Our Collective Memory Part 2

Comment Board Memorial Location 3A lot has happened since I wrote my post about the Boston Marathon bombings. It's time for an update.The bombing site reopened to the public on Wednesday, April 22 24, a week ago today. I've walked the Back Bay twice since then and found it so very comforting to see people out on the streets. People are the lifeblood of any city, and their absence in and around Copley Square the week of the bombings was even more jarring to me than the sight of soldiers and armored jeeps in front of the Boston Public Library. On both Thursday the 25th and Tuesday the 30th Copley was bursting with people of all stripes—office workers, buskers, skate punks, dandies, tourists, runners, campaign volunteers, dog walkers, moms with strollers. Bostonians are trying hard to get back to normal, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. On both walks I let myself get lost in the crowd; that's what normal means to me.I have paid four visits to the makeshift bombing memorial: April 20, 22, 25, and 30. Each time I have taken photos to document both the objects left there and the ways people are interacting with the memorial. Each time it has changed significantly since my last visit. It keeps getting bigger, of course. Twice it has changed location. Location 1 was in the middle of the intersection of Boylston and Berkeley, up against the police barricade that blocked Boylston to all traffic:MarathonMemorialIn anticipation of reopening the crime scene, it moved about 50 feet to Location 2, against the side of a building at that same intersection:Memorial Location 2Then, perhaps when it became clear this public ritual needed a space befitting its importance to the city, Location 3 was organized at the north side of Copley Square itself:Memorial Location 3Locations 1 and 2 felt cold and hard—nothing but concrete and police barriers against a backdrop devoid of people. By contrast Location 3 feels much more human. It's a large, U-shaped enclosure on the edge of the Copley lawn, an outdoor room of sorts. Ten of the Copley trees are inside the enclosure, and many of the signs and mementos people have left are propped against their trunks or hanging from their branches, with pathways in between. People are out and about again, and they circulate through the memorial, moving from tree to tree, like visitors at an exhibition. Memorial 3 feels like the right place, a place at the heart of the city.At Location 1 people left their objects themselves, with no particular logic other than where they could find available space. But when volunteers moved everything to Location 2, they organized the memorial. Three white crosses, one each for Lu Lingzi, Martin Richard, and Krystle Campbell, became more clearly the centerpiece of the memorial. Around them, flowers were placed with flowers, stuffed animals with stuffed animals, and shoes with shoes. When the memorial moved a second time, this order was maintained and expanded. As someone who studies cities, I find the most striking addition at Location 3 to be the symbols of Boston's membership in the global sisterhood of cities—"Istanbul Stands with Boston," "Stay Strong --Miami," "Nashville Believes in Boston"—but there is much more. There are several large comment boards people can sign. There are many, many shoes. There is a hat section and a flag section.Which leads me to one of the most important parts of the memorial: its unofficial caretaker, Kevin Brown. He is not the only or the first person to tend the memorial but he has been its most enduring volunteer.Kevin Brown Memorial Location 1A carpenter from Brockton, he has been there during three of my four visits. At Location 1, he and another volunteer were handing out single roses for the children in the crowd to add to the memorial, to give them a way of actively participating in the ritual. At Location 2, which blocked public access to the memorial much more formally than Location 1, mourners had to pass their mementos across the police barrier for Brown to place, and he obliged repeatedly and good-naturedly, honoring requests for him to pose for photographs, answering questions, and following instructions like "please place this around the neck of the black stuffed dog." He told me volunteers were organizing that night, in advance of the storms predicted for Tuesday the 23rd, to bag anything that would get damaged by water. He told me some of the marathon medals had been stolen so they had started setting all the medals aside for safekeeping. He told me he watched a female runner walk up to the memorial, take off her shoes, add them to the pile, and walk away barefoot. He told me he was going to make a fourth cross for Sean Collier. Not only was he the citizen curator of Location 2, he was also its docent; guiding people through the mourning ritual. Kevin Brown's role at Location 3 on Copley Square is different. Because the memorial has grown so big that you can walk around in it, you could miss Brown if you didn't know to look for him. He has a chair now. I watched him make a round to water all the potted plants, and then another round to light all the candles (it was 6 pm). I was glad to see him.Kevin Brown Lights Candles Memorial Location 3I want to pay particular attention to Kevin Brown because in so many ways he is my counterpart and colleague, even if we don't really know each other. He quickly and spontaneously took up a role at this memorial that I have trained for and practiced for more than 15 years. While he has been out there in the sun and rain every day, those of us in Boston's museum and archive community—the professionals—have been moving more slowly. Granted, there are reasons we are moving slowly. The stakes are high when you're talking about caring for things in perpetuity and we want to do this right (or as close to right as we can). We have indeed made some progress. We have been systematically checking in with each institution in the area, and our list of whether and what each one plans to collect is nearly complete (most notably, at Mayor Menino's direction, the Boston City Archives will preserve items from the memorial). Historic New England has offered its fumigation bubble to ensure that bombing-related artifacts are pest-free before they are introduced into existing collections. We have made contact with folks at the 9/11 Memorial who have offered valuable advice and ongoing support. We are trying to organize pro bono legal counsel to advise on all manner of issues, from how Massachusetts abandoned property laws will affect collecting to release forms for oral histories.I remain concerned that we still have not identified homes for all of the material that should be collected from this event. Boston deserves a thoughtful, compelling, and flawlessly executed exhibition of this material on the one-year anniversary of the bombings—to help Bostonians process their emotions and memories and transform them into some sort of positive civic engagement for the city. But there is so much work to be done in order to tell this story—and tell it well—I remain concerned about that too. One thing I am not concerned about is Kevin Brown. This week Kevin Brown is my curatorial hero. This week Kevin Brown is the heart at the heart of Boston.

