Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In her recent book, The Cities We Need (MIT Press), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.
In this talk exploring her unique book, Bendiner-Viani makes visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and how we risk losing both our senses of self and our democracy as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, public health threats, and climate change. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.
- More about The Cities We Need
- More about Gabrielle’s work and her practice, Buscada
About the speaker
Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a writer, artist, and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio on place and dialogue, Buscada. She is the author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024) and Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019), a finalist and honoree for the MAS Brendan Gill Award. A widely exhibited photographer, she was a professor of urban studies at the New School for a decade and has been a fellow at both the International Center of Photography in New York and the Centre for Urban Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Video recording of The cities we need: Essential stories of everyday places with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Transcript of The cities we need: Essential stories of everyday places with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
0:00:02.4 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities at Tufts virtual colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants Ainsley Judge and Max Seba, and our partners Shareable and the Bar Foundation, we organize Cities at Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we are delighted to host Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, who is a writer, artist and co-founder of the interdisciplinary studio on place and dialogue called Buscada. She’s the author of Cities We Need, Essential Stories of Everyday Places, which is published by MIT Press last year, and Contested City, Art and Public History as Meditation… Oh sorry, as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. She’s a finalist and an honoree for the MAS Brendan Gill Award, and she’s a widely exhibited photographer. She was professor of urban studies at the New School for a decade, and has been a fellow at both the International Center for Photography in New York City and the Center for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College in the University of London. She holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Gabrielle’s talk today is The Cities We Need, Essential Stories of Everyday Places. Gabrielle, a Zoom-tastic welcome to Cities at Tufts.
0:01:43.8 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really wonderful to be here and so wonderful to be talking with all of you. So yeah, thank you, Julian. Thank you to everybody. Thanks to Cities at Tufts for having me. This is such a lovely series of colloquia, and it’s really nice to be here with all of you. So as you heard, I’m Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani. I’m a photographer, I’m a writer, an urbanist, an environmental psychologist, which if you don’t know what that is, hopefully it will become clear through the course of this talk. But really I’m interested in the ways that people find meaning and connect to place. And so I began the work of this book over 20 years ago, asking my neighbors in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn and in Mosswood, Oakland for their tours of their neighborhoods, of their everyday places, and making photographs of the places where they took me to. So in the way that I work, there are two things that are key. I’m really interested in understanding dialogue and art making as a way of knowing, and so thinking about how do we sort of push boundaries of disciplines around art practice, around social science practice, how do we bring those two things together?
0:03:02.6 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: It’s something I really try to do in my own work. And so that’s something that’s kind of always in the back of my mind. But I’m also really interested in doing research and doing work that values people’s lived experience and people’s expertise. So thinking about how do we forefront that in the way we think about how to understand cities? So, the other thing I should say is that in the course of doing this work, as I said, it’s been 20 years in making this book. And a lot of lifetime happens in 20 years. So in the way that I’m interested across disciplines, I’m also interested in the ways in which this research shapes our lives. So thinking about the ways in which doing work in cities also is something that shapes the person doing the work. So this has certainly been a big part of my life and my own learning. And sometimes I think a little bit about doing this work over time, longitudinal kind of work. Sometimes you don’t know, you have to wait to be able to know what you’re actually going to learn. You have to wait for yourself to change.
0:04:13.1 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: You have to wait for the world to kind of change all of those pieces to help you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. When I started this project way back in 2001, when I asked when I asked… I’m going to read a little bit from the book to kind of give you a sense of the process of the work and some of the voices from the book. So this book really is both text and image. It goes back and forth between portfolios of photographs of these two neighborhoods. And I can talk a little bit more about kind of how I made these photographs. But you’ll see it’s really about the interchange and exchange between image and text and also about the ways in which we kind of use… How photographic processes can be part of knowing and understanding our world and part of understanding a process of research. So way back in 2001, when I asked Mike in Prospect Heights how he had prepared to take me on a tour of his neighborhood that I had requested, he explained, I said to myself, we’ll take a walk around the block and I’ll tell you what I know.
