field guide to the changing city
Overview
Throughout the semester you have learned to interpret the American landscape through the identification and dating of individual buildings. Now you will turn that around and use landscape interpretation to tell the history of an urban place, via a walking field guide. By doing first-hand field interpretation and primary data research, in conjunction with limited use of secondary sources, you will be able to create a guidebook reconstructing the historical, urban development of an urban landscape that can be visited in foot.
Your guide will not only retell history, but will use your eyes and ears to help the reader interpret the place in the present, and offer insights about how current urban processes may transform this place in the future. You have all learned a great detail about how to interpret the American city through landscape interpretation and historical research. Your job now is to share that understanding with a reader.
To complete this assignment you must rely heavily on primary data sources, especially the urban landscape itself. In order to tell the story of this urban place, you can bring in as much information from first-hand visual interpretation or primary sources (that is to say raw data like census information, newspaper articles, archived historical artifacts, etc.). To supplement this first-hand research you will use additional secondary sources (i.e. books or articles on local history, which digest that history). Secondary sources should not form the core of your project, but only be used to illuminate your field interpretation. You must start with field interpretation, and flesh out using background research, not the other way around.
Process
- Pick an urban area you would like to become more familiar with. It should be at a scale that is manageable, a small town or city or neighborhood/district rather than an entire metropolitan area. The scale of this area you choose to study should be relatively modest (perhaps a few miles across). Urban districts with somewhat apparent center/central axis/edge will help you delineate a discrete area to study. You will likely want to go back to the towns you’ve already been studying in your field interpretations, but you don’t have to.
- Determine a trajectory that allows you (and your future reader) to explore the urban landscape and its history from early settlement to the present, all along a route that could be walked on foot in a few hours (maybe maximum 4 miles). These ‘transects’ should be natural axes along which you can view a lot of the city’s development patterns. You can of course wander off these routes through the urban landscape, but your analysis should be structured around a key corridor that reveals a ‘cross-section’ of the city and its development. Whatever trajectory you choose, your field research should take you through those areas most representative of the different eras of urban development.
- With digital camera, architectural style guide, and notebook in hand, carefully observe the urban landscape along that route. You may choose to walk from one end of the transect to the other, or start from the middle (perhaps the center of town) and walk to each edge. Your goal is to interpret the urban landscape not through the lens of any single building, but using the city’s structures and infrastructure (and their spatial patterns) to reconstruct the urban processes that made and are remaking this landscape.
- As you walk, use your landscape interpretation skills to answer three basic questions:
- What was the process of historical urban development that made this landscape?
- What evidence of this can we see in the built environment?
- How are current processes of urban development remaking this landscape?
- While in the field or at home do some background research to address questions left unanswered by your field research. Again, you may utilize as many primary data sources as you like. And good background research with secondary sources will be essential. But your project should not merely retell a historical story found in history books. Your use of these sources should be to enrich your first-hand landscape interpretation, rather than substitute for it.
Write-up
Your goal is to write up your findings as a walking field guide, a text that any person could pick up and use to understand the evolving urban landscape seen on foot. It will chronologically describe the historical development of this urban landscape via that trajectory, while still offering observations about current trends. For example, you might start your walking tour at the historic core of your town, with the oldest structures. But you will also want to inform the reader about the new development along the way.
As the reader passes through different districts, your guidebook should help them answer the three key basic questions above. What was the historical process that made this landscape? What evidence can we see? How are current processes of urban development remaking this landscape?
Your text should be integrated with a map and enriched by photographs and other visual materials you deem necessary to tell your story. Your map need not be professionally done, but can be hand-drawn and scanned. Your challenge will be to construct a narrative of this landscape’s past, present, and possible future in the most concise yet complete way, nicely designed and presented for ease of use by the general public.
Your concrete final product should be the equivalent of about 5-8 pages of double-spaced text, woven with present and historical photos, scanned maps, and bibliographic references. The entire size of the file should be no more than 1 MB. The more important final product, however, should be your demonstrated ability to reconstruct the history of ordinary landscapes using the powers of careful observation and skillful research. Please have fun with this.
You must upload your guidebook as a Word or pdf file, presentation file (e.g. Prezzi), link to a website of your construction to Canvas no later than 7:00 am on Thursday, December 6. In addition, you must upload a separate image that captures something you learned in your paper. This could be a great landscape photo or perhaps your sketched map of the town you study. This image must be no larger than 500 KB.
A Field Guide to American Houses – Virginia S. McAlester
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