Our Collective Memory

Alphabetical Family Meeting Area Marathon SignsAll week I have been trying to look at the events unfolding here in Boston through the lens of city museums. Boston doesn’t have a proper city museum. If Boston did have a proper city museum, I would’ve wanted it this week to open wide its doors to the city for solace and reflection (many existing museums in Boston did in fact do so) and to serve as a place for civic dialogue while Bostonians struggled to understand and respond to the bombings, individually and collectively. I would’ve wanted it to collect and document the material culture of this event, and I would’ve wanted it to actively participate in city-wide efforts to interpret and memorialize the bombings.Museum workers are not first responders—let’s be clear about that. But they are part of the second and third and fourth waves. They are public servants, and in times of crisis their job is to collect and document, tell the story, keep the memory, and help the public make meaning of it all. Boston doesn’t have a city museum to do that work right now. I am writing this post to call attention to what we are missing without one, and also to do my part as an urban public historian to capture and frame the details of what Bostonians experienced this week. Right now I’m not so concerned about the facts and timeline—plenty of people are recording and analyzing the chain of events. Rather I care about ordinary Bostonians: what they felt and expressed, and how they are integrating the bombings into their own personal narratives of the city.As most of you know by now (if you didn’t know already), Marathon Monday always takes place on Patriots’ Day, which is a state holiday that commemorates the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the start of the American Revolution. It also launches April school vacation week and serves as Boston’s unofficial first day of spring. Every year on Marathon Monday thousands of Bostonians turn out to support and cheer on the runners along the course. And if they aren’t at the marathon, they’re at the Red Sox game or at gatherings of family and friends all over the city. For all these reasons Boston’s collective emotional barometer was particularly high on April 15 just before it sunk so precipitously.As Bostonians tried to make sense of the bombings this week they turned to history for signs of past resilience: the city that withstood the Siege of Boston and “invented America,” the city that survived the Molasses Flood and the Big Dig. They turned to the brand Boston projects to the world to reassure themselves about the city’s essential character: John Winthrop’s city upon a hill, with one of the best medical communities in the country; a city that welcomes thousands of people from all over the world each year to its universities. They turned to Boston’s popular culture—Dirty Water, Cheers, Good Will Hunting—to express their love and fidelity. And they turned to Boston’s sports teams—the closest thing we have to urban warriors in 2013—for signs of continuity and strength. As they did so, Bostonians were not all on the same page about what constitutes an appropriate level of tolerance, empathy, or law and order; they were not all on the same page about how to mourn and when to get back to business as usual.Every urban resident carries a mental map of their city inside their head. It’s how they navigate on a daily basis, and it’s layered with personal memories and landmarks. Most Bostonians had to look up Norfolk Street in Cambridge and Franklin Street in Watertown on Friday during the manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. No one had to look up the finish line stretch of Boylston Street where the bombings took place; it’s on every Bostonian’s mental map. They could instantly reel off the landmarks on those two blocks: the Copley Green Line station, Boston Public Library, Old South Church, the Lenox Hotel, Lord & Taylor, Marathon Sports. They could instantly recall years of personal memories—some mundane, some poignant—that were created there.What a city museum would understand better than anyone else is that the bombings tore a hole in our mental maps. On Saturday afternoon I went down to the bombing site to try to get a handle on the exact nature of that hole. I took the Orange Line to Back Bay Station, walked up to the south side of Copley Square, and then skirted the southern and eastern edge of the secured crime scene perimeter. On one hand what I observed was comfortingly the same as always. The flower stall outside Back Bay Station was selling spring tulips in every color imaginable. The doormen at the Copley Plaza were at their post, greeting guests in tuxedos and evening gowns arriving for a wedding. Runners were running; college students were turning up for a Saturday night out on the town. The landmarks themselves—the library, the churches, the Hancock Tower, were all still there. On the other hand it was disturbingly, radically different. Even after the barricades are gone and the city returns to some version of normal, we need to remember that radical difference.CopleyBarricadeEvery flag I saw was at half mast. Wolf Blitzer and a half-dozen TV journalists were broadcasting cheek-by-jowl on the corner outside the Copley Place Westin, lights blazing and TV trucks humming. Across the street from the news teams, roughly eight men in camouflage and bullet-proof vests, along with several armored jeeps, guarded the barricade at the southwest corner of Copley Square. By that point, with the threat to the city subsiding, they were spending most of their time making small talk with passersby, posing for pictures, and giving directions. Lots and lots of directions—many pedestrians were having trouble figuring out how to get where they were going without crossing Copley Square. A Boston traffic cop was also there directing cars that were having similar difficulty navigating around the hole in the city.MarathonMemorialI walked east toward the corner of Clarendon and St James, where the lawn of Trinity Church was still strewn with plastic cups and marathon debris. No one had gotten around to removing the Family Meeting Area signs attached to the lampposts, one for each letter of the alphabet, that on Marathon Day give runners a way of finding their loved ones in the finish line crowd. At Boylston and Berkeley I stopped at the makeshift memorial and watched people pay their respects. Many of the items that had been placed there were still wet from that morning’s rain. Two older men were tending the memorial; one of them gave single yellow roses to kids in the crowd so they could lay them near the three crosses at the center of the memorial. Five or six therapy dogs were on hand and getting lots of attention.I caught the Green Line at Arlington Station, heading outbound to a friend’s birthday party in Newton Centre. As the digital announcement system in my subway car flashed Entering Copley, we rode through but did not stop at Copley Station. The station was empty and dark except for a few dim security lights, still closed as part of the crime scene.On Thursday night I talked with the students in my material culture course about the bombings and I asked them what they thought should be collected and preserved in order to capture the experience of Boston this week. With a few additional objects added in by me, their ideas included:

  • Marathon medals, bib numbers, space blankets, and yellow runner bags
  • The international flags from the finish line
  • Yellow Boston Police and BAA Physician vests, marathon volunteer jackets, hospital equipment
  • Bill Iffrig‘s orange singlet
  • Carlos Arredondo's bloodied American flag
  • Martin Richard’s “No more hurting people. Peace” poster
  • Signs and t-shirts of support—local, national, and international
  • Slain MIT police officer Sean Collier’s uniform
  • The makeshift memorial at Boylston and Berkeley
  • Red Sox and Bruins memorial jerseys
  • Mayor Tom Menino’s hospital bracelet
  • The technology of the police investigation
  • The recovered lid from the pressure cooker bomb
  • The covered boat on Franklin Street in Watertown where suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hid on Friday
  • Photographs, video, news and social media feeds, oral histories, statements by public officials, luminaries, and celebrities
  • The soundscape of the week: the typical happy sounds of the marathon (the starting gun, cheering spectators, cowbells) giving way to the explosion and confusion at the finish line; ambulances and helicopters, gunshots and house-to-house searches; and finally cheers of relief and gratitude as the second suspect was taken into custody

And this has been my growing concern throughout the week: that in the absence of a proper city museum, Boston is not prepared to document and collect this story. There is no museum in the city that has a mandate to collect contemporary Boston history. There are several institutions that will likely preserve paper records and photographs, but objects—particularly a collection of this scale—are another matter. I am reaching out to local colleagues to find out if efforts are underway that I just don’t know about yet, and if not, to see if something might be done.I want to end by urging you to read a piece from today’s Boston Globe Ideas section by Stephen Heuser titled Vulnerability in an Open City. If I were planning an exhibition about the marathon bombings for a Boston city museum, this essay would be my compass. Heuser sets out to make larger points about social capital, openness, and risk that apply to any city, but he does it against the backdrop of Boston. In the process he captures in vivid detail the experience of everyday Bostonians this week. In his telling, we see the moral of this story and a value every city museum should hold: “cities bring us together in spite of ourselves.”