0:05:47.6 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: So much of the work of being human happens in everyday places. We become ourselves, we become able to see each other, to be a community. And everyday places are personal, but also global. They’re intertwining history, emotion, memory. They’re experienced, talked about, negotiated, woven into lives. We create places and in turn, places create us. So it’s not too much to say that some of these small public and semi-private spaces even have the potential to be spaces of liberation. So it’s in these spaces that we find the cities we need. So what are these remarkable or not so remarkable everyday spaces? They’re often thought of as banal. Supermarkets, sidewalks, diners, bus stops, churches, meeting places, barber shops, bike shops, repair shops, donut shops, laundromats, schools, auto body shops, which is this one, parks, playgrounds, libraries. The work that these places do helps us to become ourselves and to become communities, laying the groundwork for a functional society. And I call that workplace work. And I really think that it’s so important for us to be thinking about this kind of thing right now when we’re really grappling with what are the things that tie us together?
0:07:23.0 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Where are the spaces where we’re actually able to talk across difference? So early on in my work in Oakland and Brooklyn, someone challenged me and said, well, what might be the purpose of knowing about everydayness? Asking to what use could this project be put? I was asking all these people for their guided tours and they were great stories, but why did it matter? So thinking of the then recent losses in New Orleans in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, I answered that if you understood everyday life and you understood how a place functioned, how it worked, then if some sort of natural disaster occurred, you would know how to rebuild. You would know what was missing in the wake of that disaster. And so in subsequent years, I mulled over this question of the use or purpose of this work, sometimes rejecting it outright, sometimes allowing it to spark new questions. So when I returned to Prospect Heights in 2014 and was inspired to create the Intersection Prospect Heights Public Art and Dialogue Project from these guided tours, which I’ll show you some pieces of a little bit later, it was because I realized that a natural disaster hadn’t happened, but a man-made one had.
0:08:40.4 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And I saw the damage wrought by gentrification that had been accelerated by a very large-scale development called Atlantic Yards at the edge of the neighborhood. New expensive infill development and higher residential and commercial rents had arrived with people who could pay, but also in preparation for even wealthier people that landlords imagined would come later. And when the development was finished. So spoiler alert, that development is very much not finished more than 20 years later. But many of the small businesses that my tour guides had taken me to earlier on in the 2000s, so starting from 2001 to 2005, many of the small businesses that my tour guides had taken me to were vulnerable and had been priced out as their rents were raised. So a lot of times those storefronts had been kept empty, waiting for luxury businesses who would pay top dollar. So many, many things that were special to people about the neighborhood were at risk. And I realized in 2020 that the next in these waves of crises, right, these natural and man-made disasters was the pandemic that held us six feet apart for over a year. And I thought about the way that recovering from that crisis would necessitate learning from what my tour guides had told me all that time ago and remembering and supporting the places in which the crucial and very easily overlooked everyday interactions that help us be together actually happen.
0:10:22.2 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And so it felt very important to be able to do that. It felt important to be able to name it, right? So that’s where this notion of thinking about place work and thinking about this as work that these places do for us and that the people who make them do to create them. So by doing these two things, like doing this very important work of both helping us become ourselves and helping us become communities, these places do nothing short of creating the conditions for a functional society. So without places that do this kind of work, our lives are at best hollow and two-dimensional, and at worst, they are filled with violence. And I say that… I talk a lot about everyday places, but they’re also kind of hard to talk about because sometimes they can feel both incredibly boring and at the same time, unbearably illuminating. But they are like us, they’re kind of always becoming. And so one of the processes of this project is to really think about how do we think about becoming over time and the work and necessity for these kinds of places and this kind of space of dialogue that happens over time.
0:11:40.5 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: So this is a book about the work that places do to support our becoming, our becoming ourselves and our becoming our community. And if not communities, then at least becoming able to be together, right? Just even as strangers. So becoming themselves, and sort of the sense of how do you feel free, was what David told me about at the supermarket that you saw earlier, that Tanya told me about at the diner, you’ll hear from her, that Cynthia told me about in front of her house, and Marty on neighborhood streets, right? It’s intensely personal work that happens in public. And places can help our bodies feel free and also shape the way that we feel that we belong. So becoming community, this being together with strangers, right, was what I heard from Tualde in the donut shop, and you’ll hear from him too, Neville in the electronics store, Julia at the fence, these things, these really essential parts of being human are happening in very, very everyday kinds of places. So I could see how their places fostered really crucial kinds of talk, both casual talk, but kind of the humanity-affirming sorts of acknowledgement, but also enduring talk that grows over time, over weeks, over years that builds on trust, and has the potential to make real change.
