Outline

From UANotebook

Jeff's outline of our chapter in the Reading & Remaking Cities section of the book

Urban Archives: Public Memories and Everyday Places Irina Gendelman, Tom Dobrowolsky, Giorgia Aiello

This chapter discusses how Urban Archives combines technology and institutional infrastructures with the study of vernacular urban texts. It examines ways for using 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.

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Our outline

Insurgent Spaces

Insurgent = rebellious

Socrates was a rebel because he said that knowledge can be explored and gained outside of cultural authority. We look at Insurgent spaces as spaces where cultural authority is bypassed and where knowledge explored and shared outside of that authority (see Finkel below). The sharing of the knowledge results in stories that can contribute to the collective memory about places and their histories. We look at how institutions (places of cultural authority) can then be used as resources to preserve these stories and also to make them visible.

we are talking about different kinds of insurgent spaces

a. the spaces that we study that somehow disobey the norm or the rules in those spaces. This may be spaces that emerge without official sanction, they are not established and supported by institutions. We have documented spaces such as

• graffiti/yard art - one claims the space of others and transforms it despite the law, the other uses private property to rebel
• the signs of Aurora - the space that is becoming obsolete, but it still persists
• street names - renaming streets as a political agenda
• The Ave is Back mural 45th/University Way
• "public billboards" graffiti/stickers on the blank reverse sides of regulatory signs
• no parking signs -- a spectrum of official signs to private signs re-appropriating the look of official signs
• other ???

b. the space that is created in the collective memory through archiving. Digital technologies and organizing software now make it really easy to share, store and organize the artifacts related to these insurgent spaces and to preserve them as part of the collective memory. In a way, these collections are also insurgent in the way that Howard Zinn described them being outside of the status quo and the institutionally sanctioned archives. At the same time, we are using institutional resources to preserve the memories of these insurgent spaces.

we have used:

• digital photography -- to document often fleeting marks and artifacts in the landscape before they disappear
• mapping -- of photos/media, using metadata, to geo-locate them for future reference
• social tagging -- also via attached metadata, using controlled vocabularies as well as free-test tagging, in order classify photos, spaces, and communication types
• UW lib. digital collections -- to provide an institutionally-backed space to host this collected data in perpetuity in a reasonably stable location

c. the idea of the classroom is transformed/extended from the class room to the city itself and to WWW.

• the built environment is treated as a complex living laboratory of everyday lived experience
• students observe in the streets
• students interact reflexively with that which and those who they are observing
• examine data gathered in the streets
• share and organize online

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archives

• Institutions such as libraries and universities have been key spaces for the preservation of such artifacts for collective memory, but often the goals and means of institutions overlook certain artifacts and thus histories.
  • archives frequently receive materials from donors or from their parent institutions. entities such as street artists usually do not do this; therefore, a more pro-active approach on our part is necesary
  • under-represented populations and vernacular spaces, and their stories, often do not make their way into official repositories
  • more populist repositories, such as individual members' photostreams and community photo pools on Flickr, do a much better job of documenting these stories.
    • although such sites are great for sharing photos and building community, they offer no viable long-term archiving mechanism

• Identity of places is threatened by global economies. Collective memory is preserved, in part, through material artifacts in space and through the documentation of those artifacts.
• We study these overlooked (insurgent) spaces in the city and archive information about them for the sake of collective memory.
  • graffiti
  • Aurora
  • place names
• We can work with students to create new (insurgent) spaces in institutions such as universities and libraries as a way to preserve and tell stories that have been untold. (archives)
• This presents a new research and pedagogical opportunity. New digital tools (Web 2.0 and portable technologies) present a way teach by creating new (insurgent) spaces of inquiry outside of the classroom.