City Symphony

The Arts section of this past Sunday's Boston Globe brought me an article by Jeremy Eichler about composer Tod Machover and his newest commission, A Toronto Symphony. If you're not familiar with Machover's work, he has spent his career developing technology that pushes the boundaries of both music making and music composition, and he currently directs the Opera of the Future group at MIT.For A Toronto Symphony Machover asked Torontonians to collaborate with him in creating a piece that would truly capture their experience of the city. As Eichler writes, "He wanted to write a symphony not for the city of Toronto by with the city of Toronto, a piece of music that would ultimately be about Toronto in a way that was granular, participatory, and reflective of an urban landscape in all of its component parts." There's an excellent 22-minute video at the ideacity website of Machover explaining the Toronto project when it launched. The symphony has eight parts:

  1. OVERTURE: the city wakes
  2. CITY SOUNDS: based on crowd-sourced, recorded sounds of Toronto (listen to some of these sounds via Soundcloud here and here)
  3. CITY STORIES: people's stories of the city, made into music and woven together
  4. IMAGINING THE CITY: "a memory of Toronto when one is far far away"
  5. IN THE CITY: a collage of on-the-ground moments throughout the city's neighborhoods
  6. CITY SOARING: the birds-eye view of Toronto
  7. TORONTO DANCES: "a big dance party, a kind of 'Song to Toronto'"
  8. THE CITY SLEEPS: rocking the city to sleep

Machover posted a series of calls for various forms of participation on the project website, took part in local festivals, and worked with school children, musicians, and individuals from all over the city, not only to identify what Toronto sounds like but also to shape the actual musical composition. His team from MIT developed a group of new applications (best accessed via Google Chrome), including Media Scores, Constellation, and City Soaring, that allow people to play around with and modify Machover's core Toronto composition using graphic tools--colors, shapes, lines--such that no musical training is necessary to participate. I spent a little time with these tools today and particularly liked Constellation. It felt like a glorious experiment in synesthesia.In the Globe article Machover makes this point about the collaborative nature of A Toronto Symphony: "If it feels in the end like basically my piece no matter what, or like a mash-up of other people's stuff that I facilitated, I think that would be less satisfying. But if it's something that couldn't have been made without each other, it will feel really good." This project, and this quote, speak volumes to me about the current work of city museums. I want them to be like Tod Machover: using their expertise to bring out the best in each of us and illuminate our collective experience of the city; doing it through participation, interdisciplinary learning, and new tools that help us see the city in a different light.The piece debuts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on March 9 in Roy Thomson Hall as part of the New Creations Festival. Put it on your calendar. Meanwhile, apparently two other cities have already approached Machover about further city symphony collaborations. Maybe one of them is yours?

What I've Been Up To

I know posts have been a little thin on this blog over the past few months. One of the reasons is that I've been working on two other projects that I'm now ready to share with my CityStories readers.The first is an exhibition that came out of a fellowship I had in fall 2011 at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (JNBC) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I was at JNBC to continue my research on city museums, but while I was there I also worked with five JNBC graduate students to develop an exhibition about what it means to live in Providence, drawing from the field of psychogeography for our methodology.Pyschogeography isn't exactly a household word. Loosely defined, it involves mapping abstract concepts like emotion, sensory experiences, and personal meaning, in contrast to our traditional concept of mapping physical elements—roads, landmarks,  topography. I had been grappling a lot with the disconnect between what city museums think is worth knowing and preserving about their cities, on one hand, and what city residents know and preserve as living, breathing "archives," walking around their cities each day, on the other. The exhibition was an experiment to see what it would be like to create a city collection where the emotional, sensory, and personal experiences of residents command center stage. After this project I am further convinced that city museums should be incorporating psychogeography into their ongoing work. The exhibition, You Are Here: Archiving Providence in the Present, is documented here.The second project is a little more personal, but still strongly tied to my professional practice. I've been developing a blog for my five-year-old cousin Thomas, who wants to be an explorer when he grows up. I post photos from cities I have visited as part of my research, and I challenge Thomas to figure out the location of each photo. When he solves one, he and his mom report on how he did it, which gets posted on the blog. It's called Thomas Sees the World.The blog happened organically. Thomas was working on one of Andrew Sullivan's "View from Your Window" challenges, but it was really hard. I offered to send him a few of my own photos that I had screened to make sure they contained enough visual clues. Thomas attacked these photos with an overwhelming eagerness to learn, and I was fascinated by his thought process, which almost never conformed to my expectations. After four or five of these challenges yielded such rich responses from Thomas, his mom and I decided to try a blog. We are developing a small but devoted following, and this game is bringing us all a lot of joy. I think about cities—and the differences between them—all the time, but I have never thought about them quite this way before. I am learning all sorts of new things as I look at cities through Thomas's eyes. Take a look at the blog and you'll see what I mean.

The Greatest Grid: Great for Visitors?

