Sites of Memory: Introduction

Sites of Memory, is a collaborative project aimed at documenting fragments of the black American cultural landscape.  Its goal is to explore the historic and contemporary effects of race upon the development of the built environment and to examine the realities and myths of America's dual racial landscapes. Central to this project is the idea that race has influenced the spatial development of the American landscape, creating separate, though sometimes parallel, overlapping or even superimposed cultural landscapes for black and white Americans. The spaces forming these landscapes were initially "constructed" by the politics of American slavery, and subsequently "designed" by the customs, traditions and ideology emanating from the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" finding in Plessy v. Ferguson, as well as 20th-century "Jim Crow" statutes.  The result was a complex social and cultural geography in which black Americans occupied, and often continue to occupy distinct and frequently marginalized cultural landscapes. This project intends to utilize a multi-disciplinary focus to collaboratively identify and interpret the black cultural landscape, examining its visual, spatial and ideological dimensions.

Within the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and cultural geography there is an emerging body of theoretical, historical and design research in which race and "cultural identity" are understood to be represented spatially and visually in the built environment.  As spatial elements, race, culture, and memory offer a means of interpreting the development of the fabric of the historical and contemporary city. In this manner the city is understood to be composed of a series of parallel "cultural landscapes", defined both by tangible artifacts (churches, schools, housing), spaces (squares, parks, streets) as well as by more ephemeral customs and traditions of use. Traditional methods of architectural history and theory promote a view of the built environment which attributes a city's civic and cultural identity to the dominant culture, largely ignoring the presence of those marginal cultures not having a tradition of public building, and preventing a more didactic understanding of the city and the forces which shape it.

An increased interest in documenting and preserving black landmarks has drawn greater attention to individual buildings. Preservation efforts have tended to focus on sites such as churches, houses, and institutional buildings, often interpreting them as fragments isolated from larger social, historical and spatial contexts. Much of the black cultural landscape however, was shaped by spaces "designed" by appropriation, custom or use. As a result such critical components of the physical past and present have remained outside of the analytic view of historians and designers. Often obscured over the course of time, these larger cultural landscapes, defined by customs and events as much as by specific buildings, and represented in text, image, and music, offer invaluable insights to the memory of a place.

For centuries black Americans have supplemented the master  narratives of history with memories--protected, nurtured, and shaped into expressive artifacts as chronicles of their powerful influence upon the American landscape. Contemporary scholarship has begun to make greater use of these artifacts literature, music, dance, art, film, vernacular architecture and cultural geography to explore the construction of the modern cultural landscape; defined as much by memory as by physical artifact.

This is a pivotal moment to explore the issues of spatial identity and representation of black culture in the contemporary urban landscape. Thirty years ago the Civil Rights movement re-shaped the customs and the traditions which defined both the black and white cultural landscapes. Today we as planners, designers, writers, artists and historians continue to explore the problems of America's urban landscape, confronting its multiple histories, as well as the physical and cultural elements which separate us by race, class and gender.

Sites of Memory will present the recent fruits of such research and will collectively and individually address these crucial questions: How the ideology and political history of race are to be represented visually and spatially in the built environment? What are the visual and spatial elements which distinguish the black cultural landscape, and by what means can these often ephemeral cultural manifestations be documented, preserved and interpreted? The answers to these questions will coalesce through planning, moderation and discourse into a series of critical positions--articulated through the language of the designer and the historian into a proposals for a more complex reading of the racial and cultural history of a place.