AltDurham

Our engagement with Google Earth has been an exercise in digital urbanism. We switched back and forth between physical spaces and virtual tags, aiming through our mapping to mark out an “Alternative Durham” spread across physical locations and digital homepages. Durham fits perfectly into the type of city prepped for the digital urbanism described by Jeff Rice. It is a post-industrial town; the legacy of the infamous tobacco days—a history inscribed into its architecture: warehouses, smokestacks, railroad tressels, etc. While Durham is experiencing a renovation of its spaces through selected renewal projects: converting the tobacco warehouses into lofts, restaurants, and office space, creating a new center for the arts, gobbling up remaining fields to make way for subdivisions, we wanted to highlight layers of life in Durham operating on a different socio-economic model. The way we understand these ‘layers,’ and how we hope we managed to visually represent them in Google Earth, is analogous to what Fredric Jameson refers to as ‘levels,’ or semi-autonomous mediations between the aesthetic and the economic: “a differentiated social function, a realm or zone within the social that has developed to the point at which it is governed internally by its own intrinsic laws and dynamics”. They are both within the space dominated by multinational capital and distinct from it, in that they are free of direct financial control and operate according to different, sometimes conflicting imperatives. What we have mapped can be thought of as a single socio-economic layer divided into ’sub-layers’ determined by use and/or cultural differences.In seeking to achieve a visualization of an ‘altDurham’ we selected approximately fifty sites (by no means exhaustive) to mark on Google Earth with place locators, site descriptors, web hyperlinks, and digital photographs. All together, you can “Play” “AltDurham” on Google Earth, a feature that virtually transports you to all of the marked sites, highlighting in relief the newly visualized cityscape.The first “layer” of AltDurham we refer to as “Community.” While there are many communities in Durham (and our list is by no means exhaustive), our focus was on what might be called ‘indie,’ DIY, and green/sustainable culture, all of which are largely decentered from any single community hub (such as a church, a particular business, or a downtown strip). The two places we mapped act co-operatively to provide resources for their members and ‘constituents.’ Bull City Headquarters, a drug and alcohol free space, runs a Queer youth drop-in night, hosts performances (artistic and visual), and houses the Durham Bike Co-Op, an on-site non-profit spot at which to build and repair bicycles. El Kilombo is an activist collective comprised of members of the African-American and Latino communities and students that offers a variety of services (ESL and computer classes, homework support, seminars, etc.) geared toward people of color and working class residents. Our second “layer,” “Food” is meant to illustrate the alternative methods (aside from frequenting the nationalized chains) of procuring food in the Durham area. The Durham Food Co-Op is a non-profit grocery space dedicated to cultivating sustainability through local and organic food. While anyone can shop at the Co-Op, becoming a member (and volunteering) will reduce the cost of your food. The Durham Farmer’s Market, open on Saturdays, provides a site for local farmers to sell their produce as well as the Mobile Market option of partnering up with a local farm and receiving, via automobile, a weekly portion of their crop.

For our “Education” layer, we selected sites offering educational programs alternative to those provided by the public school system. We included the eight charter schools presently operating in the city (and open to all residents) along with El Kilombo and the Durham Literacy Center. The Schoolhouse of Wonder, run in collaboration with Eno River State Park, promotes the study and conservation of natural ecologies through day and summer youth camps. The Music Explorium conducts roving drum circle classes, either in its space or in other community locales. “Art” comprises the highly active and diversified local artists utilizing various city spaces. The Transom is an art space that houses multiple studios; The Bull City Arts Collaborative is an “artist-run creative alliance” that provides workspace for local talent. Liberty Arts, a sculpture studio and casting facility, offers workshops to the public. SeeSaw Studio runs an apprenticeship program for teens in the field of textile printing and graphic design. And the Carolina Theatre, the independent theater in Durham, showcases two film festivals: the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.The “Business” layer of the project, proving a bit more difficult to easily categorize, consists of businesses utilizing re-use, small-scale, and non-profit methods of production and exchange. Included in this layer are thrift stores (Grannie’s Panties, Trosa’s, Once and Again) including the non-profit Pennies for Change, which uses proceeds to fund the Durham Rescue Mission; independent and used bookstores (The Know, The Book Exchange, The Regulator, etc.); handicraft goods (the Durham Craft Market); and post-use recyclables (The Scrap Exchange, The Durham Bike Co-Op). The final layer, “green space,” is meant to mark out areas in Durham reserved for gardening, recreation, and contemplation, away from the hustle of city life. Seeds, Inc. is a non-profit community garden located in inner city Durham. Worked mostly by Durham teens, it provides education in sustainability, harvests locally grown produce, and acts as sanctuary for neighborhood residents. El Kilombo is also in the process of creating a community garden, the fruit of which will be available free of cost to the community. Lastly, we indicated various entrances to Eno River State Park, the predominant green space in Durham.References:Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:Duke University Press, 1991.