0:13:05.7 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: So in this book, I think a lot about spaces that are the kinds of low-stakes spaces for practicing negotiation. And I think about that as being so important, because if you haven’t practiced negotiation with other people in a low stakes way, in a place, in a time when banter is acceptable, that when the stakes are much higher, which they have the potential to really be, we’re out of practice, and we need to actually have that capacity to build capacity to work together, or to see each other together. So in this book, and over the years that I did this research, my tour guides in Brooklyn take us on walks through places that do each of these kinds of work. They notice what’s usually taken for granted, they talk about the kinds of place work, and they’re two somewhat unremarkable, though very beloved neighborhoods. But of course, and for all of you, that this kind of work happens in cities and towns everywhere, right? And so probably some that you know very well. So as you’re hearing some of these people’s stories, from places in Brooklyn and Oakland, it’s necessary to think about, well, what are the places that are yours?
0:14:25.9 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Where do you find this? Or where have you lost this, right? To be able to think about where is it that you find this essential work happening? And there’s Neville there on the left in the bike store, which was also very important for him. So I think that one of the things that’s quite important to think about is that these places also help us figure out how we relate to worlds far beyond our everyday. And one of my tour guides, Cynthia, so in this space in front of her house that I mentioned to you, she said, oh, now I get it. When we talked about why I was asking her for her tour of her neighborhood, this is Oakland. And so echoing what sociologist Dorian Massey called the global sense of the local, Cynthia proceeded to find the most eloquent way of describing this project, which she described it back to me of what I was asking for. She said, oh, I understand what you’re trying to do. She said, you’re asking how people fit the big world into their small worlds. And so with that, I want to read a couple of the stories of places that people took me to.
0:15:50.9 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And we’ll start in Oakland with Marty. And they’re on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and 34th Street. You may recognize it if you know Oakland. And Marty took me on both also, I should say people took me on walks and also on drives. And so as we drove around, we passed through this corner. And Marty said, this neighborhood was pretty solidly black. Lois and I grew up two blocks further down, but we were up here all the time. We used to hit the plum trees up there. The hospitals were there, but they were much smaller. If you look at this neighborhood, it was a lot more prosperous commercially because there were houses in here under the freeway. There were people here. I would babysit for the kids here just as they would babysit for me. Lois has her dad’s complexion and looks and her dad was a red cap. The red caps were the porters. And I can never forget, Jack would be coming home with that uniform on and I’d say, I always wanted to be like him. And he’d say, no, no, no, boy, you don’t want to do this kind of work.
0:17:01.5 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: This is the same kind of work your great uncle did. My great uncle Frank was a Pullman porter too, but he worked out of Chicago in LA for the Southern Pacific. Uncle Frank got a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1921. Where the hell was he going to work? No one was going to hire him. But this was why you had this degree of progressivism among these Pullman porters because so many of them were so much better educated than the people that were actually on the train. What we saw on this block was not the kind of blight that you see now, but people going to work every day, black men going to work every day. So all of those pieces of history and all of that personal history wound up into one corner of the street. And that sense of making self in public. And I heard a similar kind of thing, but from a different perspective, not a childhood perspective, from Tanya in Brooklyn at the diner. And so this is on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. It used to be called George’s. It’s no longer there. She said, I really like this place.
0:18:16.1 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Besides the fact that you see different people, you just hear people talking, joshing around. It’s a very mixed crowd here. Race, sex, age, you see people from all different backgrounds. You see cops come in here. You see sanitation. You see park police, plumbers, accountants, politicians, and you hear people talking trash. It’s funny. Mike gives the place its life because he’ll talk to anybody. He’ll talk crap with anybody. Here in New York, America, you have this whole thing about being somebody and being somebody of a certain level, the doctor, the lawyer, the Wall Street, whatever. And you have people here who have a life. They run a luncheonette. And they make people happy. And they know they make people happy. They like it. They come back. They don’t like it. They don’t come back. It appeals to me very viscerally. It makes me realize, yeah, you need some money, but you don’t need to be chasing, just chasing a dollar to the exemption of everything else. And it doesn’t have to be a big thing that you do. I feel that they love it. And that makes me like it also. If I’m in a bad mood and I come in here, I always walk out in a better mood.
