Term Project – Museum of Future Urban Landscape Histories

Term Project The Museum of Future Urban Landscape Histories

PREAMBLE
History is an interpretive exercise of projecting oneself into the past—sometimes a familiar landscape, but often strange territory—in order to observe, understand, or explain its patterns, processes, and possibilities in the present. The processes of history both look backwards and forwards in time, with an eye, ear, hand, foot to the future. It is a space of continuities and disjunctures and always subject to the contingencies, ideologies, subjectivities, and limits of present knowledge. History provides poignant and powerful insights into the entangled chronologies that constitute our own lives and those of the individuals, cultures, ideas, and geographies in other lifetimes and geographies. Histories are material, descriptive, interpretative, social, and always environmental. Even if tacit, histories always presume a future: a future reader, a future discovery, a future counter-argument. The Museum of Future Urban Landscape Histories asks you to investigate the nature of the city (metaphorically and materially) and interrogate urban histories. How can studying historical cities help us articulate the patterns of the past, better understand how those patterns influence the dynamics of the present, and project a future for urban spaces?

DESCRIPTION
Through this city history project, you will dig deep into the environmental history of a city of your choice to investigate the ecological, social, and ideological factors that have formed and informed the shape and disposition of peoples and places. Your “city” project will investigate a specific urban center through different scales (geographic, chronological) and lenses: materialities (substances, structures), sites (specific places eg Ganges River, Tahir Square, Joubert Park or place typologies eg alleyways, bioswales, allotment gardens), events | voices (personal, collective), flows /processes (of people, resources, ideas, energy), and ideas (political, social, cultural). Your project will deploy both text and a multimedia tool, or visualization, (virtual I web, physical l model, carto/graphic, literary, sound l podcast, video, game) to create an urban exhibit | space that situates your city in its past in order to help us understand its possible future. What have been the major enviro-social drivers of this place? What are the distinctive infrastructural patterns and how were they derived? How have people shaped this place? How have environment and the more-than-human influenced city form, human values and activities? How have they changed over time? How have different historical and contemporary voices “described” this place and what are the differences in approaches, biases, theoretical frameworks (materialist, social, Marxist, post|colonial (subaltern), feminist, microhistory, big history, etc.) that inform scholarship? What does this city’s past potentially tell about its future? Your interrogation will comprise a written document of ten (10) pages with citations (in-text or footnotes), plus bibliography (or Works Cited) in which you articulate the main characteristics, arguments, events, processes, and materials with a mind to the themes we are exploring throughout the quarter. Your paper and visualization must both describe and argue the nature of your city and its production, consumption, and interpretation and make explicit what this history can potentially tell us about its future.

INSPIRATIONS
The Museum of Jurassic Technology offers visitors both fascinating insights into the minutiae of past histories of institutions, individuals, and phenomena. The venue also questions the role of the museum in society and the ways in which we formalize and disseminate knowledge. Use your virtual exploration (if you have not had the pleasure) as a touchstone in your thinking about your exhibit piece. http://www.mjt.org/themainpage/main2.html

DELIVERABLES
Develop in tandem with your interpretative exhibit piece (visualization) and a 10-page “script” (major arguments, key components including citations using Chicago or MLA style). You may work with a partner if you choose to do so.

PART I Cartographic Cities: Mapping Ideologies, Ideas and Instantiations (Proposal)

This is your research proposal. Select and “map” the outlines of a city of your choice. You are encouraged to select an urban center that is meaningful to you and about which you wish to know more, as part of investigations in other classes or thesis work, and/or as a result of prior or future interest or travel. What are important historic issues asked by scholars regarding the intersections of people, nature and the urban? What are the key spaces (sites), features, events, processes, and ideas you might investigate more deeply? In the creation of your proposal “map” you are encouraged to be creative and analytical, recalling the ways in which maps have been used historically to orient people geographically, chronologically, and ideologically. In addition to your “map,” develop a 300-word abstract and provide a preliminary bibliography of potential academic writing and other resources—online history projects OMEKA, city films, graphic novels, speculative fiction, podcasts—that work in tandem with your map. Your “mapping” can be handdrawn, computer-generated, or a combination. The “map” should be at least 36×24 inches. We will do a pin-up of your maps in class and share preliminary geographies, ideas, and directions. Be thinking about a possible city as soon as possible.

PART II Exhibiting an Idea (draft of media)

Determine what medium you wish to work in to develop your future urban history exhibit visualization and create a preliminary (messy) draft. As you continue to develop your ideas, revisit Theibault’s discussion of visualizations in which he encourages us to think about representational forms less as “illustrations” and more as “arguments.” Think about your medium and its own inherent qualities, as both a tool of communication and dissemination of a public history of your city, as well as a “dialectical partner” to your words. What can a visualization do that words on paper (virtual or otherwise) cannot? What are the limitations? How will you exhibit your city? As a model | sculpture on a pedestal? As a banner? As a continuous looping video? As an interactive game (analog or digital)? A graphic novel? An installation? What will an audience learn from or respond to in your work

PART III Drafting | Draughting (draft of text)

Develop your written draft (at least 6 pages) to share with a classmate for discussion, editing, and feedback. Bring a paper copy to class to share. Your draft should contain your questions/arguments, bibliography, and substantial progress in your thinking about why your city is what it is based upon your understanding of its history, and how you this might help us understand what its (uncertain) future might be?

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