{"id":396312,"date":"2019-09-16T11:47:53","date_gmt":"2019-09-16T15:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=396312"},"modified":"2021-11-08T14:55:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T19:55:44","slug":"how-do-physical-spaces-help-create-community-396312","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/how-do-physical-spaces-help-create-community-396312\/","title":{"rendered":"How do physical spaces help create community?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cities don\u2019t spring into existence, but they can seem that way, as if they were neutral physical containers for the lives of inhabitants.<\/p>\n

Cultural anthropologist Kathryn Mariner<\/a> says that\u2019s just the opposite of what built environments are. \u201cSpace is created, and space in turn creates the kinds of interactions that happen around and in it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s researching placemaking in the city of Rochester. Her large-scale, multi-year project\u2014titled \u201cFertile Ground\u201d<\/a> and supported with funding from the University of Rochester<\/a> and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation<\/a>\u2014examines how people in marginalized communities are cultivating their lives in the midst of Rochester\u2019s enduring history of racial segregation. The city\u2019s divisions create profound differences in socioeconomic status, education, health, and opportunity for its citizens.<\/p>\n

\n

Design Justice: Power + Place<\/a><\/h3>\n

Bryan Lee, Jr.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

September 19, 5:30<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Hawkins-Carlson Room<\/strong><\/em>
\nRush Rhees Library<\/strong><\/em>
\nFree and open to the public<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This talk is part of the 2019\u201320 Humanities Center Public Lecture Series<\/a>, this year exploring the theme of communities.\u00ad<\/p>\n

Bryan Lee, Jr. is an architect, educator, writer, and design justice advocate. He’s also the founder and design director of Colloqate Design<\/a>, a nonprofit multidisciplinary design practice in New Orleans, Louisiana, dedicated to expanding community access to design and creating spaces of racial, social, and cultural equity. Lee was named one of the 2018 Fast Company Most Creative People in Business. In 2019, Colloqate became the youngest firm to win the Architectural League\u2019s Emerging Voices award.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think you can understand Rochester as a city without attending to space and the way that space has been inhabited, contested, reclaimed, and transformed,\u201d Mariner says. She sees communities\u2019 reinvention of place as a way to \u201cenvision and enact a more emancipatory future.\u201d<\/p>\n

A focus on \u201ccommunities\u201d at the Humanities Center<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Mariner\u2019s focus on community is shared this year by the Humanities Center<\/a>, which has taken \u201ccommunities\u201d as its annual theme. \u201cCommunities and the forces that disrupt them are central to our sense of connection to others and thus to why we persist in striving to create a better world.\u00a0 The theme is a great example of the potential of humanistic inquiry to spur social change,\u201d says Joan Shelley Rubin, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center and the Dexter Perkins Professor in History.<\/p>\n

The center will raise the curtain on this year\u2019s slate of public lectures<\/a> with a September 19 talk by architect Bryan Lee, Jr. He\u2019s a design justice advocate and the founder and design director of the multidisciplinary, New Orleans\u00ad\u2013based nonprofit Colloqate. Its mission is to organize, advocate, and design spaces of racial, social, and cultural equity.\u00a0Buildings, Lee contends, can be a force for bringing greater justice to the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work Bryan is doing is so important because architecture in general is not a very diverse discipline,\u201d and he brings a rare focus on social justice, says Mariner. Anthropologists and architects approach their work differently, \u201cbut I think we have a lot to learn from one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking from the micro to the macro level<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In the first phase of her fieldwork, Mariner is working at a micro level, exploring how city residents are reshaping outdoor environments in the city. They’re changing spaces, often with few resources, in ways that foster connection, as with community gardens and play spaces. As the project advances, Mariner will widen her focus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think you can understand these smaller grassroots spaces without branching out to the neighborhood and then the city,\u201d she says. \u201cSo much of the history is about structural patterns that have impacted the city as a whole: zoning policies, environmental services, parks and recreation, public transportation, housing. All of these things are shaping space down to the micro level.\u201d<\/p>\n

An assistant professor of anthropology, Mariner published her first book in the spring. Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States <\/em><\/a>(University of California Press, 2019) examines transracial adoption and ideologies of family, race, and class. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2015 and carried out her ethnographic fieldwork for the book in that city.<\/p>\n

\"portrait
Kathryn Mariner, Wilmot Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies. (Miguel Cardona photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now a member of the steering committee for Rochester\u2019s graduate program in visual and cultural studies<\/a>, Mariner didn\u2019t employ photos or films in the fieldwork for her book. The subject was sensitive, and she found herself attending to the erasures and invisibilities of the adoption process. But \u201cFertile Ground\u201d is a highly visual project. Alongside the mapping, interviews, and observant participation in which Mariner is engaging, she\u2019s also taking photos and providing cameras and prompts to community members, encouraging them to capture their environments in an anthropological technique called \u201cphoto voice.\u201d An exhibition of the photographs will be held next year.<\/p>\n

When teaching, Mariner asks students to consider the architecture of the classrooms they inhabit. What kinds of social interaction does the room encourage or discourage? Where does the layout situate authority? \u201cOne of the things I\u2019m trying to do on my project is uncover the ways that things we think of as merely social are engineered into the spaces we inhabit,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat does it mean to design a building that fosters community\u2014not just through what people are doing inside it, but through the structure itself?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her highly visual, multi-year project \u201cFertile Ground,\u201d cultural anthropologist Kathryn Mariner is researching placemaking in the city of Rochester, and her focus on how community is formed is shared by this year\u2019s Humanities Center lectures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":396462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[21512,14,21522,9576,25132,34752,16072],"class_list":["post-396312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-department-of-anthropology","tag-events","tag-graduate-program-in-visual-and-cultural-studies","tag-humanities","tag-humanities-center","tag-kathryn-mariner","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow do physical spaces help create community?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In her 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