0:19:34.7 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: It’s just the place. It’s comfortable, you know? So that sense of building self happened and that sense of building one’s own ethics and sense of what it is to be a person in the world and a good person in the world happening in these public places, in places that you think, couldn’t possibly do that kind of wanted work, right? That’s pretty important work. But similarly, kind of going beyond one’s own sense of self, which often has so much to do with how you treat with other people. Both Towolde and many other people talked about the idea of what it was to feel a part of a sense of belonging with other people, right? Sense of community. So I want to read Towolde’s story, from now we’re back in Oakland. And this is Telegraph Avenue and 42nd Street, just a few blocks up from where Marty was talking about. So Towolde says, I was one of the first Eritrean refugees that came into the United States in the 1980s. And there was lots of organizations to support the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, fighting for independence from Ethiopia. Golden Gate Donut Cafe.
0:21:00.8 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And that’s this one. We used to just sit there all day. I am not kidding you. When I say all day, I mean all day. There are hardly any people in there now. But it’s always been like that. Those of us who didn’t work on weekends, we’d get in in the morning, we’d have donuts and just sit there, smoke and sit until it’s time for the meeting. And at that time, it wasn’t political so much as getting to know other Eritreans. Just being friends and starting in this new place. The guys didn’t mind us sitting there all day and filling the place up with smoke. This, we sat here and this is what we saw. People would come in, buy donuts and coffee and leave. And we just sat there. Actually, people still frequented this long after independence too, but I haven’t been there since then. So different places, different buildings, have different emotions and different memories. And the last story I want to read to you is coming back to Neville, who took me on a walk through Brooklyn, one of the first, actually, he was one of my first tour guides.
0:22:15.3 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And he walked me past this place and he told me how this used to be the electronics repair store. He also ran an electronics repair store. And he said, this was my friend’s. And we were there on a Thursday. And he said, my friend, who was in the same electronics business like me, he died and they closed the store with all his stuff inside. He was a cricketer in the West Indies and his friends, who were his old cricketers, they always used to meet every Thursday around that table, have their drink. Two years ago, he passed away. They still meet every Thursday afternoon, still the same way. And he said to me, actually, it’s Thursday afternoon. And we knocked and went back in and everybody was there at the back of the store at this kind of closed-up shop, having their afternoon lunch. He went to the hospital for a checkup and they found something and they operated. And when they operated, he died. See, everything’s still here, he said. The store hasn’t been touched. If I need anything, if I’m short of anything, instead of buying it, I get it from him. So all of these stories were the reason that I wanted to make a public version of this project, and these two are parts of this, to try and think about, well, how do we bring some of these stories back to the places where they come from, right?
0:23:51.7 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: How do you think about that? How do you let other people know? What could that do for people’s own understanding of the place in the current time? So I have never been bored by anyone’s answer to the question of where would you take me on a guided tour. And I never know what will come out of someone’s mouth, nor what surprising connections between people will emerge. Each tour makes clear the complex, contradictory people that we all are. And to be fair, it may seem very unimportant that these places keep me interested, but making visible complexity surely isn’t, right? So most media does the exact opposite. And so part of what I think my job is, is to make that complexity clear. So to come back to that rankling question about purpose from so many years ago, how can we use the place work that we’ve seen throughout this book? Or to put it another way, what if we continue to ignore the essential work that places do for people, right?
0:25:02.5 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: I think part of what we are risking is truly our capacity to have both a sense of ourselves and also a sense of community and even the capacity for building what is really core to a functional society. So Lorena Zarate, my friend and former president of Habitat International Coalition America Latina, she writes, and I think this is so important to this work, right? The meaning of justice will necessarily include all the dimensions of social life, political, economic, cultural, spatial, and environmental. So Zarate goes on to say that in the just city, the goal of economic activities is collective well-being. Also, she doesn’t say it should be, but she said that is what makes a just city, is the goal being collective well-being. So well-being, right? The goal of the city is its inhabitants’ well-being, not the city as an investment vehicle, not towers inhabited only by global capital, but the city as doing necessary work for people to become themselves, to become community. For the city to work for people and for the city to do place work. So as you can see, this notion of place work is a way to think about these spaces, as well as an argument that everyday places are in fact important.