 

Digital Urbanism

The aim of Google Earth appears to be referentiality: to collectively upload the “territory” onto the map in order to achieve as perfect a correspondence as possible. But Google Earth already supersedes the territory: the planetary scale, the historical levels, the user-generated content—it is a new spatiality developing out of the intersection of physical and cyber-space. Usage of this virtual map provides a fitting example of the kind of digital urbanism theorized in studies of New Media. De Certeau already recognized that simple acts of elevation change the grounded cityscape into “[t]he panorama-city…a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulation” (93). Passing from the “real” into the “virtual” in this theorization occurs at particular altitudinal perspectives. The city is always already on the verge of virtualization; it just requires a deific transmogrification (up stairs, up elevators, up rocket ships) to crystallize this potentiality.

For many, the implosion of urban space in the 20th century has manifested itself in a parallel implosion of these physical spaces into cyberspace (Bukatman). Jeff Rice’s essay “21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging” is an attempt to carve out such a spatial shift (urbanism to digital urbanism) in post-industrial Detroit. Rice proposes that the logic of digital culture is at the heart of contemporary urbanity with new media providing the means of escaping the late millennial malaise of a dilapidated urban infrastructure. In order to articulate Detroit as a digital city, Rice first re-works the notion of city from a fixed spatial location to—borrow from theories of new media—a network in what he categorizes as a “mixing [of] physical space with imagination.” Reminding us of McLuhan’s analysis of the city—that it co-evolved with writing—Rice, in effect, justifies de Certeau’s reading of the city as analogous to speech act, i.e. interpreting the WTC as “the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production” (910). But what Rice seeks is a digitized de Certeau. He points to practices of digital writing on the Internet: digital tagging (the cyber-equivalent of physical graffiti?) as a means of marking and re-using space. This “tagging” is what happens on Google Earth as users re-appropriate physical spaces in new ways, marking sites with uTube videos of couples, parents, children, pets—all interacting with the tagged locale.

The new media logic of the city, for Rice, is that of assemblage. The mixing of spaces both physical and virtual hails the beginning of a new spatial practice, admittedly hybrid in form. Rice posits that “when writing becomes tagging, associative combinations become rhetorical principles. These associations form digital networks, and thus digital urban spaces.” Digital tagging becomes a means by which to achieve a “digital sense of connectedness” (Rice); it also shifts articulation of the city from univocal to multivocal. Throughout the course of its development, the City emerged as an entity onto itself with its proper name obscuring all of the participants continually maintaining its—social and physical—structure (de Certeau). It is a spatial alienation that arises out of the congealed labor-time present in a city that has lost its referential which—as theorists of the city argue—was capital. Thus the utopian city has often been envisioned as multivocal (de Certeau 94). In mapping altDurham, we have attempted to uncover this multivocality, driving from site to site to hear the users of these spaces speak about their experiences.

References:

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Postmodern Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven
Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 91-110.

Rice, Jeff. “21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging.” 1000 Days of Theory. [7 Jun 2005]
[28 Dec 2006] http://www.ctheory.net