The Power of Place

February 1997
316 pp., 112 illus.
$28.00/£20.95 (PAPER)
Short

The Power of Place
Urban Landscapes as Public History
Dolores Hayden

Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles.

In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory.

The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it.

One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.

Endorsements The Power of Place is a well-timed, well-reasoned call for fusing history and the environment to create a more democratic and inclusive interpretation of the places in which most of us live and work. Ms. Hayden greatly strengthens preservation with arguments that give the historic environment a critical dimension beyond beauty and rarity." —The New York Times Book Review

Awards

Winner, 1995, category of Archeology and Anthropology, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Power of Place: Media Technology, Youth, and City Design and Development

MIT 4.285J/11.948J Spring 2001, Wednesdays 2-5 Room 2-131 TAs: Katrina Simon, Zachariah Kramer

This workshop provides an introduction to urban environmental design and explores the potential of information technology and the Internet to transform public education, city design, and community development in inner-city neighborhoods. Integration of comprehensive ("top-down") and grassroots ("bottom-up") approaches to design and planning is a major theme.

Students will work in a real neighborhood with real people on a real project, putting theory into practice and reflecting on insights gained in the process. With teachers and students at a middle school in West Philadelphia, we will study environmental and community history and devise designs for vacant land near the school within the context of planning for the larger community and watershed.

The course is associated with the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), a program that has integrated research, teaching, and community service since 1987. The WPLP (www.upenn.edu/wplp; MIT version will be on line soon) has received millions of hits since 1996. A new WPLP website will be the principle locus of our collaboration with the school and community.

Place
The Mill Creek watershed and neighborhood in West Philadelphia, particularly the area around Sulzberger Middle School. The school is located next to a buried river, and many vacant lands near the school are located on or around the sewer, in the old floodplain of the buried creek.

People
Students and teachers at Sulzberger Middle School, neighborhood residents, staff of the Philadelphia Water Department.

Project
Develop a new, community-based, environmental curriculum for Sulzberger Middle School where students engage in the process of community development. Since the first Power of Place class in 1996–7, seventh and eighth graders have studied the natural and social history of their neighborhood, produced outstanding academic work, inspired pride in their community and visions for its future. The school's principal and teachers are very excited about the prospect of expanding this program to include MIT students working with Sulzberger students via the Internet.

There will be two field trips to Philadelphia during the semester.

For background on the project see the WPLP website, especially the section on Sulzberger Middle School (www.upenn.edu/wplp/sms) and summary of the Mill Creek Project (www.upenn.edu/wplp/sms/millc.htm).

A knowledge of web-authoring and geographic information systems (GIS) is not a prerequisite this year, but is highly desirable.