0:26:28.1 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Particularly for the ways in which people negotiate their individual lives with connections to the larger world. And the development of their own worldview. So people have a right to a city that works for them, not to a city that works them. They have what Henri Lefebvre and later cultural theorist David Harvey have famously called the right to the city, right? Which Harvey defines as the right to change ourselves by changing the city. And people need, sometimes expected, but sometimes surprising, sorts of places in which these complex and contradictory identities can find shelter and be worked out. People in communities of multiplicity and of contested spaces need places where they negotiate difference, both better to know themselves and to better function as a community. So in this time of when political crises are truly ongoing and increasing, one of my huge concerns among many, I should say, is a crisis of place and dialogue. So in this post-fact time, wherein stating facts seems to have very, very little bearing on many people’s opinions, sometimes I think that this is where we can learn from my tour guides and from the places in which they were able to build themselves and then share themselves with people they didn’t know and may not have agreed with.
0:28:01.0 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: So the job of place work seems more crucial and more threatened than ever. We’re also in a moment when polarization simplifies and dulls identity and individual stories. When so much of our time is spent on protecting our basic human needs, we lose the ability to share and protect the parts of us that are really the most human. We’re losing places that facilitate our sharing of the weird, specific, funny, surprising parts of ourselves. That sharing is that that helps us genuinely connect and the things about people that have kept me interested in asking for guided tours for over 20 years. But I don’t think that we can give up. There’s much that we can do, and the reason to do it isn’t that, which this is also true, equity, justice, and fairness are simply the right way to behave, which is certainly the case, but the reason to do it is existential. The work that everyday places do, that policies prioritizing a right to the city would support, this work is what enables us all to become ourselves, to be a functional society. And without this, we are nothing but consumers, data to be bought and sold, nothing more unique than what the artificial intelligence that trawls our online detritus can create.
0:29:24.1 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: So if we want to be human, we need place work. And without it, we can’t get to the cities we need. I want to leave you with one last voice. And I like to give the last word to one of my favorite tour guides. So this is from Amanjat in Oakland. And she was 12 at the time when I asked her, right at the end of interviewing with people, and I said to her, if you could take me on a tour of our neighborhood, where would you take me? And she said, this is 36th Street in Oakland. And she turned around behind our two houses and she pointed right back to the freeway that was right behind us. And she said, when you stand out and you can see where the freeways are and you can see the sun setting, that part right there. Thank you very much.
0:30:43.8 Julian Agyeman: Gabrielle, thank you so much for a rich, expansive look and a passionate look at the role of places. I’m going to start with a really unfair question. What’s the role of urban planners in facilitating this depth of nuance that you and many other people, but you in your way as an artist have elucidated for us?
0:31:18.7 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Yeah, I think it’s important. It’s very interesting. I think one of the… Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve been having have also been around both about planning, but also about community preservation and kind of the role of preservation and that tension. Does these things have to just sort of happen organically? Can they be fostered? Can they be cared for? And I think that’s the question is like, well, it’s not so much a question of whether we can make the… I think we certainly can make these sorts of places where we can build them. We can think about how do we foster them? One of the things that I think, I always like to step back. And I think the role in that sort of sense of the kind of role of planning is to think about… Well, one of the things I often find is kind of a… Cities are complicated things. There are a lot of kinds of people who both know about cities, think about them, care about them. But a lot of the times we kind of lack the capacity to have real dialogue across disciplines, which seems very silly, but very frequently happens.
0:32:32.9 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And so one of the things I think the role there is, is part of it is like, how do we shift the way that we talk about research, the way that we talk about research and understanding people’s experience of place? How do we take that stuff serious? How do we build that into planning processes? And don’t kind of… Because too often I think the idea of people’s connection to place or doing research with people about their places gets kind of denigrated to like a very early part of a process, right? Where you just talk to people right at the beginning. And maybe if it’s a project that needs to go through public review, kind of basically toward the end and that that dialogue with understanding need kind of gets made very small. And I think that to me is where I feel like this kind of work kind of plays into thinking about like, well, how can we expand that? Can we sort of make this sort of rich way of understanding people’s relationship to place be more inherent in the process of planning?
0:33:40.1 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: So we need to build new housing. We like we need more affordable housing. We need to do those things. We need to continue to planning is also about thinking about how do you preserve what is already there? So how do we think in a nuanced sort of way around preserving and supporting these kinds of small and sort of interstitial sorts of spaces that do all this really important work? One of the ways I think that we need to start to think about that is how do we not so much think about research as the like ask people what they want? Because very often people don’t know exactly what they want. Like that’s not their job. That’s like our job. But to ask what it is that they need or what is it that they get out of existing places and sort of to to tease apart that and then to think about, well, what are our responses to making those things more possible? And I think that’s the kind of challenge in thinking about this from a planning perspective.
