives. Finally, with the creation of a project website (http://urbanarchives.org/projects/aurora/aurora.html), we also offered an attempt to connect the historical and contemporary discourses regarding the aesthetic qualities and flaws of Aurora Avenue with the underlying social and economic issues that are at work in the power-laden definition of what is worthy or unworthy of appreciation and preservation in the city.