A few weeks ago I spent a couple of hours at the Museum of the City of New York seeing the temporary exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, which runs through April 15. I'm really glad I got down to New York for this show, because it reinforces a lot of the concepts I've been exploring on this blog, and in my research on city museums in general.I got there around 1:00 pm, and the museum was a lot busier than it had been the last time I visited in July 2011, when the main temporary exhibition was about colonial revival architecture. I had to wait in a line 20 people deep at the admission desk, and it was a good thing I arrived when I did. By the time I left at 3:00 not only had the admission line gotten longer but there was also a separate line for The Greatest Grid; the exhibition was so popular that the gallery housing it reached fire code capacity. I talked to a security guard who said it had been that crowded every weekend since the exhibition opened. At one point the exhibition curator, Hilary Ballon, showed up to do a gallery talk and had to use a microphone to be heard amidst a sea of attentive visitors.Blockbuster exhibitions happen all the time at art museums, and at a lot of science museums too, but they are rare at city history museums. Why is The Greatest Grid so popular? From what I observed during my visit, I would say that MCNY struck a chord with New Yorkers. The museum could've presented a fairly standard urban planning exhibition, filled with historic maps, and gotten a reasonable turnout. But instead a decision was made to structure the exhibition around the concept of the Manhattan street grid—why and how it was developed, and what effect it has had on the city over time. That's a concept that New Yorkers can really sink their teeth into.Anyone who lives or works in Manhattan contends with the grid on a daily basis (click here to see an excerpt from 12x155, a video installation by artist Neil Goldberg, included in the exhibition, that illustrates this point quite effectively). Not only (says the gal from Boston) is it a particularly easy system to navigate—because of the grid you always know which way is north, and how long it will take to get from one place to another—but it also has a lot to do with what makes New York, New York. For example, the 19th-century real estate boom set in motion by the introduction of the grid is one of the big reasons NYC became such a financial powerhouse. And because the grid doesn't really allow for inner courtyards, it constantly pushes Manhattanites out on the streets, ratcheting up the energy to that frenetic level we all associate with NYC.Consequently, what I observed at the exhibition was a gallery packed full of locals in small social groups, spending a very long time pointing and talking about this grid and what it means to them. Often they were trying to find themselves—their home—on the historic maps, but just as often they were pointing out all the interesting things they noticed about how other parts of the city had changed. Here's my slide show of all the pointers:[slideshow]Anyone who follows Nina Simon's Museum 2.0 blog knows that museums have a new imperative to craft social experiences that compel visitors to engage with one another while learning. The Greatest Grid is very effective on this level.Another thing the exhibition team did really well was to develop a small companion exhibition, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, installed upstairs from the main gallery. It features the eight winners of a call for ideas sponsored by MCNY and the Architectural League of New York that asked architects and urban planners to envision ways of improving the grid for the 21st-century. These proposals are quite creative, and pull in visitors even further by asking them to consider whether the grid actually works in its current form. They also reinforce a theme introduced by the main exhibition, that the grid was not inevitable but exists because of—and will continue to be shaped by—a series of urban planning decisions. I've written before about the need for city museums to address not just the past but also the present and future of their cities. Therefore I was glad to see The Unfinished Grid help visitors extend the historical timeline to include both contemporary urban life as well as hopes and dreams for a New York still to come.But the exhibition team missed an opportunity to address another new imperative that Nina Simon regularly writes about: creating experiences where visitors actively participate in making meaning, alongside the curators. If I were a New Yorker visiting this exhibition, filled with excitement and new knowledge about something that feels very personal and real in my daily life, I would want to express it beyond my own social group. I would want to stick comments on a giant map of Manhattan, or photograph myself sharing the most interesting thing I learned, or vote on my favorite avenue. And doing so would help me see beyond my own experience, to the collective life on the street that all New Yorkers share.New Yorkers, get thee to MCNY to see this exhibition, and then tell me what you think. Do you find it compelling? Did it make you want to share your own experience of the grid? What did you point at?

My Favorite New Yorker Issue in Recent Memory

Is the one from April 18, 2011, with the “Journeys” theme. Fittingly, this is the issue I happened to grab for my trip to Europe last month, and I read it slowly, on a train in northern Scotland, in a small town in southern Italy, during the white nights of Helsinki's midsummer. Under the heading "Coming to America," it has one-page reminiscences from six different writers about their experiences immigrating to the United States. I was particularly struck by Lore Segal’s piece, “Spry for Frying,” in which she talks about her memories of moving to New York City from Austria, by way of Dominican Republic. She writes at the end:

“The refugee in me still feels displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down roots. It is in Manhattan.”

This quote reminded me of a point Jette Sandahl, the director of the Museum of Copenhagen, made in a talk she gave at Harvard back in April. She said that one either is or isn’t a Dane—this is determined by where you are born—but one can choose or not choose to be a Copenhagener:

“In the city we are more interested in where we are going than where we came from.”

Sandahl went on to say that city museums have a duty to emphasize diversity and teach tolerance, because part of the experience of living in a city means learning to share the same apartment building, or subway car, or park bench with the many different kinds of people who have also chosen that city to put down roots.In my own way I am an immigrant in Boston. It's true that I was born an American, but I come from a part of the US that's quite different culturally from this New England city. I have chosen to be a Bostonian, and I love my city all the more for the ways it reveals itself to me slowly over time. I like the idea of a city museum that has room for me and all the people I see on my block and in the subway and the park. So how do we make that happen? The Museum of Copenhagen is taking on these issues this year in an exhibition, Becoming a Copenhagener. I look forward to seeing it this fall.

The Power of Community in a "Dying" City

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI]If you happened to miss, like I did, the Grand Rapids LipDub video that went viral two weeks ago, stop everything and watch it right now. The video was created through the efforts of Rob Bliss and Scott Erickson in response to Grand Rapids' inclusion in Newsweek's list of America's dying cities (based on population decline) in January. Hundreds of local residents turned out to appear in the video, lip-syncing to Don McLean's "American Pie," to help Bliss and Erickson prove Newsweek wrong. I won't go into the details too much because really, you just need to watch it.I've been traveling in Europe for the past few weeks, with spotty internet access, so I hadn't heard anything about this video until it was referenced on my favorite blog two days ago. Then there I was Friday morning in a friend's kitchen in London, reduced to weeping at the sight of all these Grand Rapids residents, from different walks of life, stepping up to make a statement about their city. Fifty or a hundred years from now, when Rob Bliss, Mayor George Hartwell, and even perhaps Newsweek itself are long gone, Grand Rapids LipDub will be a powerful historical document, a snapshot of the city during a period of significant change: the dress, the cultural life, the architecture, the people. Here's hoping someone stays on top of migrating the video to new formats.Addendum: Two more comments as I continue to think about Grand Rapids LipDub. First, it's definitely boosterism, but at least it's an organic form of boosterism, widely supported by local residents, in reaction to boosterism's other extreme, "ruin porn." And second, because I do see this as a form of documentary, something Grand Rapids will want to look back on years from now, I wish it had been able to show us the full picture—good and bad, ballroom dancers and local celebrities but also the city's homeless citizens or children without health care. But of course then it wouldn't be boosterism. I'll take it anyway.

For Your Netflix Queue

Today I found the ticket stub for Baarìa, a movie I saw at the Glasgow Film Theatre last summer. Baarìa is written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore of Cinema Paradiso fame (another film that should be in your Netflix Queue if you haven't already seen it).Simply put, Baarìa is Tornatore's love song to his hometown of Bagheria, Sicily. History is a major character in the film: we see Bagheria change through three generations of the same family, from the 1920s to the 1980s. Without spoiling anything, there is a breathtaking moment at the end of the film where time runs together and you feel—acutely—Tornatore's longing for the Bagheria of his memories. Baarìa is a visually stunning example of the imprint a place can make on one's soul.Interestingly enough, parts of Baarìa were filmed in Tunis (presumably in the Medina?), because it more closely approximates what Bagheria looked like in the early 20th century. (As an aside, you might want to check out the work of my colleague Habib Saidi at Laval University in Quebec City; he studies tourism and cultural heritage in Tunis, among other places.) Which raises another possible topic for a blog post: cities that feel like other cities—past, present, or future.