0:34:50.8 Julian Agyeman: Sure. One thing that really strikes me in this work is that as a geographer myself, there’s been quite a lot of work in geography on emotional geographies, psycho geographies. And I don’t see us as planners really engaging with that. And I’m thinking, we don’t have a class on that. And I noticed Rebecca is on here, fellow geographer and a fellow professor at Tufts. Rebecca, if your classes are different to that, please. But I think we could really use within the urban planning profession, let’s not negate technical expertise, but let’s also shift a little bit towards the subjective, towards these emotional sort of geographies. We’ve got a question. Love the process of local walks. We’ll be teaching a course on leading local walks to highlight neighborhoods next year. Anyone have any advice for teaching students who are complete novices, newcomers who don’t even know their own neighborhoods well?
0:35:55.5 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Yeah, absolutely. And just before I sort of… Just to build on your point, Julian, one thing that I often think about is that, that kind of cross-disciplinary work. Cities are this complicated place, of course, we should have this, like, cross-disciplinary way of looking at it. We should bring in thinking about public health as well, like all these pieces. And part of that is also, it’s both teaching students how to do that work, but it’s also teaching students and more broadly each of these professions how to work with each other. So that it’s not only that every single person has to become an expert in everything, but that you become an expert in how to collaborate across disciplines to work on this complicated thing that is a city. And I think that that piece of like, well, what does it look like to really be able to listen and to be able to think about all the different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing that need to go into making a plan? That to me is something to think about. Well, then also how do we reshape, kind of planning education.
0:37:10.4 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: What does that look like in terms of building our capacity to talk with each other as professionals. But then, thank you so much for the question around students and walks. I have done a lot of walks with students, both in terms of having them walk in their own neighborhoods, walk in other people’s neighborhoods. What does it look like? I will say, one of the ways that I started this project was both as an urbanist and as a photographer. Photography has… It has many kinds of histories, but one of the things that I was thinking about at the time when I started this project was it’s like got a quite colonial sort of history as well of making photographs of other people’s neighborhoods, more broadly thinking cultures, right? And sort of saying, well, this is what’s out there, especially photography and research, right? And I was very interested in not doing that. And also in thinking about, well, how could you kind of bring together that idea of really being guided to see what is important that you might not otherwise see, and bringing that together with a photographic practice. And then also in thinking, well, what would happen if you brought photographs back to people and said, well, here’s what I made.
0:38:32.7 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: I spent the time with your place. I care enough to… Like, this is work to do that. What did you see in that? Is this what you see? Is this right? Is it wrong? That’s just as interesting, right? So that’s part of what was interesting to me was that idea of like, how do you kind of let yourself be guided through a place and kind of be able to see it through someone else’s eyes, which is obviously you will never be somebody else. You cannot be. But how do you kind of try to open yourself up? How do you kind of work through and try to kind of think through that and use these different tools to kind of approximate that to a certain extent? So one of the things I think a lot about with walking with students is starting with helping students really just be good observers. Like not even with photographs, not with cameras, not anything, but just learn how to look. And so I think there’s a lot of work out there and that actually is kind of leans more on thinking about, well, how do we read environments?
0:39:39.3 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And there’s some excellent work kind of that’s from more of a planning perspective that comes from that of like, well, how do we read the environments? How do we read kind of formal and informal signs of an environment? How do we kind of read and understand where do we sense boundaries of a neighborhood? Just starting to call attention to all of those things, which are really core to both the sort of geography practice, social… Kind of environmental psychology’s practice, all of that stuff. How do you get students to start to analyze that in their own minds and start to just really see it as a matter of practice, like before they even talk to anybody, to really be noticing? And then think about, well, what does it look like if they ask somebody to give them a tour of say their neighborhood, right? What would that look like? Is there someone they could ask. So starting to work with students to be able to say, your expertise is one thing. There are many other kinds of expertise and how do you pay attention to those? That seems like a really important piece of that work.
0:40:51.9 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Paige. Paige is saying, I really appreciate this talk. This is really making me think about the social fabrics that are disrupted through gentrification and the possible impacts of that. What do you think are local policies that organizations could push for to combat gentrifications in neighborhoods?
