Towards a practice of place

Building new and stronger connections

Over two sessions in November 2016, local people from Astoria, Queens, NYC gathered at the Broadway branch of Queens library to share stories about their neighborhood. The first session was broadly on memories of the neighborhood, which has experienced waves of immigration since its existence. The second honed in on music-related memories of the neighborhood.

The sessions are among the most meaningful I’ve been involved in organizing. They marked the fifth anniversary of my project 30^th Ave – a Year in the Life of a Street, and were held in partnership with Queens Memory Project, a wonderful initiative of Queens Library.

Throughout those two events, the power of building connections between people through the lens of place was abundantly clear.

Some people in the room already knew each other, but many didn’t. A young man who had recently moved to the neighborhood with his partner connected with an elderly woman who had lived there for decades, over their shared love of singing. A participant showed the old accordion that his grandfather had brought over from Italy, and had played in their apartment as family members danced tarantellas around the room, while others reminisced about nights out drinking under the Hell Gate Bridge in the 1980s.

The events came right after the deeply divisive 2016 US Presidential elections. But those dynamics were far from people’s minds as they shared what the neighborhood meant to them in the past, and present, and looking towards the future.

The interviews that I’d conducted five years previously – one each week, all along 30^th Avenue – similarly had the strong through-thread of people’s very specific connection to their surrounding place.

Martha of Grand Avenue laundromat said that having worked in laundromats far away from her home she suddenly realized she should ask the one down her block for work: it paid off. She liked working there because the streets were still busy at midnight when the laundromat closed, so she and her daughter felt safe.

Mustafa of Trade Fair supermarket said that:

“You can cross borders when you cross our aisles. No matter where you’re from you can always find what you want”.

And a group of young filmmakers shared the good and the bad of living in the city. Some yearned for more peaceful places, others saw the city as having something unique. As Dashawn put it:

“What I love is when you’re in the subway, and everything is kind of dirty and broke down, but as soon as you walk upstairs and see the city, especially at night, you see all the lights and everything, it’s like a big change. It opens up your eyes.”

The interviews provide a snapshot of a particular time. As time has passed, some of the interviewees have died, or moved away, or their stores have been relocated for new developments. But, perhaps even more so given that transience, the interviews reinforce the value of creating space for listening. And the value  - positive, negative, of all kinds of value - that people place in the places that surround them.

There’s plenty of focus on “place-based” strategies, which recognize the need for context-specific approaches to any policy intervention, yet which can still involve doing “to” rather than “with” people.  A grounded-ness in place can go deeper than that. The Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation has published a series of seven “emerging patterns for systems change”. The sixth is “Connecting to place and being in place”. As the summary of this pattern puts it:

“Place and space are more than geography – they are connectors of people, history, land and story. Being grounded in place encourages us to see people’s whole, and in relationship to their environment, rather than through single issues / interventions.

We do need to work on shifting systems, and every place is a part of a wider system. For starters, the library branch where the two sessions in 2016 were held has been closed for renovation for what seems like ages, and its prospects of reopening soon seem dim given recent city-wide budget cuts. To zoom out even further, not a day goes by without us being reminded of the smallness and fragility of our planet, and the interconnectedness of everything. But at whatever level we are thinking and working a grounded-ness in the practical, tangible, emotional connection with places can unlock things that are stuck, and can open up connections that may not otherwise be made.