The God of the City

When I was in China last month I spent a day in Hangzhou, a city of 7 million a few hours southwest of Shanghai. Like most Chinese cities, it has a temple for the god of the city. These gods serve as the spiritual counterpart to living local officials, protect their cities from all manor of problems (wars, natural disasters, crop failures), and also address the individual needs of residents.Hangzhou's current city god temple is not very old; it was built in the 1990s. But nonetheless it is beautiful, and well-sited. Surrounded by trees, it sits on Wu Hill, not far from the Hangzhou Museum, looking out at the entire city. Here's the view from the temple toward West Lake:And the view looking east, toward Hangzhou's business district:I'm not very religious, but the city god is a concept I can get behind. I'm thinking of America's Rust Belt cities, struggling to reinvent themselves given new post-industrial realities. Or Washington, DC, which so often gets swallowed up by the federal government. Or New Orleans. These places could all use a god just for them, to give an extra push where us mere mortals fail.Or a super-hero. Or a fairy god-mother. I'm not picky.

Where Am I?

I took these photographs on a recent travel excursion. Can you guess where I was?If you guessed somewhere in the UK, you're wrong. I was in Shanghai, China.I was visiting a development called Thames Town, which is part of Shanghai's One City, Nine Towns initiative. One City, Nine Towns is of a series of planned communities around the outskirts of Shanghai, each one designed after a different European architectural style: British, German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian. They were meant to echo the international flavor of Shanghai's colonial past, but something happened in the execution.The homes in these new developments reportedly can cost as much as $900,000, a hefty sum made even less attractive by the distance from the city centre. Many units were snatched up by speculators who have failed to find buyers. From what I have read, none of the Nine Towns have reached adequate occupancy levels, and in some cases construction was halted before completion.The result, at least for Thames Town, is something that looks like Disney, or a movie set: buildings that don't look fully real, few signs of everyday living, and storefronts with displays in the window but no actual businesses inside. It's made all the more eery by scores of Chinese wedding couples using the development as the backdrop for their professional photographs. In addition to the red phone booths and the Winston Churchill statue, there's a church and a church green:And tons of mostly British architecture:And a chip shop:And even fake British people:In the face of globalization, I believe each city should preserve and cultivate the cultural elements that make it different from any other city on the planet. We need authentic, unique places---now more than ever. Maybe I'm bringing in my own cultural biases, or maybe Shanghai's identity in the 21st century is in fact something like Disney, but Thames Town feels all wrong to me (even if it was a fascinating way to spend an afternoon).Much has been written about the One City, Nine Towns project. If you find it as fascinating as I do, you should check out this Smithsonian Magazine slide show, this piece from Time, and also this piece from the cultural journal Assembly. If you're really serious you might want to read a new book by urban planner Harry den Hartog, Shanghai New Towns.I was in Shanghai to present a paper at a conference for CAMOC, the city museums committee within the International Council of Museums. In the coming weeks I plan to post several entries chronicling both the conference and my overall experience in Shanghai, but Thames Town was my top posting priority. I hope my photos do it justice.

Urban Roots

In July of this year Asian Longhorned Beetles were found in six red maple trees in a wooded area about a mile from my house in Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood. Asian Longhorned Beetles bore into hardwood trees like birch, maple, and elm, eventually killing them if left untreated. Authorities consequently set up a quarantine area that includes my street. This means no one is allowed to transport firewood or yard waste out of the area, and an inspection is being conducted within the quarantine zone. There is a particular concern for the trees of Arnold Arboretum, which lies within the quarantine area.In 2008 there was an Asian Longhorned Beetle outbreak in Worcester, Massachusetts. The city was forced to cut down 25,000 trees. Here’s a before and after comparison:Worcester Street before, by Kenneth R. LawWorcester Street after, by Kenneth R. LawWith old trees, as with historic buildings and artifacts, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.This August in Amsterdam, the tree that Anne Frank studied (and wrote about) from her attic hideaway (adjacent to the Anne Frank House but not on its property) fell down, despite efforts since 2008 to support its weakened trunk. Its owner plans to donate parts of the tree to Jewish museums around the world.On Boston Common, in the heart of the city, there used to be an elm tree, called the Great Elm. It was a landmark, and some people called it Boston's Oldest Inhabitant. When a storm felled it in 1876, L. Prang & Co. printed portraits of the tree onto thin, veneer-like slices made from its trunk; Mayor Samuel Cobb even signed the image to certify its authenticity:Another Boston tree had even greater historical significance: the Liberty Tree. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, Bostonians met under the Liberty Tree to mount public acts of protest against the British government. Unlike Boston’s indoor meeting places—Faneuil Hall, Old South Meeting House, and the Town House—anyone could witness or participate in the goings-on under the Liberty Tree, regardless of class, race, or gender. British troops cut down the tree when they occupied Boston in 1775-1776 at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.Other cities have particular relationships with trees. Helsinki would be nothing without its birches. Every resident of Tokyo, and Washington, DC, marks the coming of spring in their city with cherry blossoms. The ombú trees in Buenos Aires are captivating, with their exposed roots and deeply shaded canopies.So how can we more fully recognize these trees that have witnessed so much change in our cities? Artist Katie Holten organized an outdoor “Tree Museum” along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in 2009. The main feature of her project is a cell phone audio tour, in which 100 trees “talk” through the voices of local residents from all walks of life. Organizations in San Francisco and San Jose lead walking tours of interesting trees in their cities. And the UK’s Woodland Trust has an “Ancient Tree Hunt” feature on its website that allows users to find notable trees, both urban and rural, on an interactive map, and also to nominate trees for inclusion in the Trust’s registry. Plenty of science museums have organized exhibitions about trees, but I haven’t found any history museums that have explored, in an historical context, what trees can mean to a place. I think it would be an interesting project. With hugging allowed.

I Want to Go to There

I'm a fan of the urban planner Charles Landry and his concept of the creative city. I just started his book The Art of City Making and came across this passage:

Our sensory landscape is shrinking precisely at the moment when it should be broadening. Sensory manipulation is distancing us from our cities and we are losing our visceral knowledge of them. We have forgotten how to understand the smells of the city, to listen to its noises, to grasp the messages its look sends out and to be aware of its materials.

