“‘Place,’” the historian Dolores Hayden has written, “is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid. It carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in a social hierarchy.” Posts in this section follow this social element of physical space, emphasizing questions of meaning and human effort in creating shared (or contested) culturally meaningful space.
America’s national and state parks have often been utilized by majority white populations. The assumption that the outdoors are a space for white, able-bodied people who have resources and time continues to influence who uses green space...
Throughout American history, economic and social systems relegated communities of color—especially Black communities—to environmentally hazardous urban landscapes. Ujiji Davis’ piece, The Bottom: The Emergence and Erasure of Black American Urban Landscapes, illustrates how the Bottom came to be in states across the country...
Challenges facing scholars and practitioners working on issues pertaining to land, water, and community call for innovative perspectives that reach across traditional boundaries and professions. While specialized expertise will always be important, this web site is designed to support cross-disciplinary thinking. The short articles featured on this site are intended to achieve three goals:
Dolores Hayden’s article “Urban Landscapes as Public History” and her larger book project The Power of Place accomplish a great deal in bringing together previously disparate academic and professional conversations on the meanings of place.
We commonly make sense of place through story. Beginning in 2016, a coalition of six state agencies in Minnesota, working with host sites around the state, developed a traveling exhibit and associated activities focusing on the water that makes Minnesota such a distinctive place.
“Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi,” as Vann R. Newkirk II argues in his long form journalistic piece “The Great Land Robbery.” Through a detailed examination of the land history of one family...
Richard M. Mizelle, Jr., a historian at the University of Houston, masterfully lays out the history and contested geographies of water in east-central North Carolina along the Tar River. Even from its 19th-century origins, the mostly African American community of Princeville struggled to form community on marshy, frequently flooded ground.
The urban designer Ken Greenberg has written about the “retreat of the industrial glacier” as a figure of speech describing the availability of land in cities that was formerly taken up by now-obsolete industrial or transportation uses...
“‘Place,’” the historian Dolores Hayden has written, “is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid. It carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in a social hierarchy.” Posts in this section follow this social element of physical space, emphasizing questions of meaning and human effort in creating shared (or contested) culturally meaningful space.