Dis-Placing Place-Making: The Role of Technology in Expanding Opportunities for Public Participation

• In Event: Mobile (Media) Constructions of Place

Abstract

Current notions of place-making assume that individuals and groups of people have legitimate ‘rights to the city’ (Lepofsky & Fraser, 2003). The objective of this paper is to unsettle these notions to incorporate the politically and legally tenuous relationships immigrant and African-American youth have to their cities, especially in the current sociopolitical climate (e.g., Wells, 2017). I describe a community-based digital STEAM curriculum called Mobile City Science (MCS) that invited urban youth to engage in place-making efforts using mobile and location aware technologies. Data collection and analysis relied on video of and interviews with youth participating in MCS implementations in Seattle, Chicago, and New York.

Ongoing analysis reveals that the design of MCS relied on a contradiction that is fundamental to youth place-making in an era of white nationalism. That is, for African-American and immigrant youth to engage power structures in community development processes – to argue to adult stakeholders and imagine youth relevant places – they had to engage in a series of dis-placements that removed them from embodied experiences and in-location perceptions of public plazas, hospitals, and libraries. Mapping, walking through, re-viewing, and historicizing their neighborhoods were all examples of dis-placements we designed for youth to speak truth to power with digital and mobile tools. After participating in these designed activities, youth shared their recommendations for community change in public charrettes, using the digital artifacts they created as evidence backing their claims to space and resource allocation.

While displacements have been important to the contradictory nature of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and capitalism (Marx, 2005), this paper builds from and expands on notions of displacements from both Latour (1987) and Star (2010); scientific “discovery” is a contradiction in that understanding something in the world requires removing it from the world in such a way that it becomes consequential to a certain community. With the help of wearable and geolocative technologies, young people moved between re-placements and dis-placements to provide faithful translations of the place to the map, the place to the memory, and the place to the image. I argue that these digitally mediated translations provided youth membership (albeit marginal) in place-making efforts that are typically led by powerful adults.

Author

• Katie Headrick Taylor, University of Washington - Seattle