I was reminded of Landry when I came across a link to a contemporary art exhibition currently showing at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in NYC. It's called You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City. According to the Pratt Manhattan website, the exhibition includes:

  • a three-dimensional map of the lower Manhattan skyline made of a Jell-O-like material by Liz Hickokan
  • an anxiety map of the five boroughs lit by sweat-powered batteries by Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson
  • a “Loneliness Map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington
  • a scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
  • a cemetery map of Polish ancestors’ graves by Kim Baranowski
  • an installation constructed from city ephemera by Pratt faculty member Robbin Ami Silverberg
  • personal maps created from a call for submissions by the Hand Drawn Map Association including works by Tony Dowler, Will Haughery, Janine Nichols, Yumi Roth, Gowri Savoor, Rob Servo, Krista Shaffer, Kees Touw, Dean Valadez, and Shane Watt
  • a series of mapped reflections on the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the ascendancy of the rock dove by Miranda Mahera
  • a New York subway map in Urdu by Pakistani artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh
  • photographs of a buzzing honeycomb map created by Liz Scranton’s bees
  • the preliminary artwork for New Yorkistan, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s post 9/11 cover for The New Yorker, and Kalman and Meyerowitz’s culinary subway map of the city
  • Nina Katchadourian’s New York soundtrack, assembled from found segments of cassette tape
  • Jeff Sisson’s ongoing Bodega List project
  • a Happiness Map by Jane Hammond
  • Bill Rankin’s maps of Not In My Back Yard-isms showcasing various geographies of community and exclusion
  • a diptych of memory maps by Dahlia Elsayed

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking this exhibition is probably chock-a-block with sensory experience. I can't make it to New York before the exhibition closes on November 6, but I'm hoping an NY reader might check it out and report back. Do you come away with a deeper, more visceral understanding of the city? And which pieces are most successful? In the meantime, the rest of you can find more description and some photographs at UrbanOmnibus.

Imaginary History

Have I got a story for you. Earlier this month I paid a visit to two cities on the German/Polish border: Frankfurt on der Oder [German] and Slubice [Polish], separated by the River Oder. They used to be two sides of one German city, but Poland ended up with everything east of the river after WWII. The people who live in these cities don’t have much personal history there: Frankfurt was evacuated during WWII and very few of the residents ever returned; meanwhile Poles were brought in from elsewhere to resettle Slubice when it became Polish territory. There is one bridge across the river between the two cities (see above). From the end of WWII until 2007 it was at times a controlled border crossing and at other times closed completely. But now that Poland has joined the European Union’s border-free Schengen Zone, anyone can walk over the bridge without so much as a Simon says. The result: people who spent many years having nothing to do with one another (save perhaps a black market cigarette sale) are suddenly close neighbors. And although the two cities are starting to connect in small ways, traveling across the bridge is rarely a part of daily life. You can’t take public transportation from one to the other, for example.Enter Michael Kurzwelly. An artist who speaks both German and Polish, he moved to the area in 1998 and began staging public “interventions” to explore issues of identity along the border. Most of these interventions center around his vision of a united city, called Slubfurt, and with help from other residents he has set about convincing people that it really exists. At the invitation of Florence Maher, a fellow Fulbrighter studying border politics at Viadrina European University in Frankfurt, I took a tour of Slubfurt and talked to Kurzwelly about his work.Kurzwelly’s projects have been wide-ranging. He created a Slubfurt coat of arms, a rooster sitting on an egg. With a nod to the medieval city walls so prevalent across Europe, he got permission to erect wall fragments that delineate the Slubfurt city boundaries, a symbol of enclosure rather than division:With help from other residents he staged parliament elections for Slubfurt; the parliament meets regularly despite its lack of official political power. An array of glossy tourist information awaits the Slubfurt visitor: an impressive travel guide, a color map of the city, and tours led by Kurzwelly himself. In each case some of the information is factual and some of it is not: Kurzwelly worked with local university students to change the street names on the map, and he makes up stories about local landmarks to suit his purposes. For another project residents were invited to sign up for dinner in the home of someone who lives across the river; a Slubfurt cookbook, with recipes that blend the cuisine of both cities, is forthcoming. “Mediatekas” in the two public libraries provide a wealth of resources for the curious, including artifacts donated by Slubfurt residents—accompanied by personal stories—that can be checked out like books:This is just the tip of the iceberg; I could go on for several more paragraphs describing the efforts to actualize Slubfurt.People seem to be catching on. While I wouldn’t call it a groundswell, Kurzwelly has drawn enough attention to the divide between the two cities that there now seems to be a public dialogue about border issues where one didn’t previously exist. When Kurzwelly offered the residents of both cities the opportunity to apply for official Slubfurt identity cards, 300 people signed up within the first two days. You get the sense that if Kurzwelly ever left the area people would genuinely miss his interventions. He was even asked to serve on the culture committee for the Frankfurt local government.I find Kurzwelly’s work fascinating and brilliant. Bit by bit, he and his collaborators are creating a new sense of place for these two border cities. And they are doing it from the ground up (Kurzwelly actively encourages anyone and everyone to submit suggestions for interventions and to participate in their execution). What’s more, Kurzwelly believes in a lighthearted approach, which not only makes it more fun for his audience but also allows him to create a strong breeze without ruffling too many feathers. Public historians could learn a lot from his approach.Eleven years on, the city of Slubfurt now has its own history. Who’s to say it isn’t real?A special thanks to Florence Maher and Michael Kurzwelly for sharing Slubfurt with me. I came away with tons of Slubfurt material—the travel guide and map, campaign materials, a DVD—that I am happy to share with any interested individuals. And post a blog comment if you have ideas of your own for further Slubfurt interventions; I am making a list for Kurzwelly.