0:41:15.0 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Yeah, small topics, very small. We’ll get that sorted like now.
0:41:19.8 Julian Agyeman: 30-second response.
0:41:21.0 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Exactly. I think one of the things is, from my perspective, there are many parts to teasing out gentrification. I think one piece of it is, well, how do we actually think and take seriously affordability and affordable housing? You may have heard we have a big election in New York City right now, right around that very question. Thinking about taking affordable housing really seriously and doing the kind of baseline policy work of defining what affordable actually is. We have a lot of kind of lip service to these things, but not a lot of actual work that really is defining work for how people can really stay in their homes.
0:42:41.9 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: One of the things… That we need to think about is, well, what does it look like to build in protections for small businesses? How do we actually… And how do we end up with, say, neighborhood improvements, better parks or things like that, that don’t end up displacing people? We should be able to say that stuff out loud, that it’s not a, well, that’s just how it goes. This is not the laws of physics. This is decisions, and somebody’s making money off of this. One of the things that we need to think about is like, well, how do we start to prioritize that and say, those are the things that we really care about. How do we actually ensure that at the end of a 10-year commercial lease, it’s not getting doubled. When a business really does do this really important work for a community.
0:43:52.5 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: How do we ensure that… Make policy then, which people aren’t getting tax breaks for keeping their storefronts empty while they’re waiting for the new development to sort of come online. That people don’t often… That happens quite frequently. So if you have a… You’re making a loss on your commercial property, you get a tax break, but that’s kind of often a way for people to keep that storefront empty with this kind of imagined future rent. So we end up with these very weird sorts of situations where people lose their space, but then nothing actually replaces it. So thinking through kind of the… In some ways, these are very small things. This is not easy to make happen, but they are not grand plans, but they’re like really paying attention to the how it happens as opposed to the flashy part that I think actually can make real difference in terms of the impact and displacement around gentrification, that those things start to be important. And when you say what happens to people? I mean, the other thing is that, so one piece is that people often are displaced.
0:45:06.7 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: The other thing is people often, if they do have staple housing, a neighborhood changes around them so much so that they feel completely isolated and maybe there’s nothing they can afford in their neighborhood anymore. There’s nothing that they recognize. What that does to you is very significant, right? So taking that stuff seriously and taking that idea that, we want people to be like, have a sense of wellbeing. We want happy and healthy people in cities. That’s what we want. And that that needs to be kind of a priority. And it seems really like Pollyanna to say that, I think out loud, but I do think that that… It’s not that complicated, but it is a huge shift from the way in which we make decisions around most cities right now.
0:45:58.6 Julian Agyeman: And two of the cities you chose, I mean, Brooklyn and Oakland are ground zero for exactly what you’re describing. We’ve got a question. I am very impressed by your work, especially giving voice to those. Hang on, would you get another question? I’m very impressed by your work, especially giving voice to those who rarely have a chance to narrate their own neighborhood from a perspective often overlooked by urban planners. What are the next steps?
0:46:26.9 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I think… What are the next steps? In the world or for me or I don’t know, which I could go on for a long time.
0:46:37.3 Julian Agyeman: In your… I mean, this has been a long-gestating project. What’s next?
0:46:43.2 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Ah, okay. Well, yes, it has been a long-gestating project. It’s such a nice way of saying it. And I will say my first book, that only took 10 years. So I feel like, now I’m going in the wrong direction. Like I now have to go back to things that take 30 years. I don’t know. But I think all of this, I kind of keep circling around. My first book with the very long subtitle is really around a failed urban renewal site, which was demolished in the late ’60s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And the 50 years of work that it took community organizations, like really literally people’s whole lives to fight against something terrible being built there and to fight for some level of affordable housing being built on that site. And I will say something that is very imperfect, but is an enormous success in the context of what could have been. So I keep thinking a lot around this thing of both people’s agency and the ways in which they make place and tell stories about their own places.