Barca

We hit Barcelona last week. It was a culture shock after Helsinki--loud, huge, hot, a little disordered, and out all night. It smelled differently too: on the streets there was always a faint whiff of frying food, garbage, urine, hot dirt. A few months ago I posted that it took time for me to get adjusted to the smell of Helsinki when I arrived there in March--my nose was off-kilter for the first few weeks. In Barcelona I realized that, having grown up in a warm climate, it was the underlying smell of things baking in the heat--slightly off-putting but nonetheless familiar--that I was missing in Helsinki.The Barcelona city museum is in the old city, in a complex of buildings that includes a medieval palace and church. The lower level has been excavated to reveal the remains of dyeing, fish processing, and wine-making businesses. You can walk around on platforms just above the excavations. I have seen this technique at two other museums: Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal and Aboa Vetus in Turku, Finland.Most of the permanent exhibition at the Barcelona city museum is devoted to early history. The 20th century makes a brief (maybe 30 second) appearance in the introductory video. I saw no mention of Barcelona under Franco--still too raw after 35 years?There was a temporary exhibition on the expansion of Barcelona and the influence of the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà. It was perhaps too academic for a general audience, but there were two meaningful moments that I liked very much. The first was El Cubo Atmosferico (the atmospheric cube). It was a transparent cube that you could walk into, based on the 19th-century urban planning notion that there was a certain volume of clean air every couple needed when they slept each night to renew themselves from the day and to protect themselves from disease. The idea was that every bedroom should be large enough to provide this volume of air. In the midst of such an academic exhibition, being able to inhabit the physical cube was a concrete teaching tool that worked.The second was one of the best museum videos I've ever seen, "Barcelona, Visions de la Primera Metròpoli." The museum commissioned this video from a production company called Nueve Ojos.  Historic photos of Barcelona are animated so that they morph into one another and go from 2D to 3D, seamlessly. You can see a clip from the video on Nueve Ojos's website. Make sure you watch the whole piece because the end is particularly spectacular. If you like this animation style, you should also check out their other project "The Beijing of Lao She."After four hot days we moved on to Paris, which turned out to be no cooler. More to come the next time I have internet access.

The Vale of Humility

I finally made it to St. Petersburg. It was enormous and beautiful, albeit with a patina of decay. Everything I had read about St. Petersburg's relationship with Helsinki fell into place while I was there, just as it had when I was in Stockholm. These two much more powerful cities took turns ruling Helsinki--indeed all of Finland--until the early 20th century. It's funny how you can read about such things for pages and pages but not actually get it until you're there, standing in Palace Square, taking in the architecture of empire. St. Petersburg and Stockholm look like cities that have ruled other places, same as London and Paris.I was born in North Carolina, in the American South. North Carolina is sometimes described as the "vale of humility between two mountains of conceit." Its history, filled with small farms and tradesmen, is much more humble than that of Virginia or South Carolina, the "mountains" to its north and south. North Carolina was slower to develop economically during the 18th and 19th centuries, and was the last state to secede from the US at the beginning of the American Civil War, perhaps because it had less to fight for. Meanwhile, Virginia and South Carolina were rich in southern aristocracy: plantations, old money, power politics.Walking around St. Petersburg, along the River Neva that looks as long and wide as the Thames; and through the Hermitage, with treasure room after treasure room gilded and curlicued within an inch of its life, I realized that Helsinki too is a vale of humility, tucked between one Russian and one Swedish mountain.Helsinki's scale is so much more human. It has its own treasures but no real palaces or other grand displays of wealth and power. Its people are humble--they ask me "Why on earth would you want to study Helsinki?" And they ask it in my mother tongue, not their own--long ago they got used to having to learn other people's languages.The old power dynamics have left their mark on Helsinki--in the layout of the city, the buildings, and the street names--but they matter less now. Even if Helsinki never rules anyone else, its tech economy is making it a world player in its own right. And life is pretty great down in the "valley"--clean air, low crime, good housing. Moreover, the view of the mountains is spectacular.

I ♥ Helsinki

I was hanging out with a few of the staffers from the Helsinki City Museum the other day, and I asked them about their favorite places in Helsinki. First Tove Vesterbacka said anywhere along the harbor; to her Helsinki means water. She also mentioned Linnanmäki, the amusement park—it sits on a rocky cliff and the ferris wheel stands out in the skyline from many places in the city. Then Sari Saresto talked about her route home from work by bicycle, from city centre to east Helsinki. The landscape changes so much along the way, from the classical architecture of Senate Square, to the industrial buildings along Sörnäinen, to the island of Kulosaari, and then on to residential east Helsinki. Ulla Teräs said the wooden buildings in Vallila, near her home. And Jari Harju said in summer the Esplanade but in winter, anywhere inside with a good view of snow, trees, or frozen harbor. Which prompted everyone to agree that one’s choice of favorites changes with the seasons. Later I asked the same question of HCM director Tiina Merisalo. Like Sari, she described her commute over the Kulosaari bridge—this time by train and not bicycle—and how much it revealed about the development of the city. She also talked about east Helsinki, where she has raised her family—the neighborhood, the bike paths, and the old manor house. To her this is the Helsinki of real life, the part the tourists will never see.I came to Helsinki to explore city history and city identity—what makes Helsinki, Helsinki, and how the city’s history shapes its sense of place. Four months later, one of the things I have learned is that there is no monolithic concept of Helsinki; for each person the city is a series of individual places, moments, and memories that together form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Certain images may rise to the top in the mind’s eye—a particular building or street, the water, the parks—but cities are nonetheless comprised of cumulative experiences, some collective and some that are all your own. The longer you live in a place, the more experiences accumulate—locals know their city better than short-timers. And I do believe that those who learn the history of their city understand it better than those who only live in the present.I leave Helsinki tomorrow, bound for further adventures in other cities, all of which will be interesting and amazing but none of which will be Helsinki. The eve of my departure begs the question: what are my Helsinki places? The challenge of my Fulbright project has been to accumulate a sense of the city at a faster than normal pace, to pack several years worth of place experiences into four months. I can't claim to know Helsinki like Tove, Sari, Ulla, Jari, and Tiina, but here are my top three:1. The view of the Tuomiokirkko, the national cathedral, from my 7th-story apartment—in snow and fog, lit with floodlights in the winter and glinting in the sun through the midsummer night. From the ground, in Senate Square, the cathedral is one of the most photographed landmarks in Helsinki, but I have a different view:Through the floor-to-ceiling picture window in my living room, this view has been a constant since I arrived here, so much so that I tell time from the cathedral’s clock. In fact, it has become my cathedral. I can’t imagine Helsinki without it.2. Kallio neighborhood, as a whole. I live just over the Pitkäsilta Bridge from Kallio, and I have spent a lot of time there. My favorite restaurant in all of Helsinki is a little Thai place called Lemon Grass, just a block down the hill from the Kallio church. There’s also Hakaniemi market, the Worker’s Housing Museum, karaoke at Paja, the outdoor deck at Siltanen, Karhu Park, and the ethnic groceries along Hämeentie. Kallio holds a special place in the cultural landscape of Helsinki. It’s a little grittier—ever so slightly rough around the edges. In such a safe, clean, middle-class city, I like the texture it provides.3. Helsinki’s art nouveau architecture. It’s concentrated here in a way that you just don’t find in American cities. And it’s a special brand of Finnish art nouveau too. It makes even the schlep to do my laundry interesting:I am not finished with Helsinki. If anything, I hope that my relationship with this city is just beginning; I would like to live here again someday. But for now I am bound for other places. We leave for London tomorrow on an evening flight, followed by Barcelona, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin. I will continue to use this blog to consider Helsinki, but I will also write about these other cities, and their city museums.

Lenin Slept Here

While waiting for a bus the other day in Helsinki’s Hakaniemi Square, I snapped this photo of a plaque on an apartment building. In English the plaque reads “V. I. Lenin lived here 1917.” There are similar plaques on a few other buildings in Helsinki, and there's a Lenin Park. There’s also a restaurant I’ve eaten at a few times, Juttutupa, that boasts in its menu of serving Lenin. Such tributes are not as ubiquitous as the “George Washington Slept Here” markers up and down the east coast of the United States; and they have attracted their share of controversy. But nonetheless Lenin does have a presence in Helsinki, particularly in Kallio, a neighborhood with a strong working-class identity.Growing up in the American public school system at the end of the Cold War, I was taught to treat anything smelling even faintly of Communism as suspect. Therefore it’s been an adjustment spending some time in a city that straddles east and west; that fought its own civil war, Whites vs. Reds; that has very complex yet close ties to Russia. Helsinki is much less a Russian city than it was at the turn of the 20th century, but in the center of Senate Square, the civic heart of Helsinki, there is a statue of Czar Alexander II and not a Finn:A red brick Russian Orthodox cathedral shares the skyline with the white dome of the Lutheran national cathedral:And according to Helsinki Urban Facts, Russian-speakers are the largest foreign language group in the city. The history taught to Helsinki schoolchildren is different than the history I was taught. I’m grateful for this chance to see a different perspective, not just in Helsinki but in Tampere and Tallinn. RIP, VIL.

Living History in Rauma

You’re looking at a birds-eye view of the historic district in the port city of Rauma, on the southeastern coast of Finland. Named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1991, Old Rauma consists of about 600 wooden buildings, a particularly high concentration of 18th- and 19th-century Finnish vernacular architecture. I was there on Friday for an expert tour given by Tanja Vahtikari. The photo was taken from the tower of Rauma’s 15th-century Church of the Holy Cross.I know Tanja through the network of urban historians at the Universities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Turku. Tanja is about to complete her PhD dissertation on UNESCO World Heritage sites, and she is using Rauma as a case study. As we spent the day meandering through the old town, with Tanja pointing out sites of interest on each block, we had a meandering conversation about historic districts, heritage policy, and 21st-century compromises.Most of the 600 buildings in Old Rauma are privately owned and occupied. While it is certainly a tourist destination, Old Rauma is also a high-functioning residential neighborhood. According to Tanja, the historic district has cultivated an identity as a living heritage site. So, for example, there is no attempt to make Old Rauma a pedestrian zone; residents are free to drive and park throughout the district. And, in contrast with the old wooden town of Porvoo, whose businesses—restaurants and knick-knack shops—serve mainly tourists, Old Rauma boasts hair salons, a hardware store, and other amenities needed by locals.I was impressed with the resources the City of Rauma provides to assist residents in negotiating the tricky business of living in an historic home. There is a preservation restriction on each of Old Rauma’s wooden buildings, which means that all exterior and any major interior alterations are subject to an approval process. The city employs a preservation architect devoted exclusively to Old Rauma, who works out of Tammela, a building renovation center with extensive services for residents. Homeowners can stop by Tammela to consult informally with the architect on projects big and small. There is a salvage operation where you can get a period-appropriate stove door and other architectural details at reasonable rates. There are demonstration rooms where you can learn how the walls of Rauma houses were constructed:Or how to restore your doors:Tammela also makes paint the old way, and will sell it to you for cheap:You can even rent this workshop, with tons of power tools, for a mere 2 Euro a day:So that you can make sure those 19th-century windows continue to look like this:The result? There are plenty of instances in Old Rauma when the present intrudes on the past: the occasional 1920s or 1950s building mixed in with the older architecture, some decidedly contemporary commerce peeking out from 19th-century windows (I spotted both Subway and Benetton), and the hectic buzz of 2010 work and play. But preservation permeates Old Rauma nonetheless, and you get the sense that residents actively contend with the past on a daily basis. Moreover, thanks to resources like Tammela, Old Rauma is not a neighborhood exclusively for the upper class, as are many historic districts I’ve seen at home in the US—there are middle and even working class folks living here too.Historic preservation junkies might want to check out Tammela’s Renovation Guide, and here’s a great post by former Finland Fulbrighter Kenneth Kolson that explores the issues above in greater detail. I for one spent the entire bus ride home thinking about DIY projects for my 1914 duplex in Boston—that’s Old Rauma rubbing off on me.

Mapping Locals and Tourists

I just heard about the work of Eric Fischer, a programmer in the San Francisco area who has created a series of maps of major cities showing where people take photographs. Because the public photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa enable geo-tagging of the images people upload, Fischer was able to create maps that show the hot-spots—the places that are photographed by many people every day. This is interesting for my research because it could help city museums visualize the urban spaces that are most important to the public—the places that possess a high amount of social capital, the ones we want to remember.As if that weren’t enough, Fischer took it one step further and used the timestamps on photos to divide them into those taken by tourists and those taken by locals.  He defines tourists as people who took photos in a given locale for less than a month, and locals as those who log timestamps over many months in the same city. Above is Fischer’s Locals and Tourists map of Boston. Blue represents locals; red represents tourists; yellow represents photos that couldn’t be categorized. Since city museums must be mindful of the different needs of locals and tourists, it’s really interesting to be able to confirm in such graphic terms that the places residents care about are often not the places tourists care about.Here’s the Locals and Tourists map of Helsinki:The first thing I noticed is the prominence of the ferry ride to the island fortress of Suomenlinna. It shows up as a sharp blue line extending from the southeastern edge of Helsinki centre to a blue and red island that looks like a bunch of grapes. The blue line is so defined that you’d think it followed a road, but it’s actually traversing the harbor. And then, of course, you can also see Senate Square and the Esplanade in bright and shining red at the centre, in contrast with the oval blue outline of Toölönlahti, Helsinki's version of Central Park, just to the north. I look at this map and I am proud to say that I have visited just as many blue spots as red. While I am by no means a local yet, I do know something about the Helsinki of Helsinkians.You should all go explore the cities you love through Fischer’s maps—there are hundreds of them. Fischer has made them available in multiple sizes, everything from thumbnail to the original 6137 x 6137 files—just click on the “all sizes” button in the top left corner of each map to access a version with more detail. Isn’t it amazing when information becomes a work of art?