0:48:01.2 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And I think a lot about like, well, what is it about organizing? How do we kind of organize over the long term for cities that are better for people? What does that look like? How do we kind of merge this personal and the historical? And I think that’s something that has been a big part of all of my work and that sort of merging of the social science research with a photographic practice or an arts practice, thinking about like, well, how can both of those be ways of knowing and knowing the city and better understanding kind of these things that are kind of, as I say, like the everyday stuff is really hard to talk about because it really can seem incredibly boring. Like, why are you even asking about this? It’s not important. Let’s talk about something flashier or shinier. And then people say these things that are like heart-stopping about their supermarket, and that’s like seems quite important to actually spend the time on. And so I’m also really interested in methodology. Like, how do we know what we know?
0:49:11.6 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: How do we take that apart? It’s very hard to know anybody else at all. So what is it? How do you take seriously methodologies for research? How do we take seriously understanding what we know? All of those things are quite important to me. So the next project that I am working on, I’m just kind of in the beginning stages of it, and I’m sort of figuring out how to explain it. But my background is that, well, I should say I have two projects, but one of them is, I am like a multi-generational New Yorker, which is not that common. So I really have grown up with… And grew up in New York, live in New York, I’m raising a child in New York, parents who grew up in New York, and their grandparents, and my grandparents grew up in New York. So all of these things of thinking about ethics and how to be as being told through place, that’s something that I’ve definitely lived. That these stories of kind of how to be in the world seem to me to be very situated in place, in this pretty weird place, actually, for me.
0:50:28.5 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And so I’ve been thinking a lot about how to tell that story, but also to think about it in the context of like, well, what does it mean to have intergenerational narratives around who you are, belonging, and how to be in… How to be as being immersed and enmeshed in place? And what does that mean in a bigger context of why displacement, why migration, why all of these pieces are so naughty and also so important, like what you might lose when you are forced to leave those things? What you may gain through engagement with new places too, but that sort of starting from some of my own experiences and my family’s experiences, as kind of being rooted in the weird stories of New York City, but also to think about, well, what does that… How does that… How might that help us kind of understand long-term connection to place and why that is like really one of the key questions of our time?
0:51:36.6 Julian Agyeman: I think this will probably be the last question, and it relates slightly to your points about methodology. So this is from Tom Llewellyn. This lecture has made me think about similarities and differences between cultural wayfinding in urban and rural areas. I grew up in a rural community 30 minutes from Oakland with dirt roads that had little to no signage, where all explanations of place were anchored in shared history. It was interesting hearing similar stories from an urban community in close proximity. Have you explored any rural communities with the same methodology?
0:52:08.0 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Yeah, I have, and that’s like, yeah, going back to an even earlier project and something that I keep wanting to go back to actually, as well. Somebody actually said to me, the book is called The Cities We Need, and they said, well, do you not think we need rural places? And I was like, no, that’s not what I mean by that title. Because I think that the ways in which storytelling of place, I mean, may happen even more in rural places. And I think that that is so incredibly powerful. I will say that it’s not something that it’s… So I will say that one of the things I didn’t read from, one of the things I didn’t read from the book, but the first tour I ever went on when I was sort of exploring this methodology as an idea, actually, was when I was in college. I asked a lot of my friends to take me back to where they were from and give me tours of their hometowns. And so one of my friends was from a very rural part of Pennsylvania. And so she took me around her town. And as we were driving, I was like, start screaming in the car.
0:53:16.8 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: And I was like, there are cows. And she was like, that’s… Yeah, that’s normal. And so I think, and so for me… I mean, that was pretty exciting for me as a New York City kid. But I think that piece, starting to do that work in rural places, has been really interesting to me, kind of a very mini project, which I keep wanting to return to, was I did do a whole series of these kinds of tours with people in a town in South Texas, kind of pretty close to the border. And both farmers and people in the town to ask them what their guided tours of their places were. And that’s work… That sort of stayed with me in the back of my mind that I think they seem so parallel and so important to the ways that we think about these sorts of spaces together, when very often we think about them as being very separate. And so that’s something that feels like the kind of the other side, but where I am very much an outsider to that kind of space. So that’s something I think to grapple with, but definitely something that’s really interesting to me.
0:54:38.5 Julian Agyeman: Great. Thanks very much. Can we have you back in 10 years when you’ve next finished…
0:54:41.8 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Exactly, the next one.
0:54:47.1 Julian Agyeman: Can we give a very warm Cities at Tufts thank you to Gabrielle? What a fantastic project. And Gabrielle, keep in touch with us. Thank you.
0:54:54.8 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. It’s wonderful. And thanks for all the wonderful questions.
