Project Picturing Milwaukee
Recounting stories of everyday places where we live and work can spur active engagement with others who share these spaces with us, revive interest in our built environment and encourage stewardship of this patrimony. The need for collaborative storytelling to create a public culture takes on a sense of urgency when established traditions and ways of life disappear and new ones emerge. Such is the case of Thurston Woods, a neighborhood in Milwaukee where old demographics and culture have given way to new inhabitants, economic practices and cultural life. Merely telling stories is not enough in these cases - rather citizens should be inspired to participate and contribute in a collective retelling of stories thereby producing a public discourse that is invested and engaged. The objective of this project is to produce an inventory of sites that have historical value to this neighborhood and to provide users with interpretive ways of reading these sites. We expect that this project will increase awareness of neighborhood history and preservation of the built environment.
Project: Picturing Milwaukee hopes that by providing critical tools and an interactive public forum for city officials, residents, neighborhood groups and citizens of Milwaukee, we can learn, discuss and produce stories of places that matter to all these people. This project is significant because it will promote an easily accessible and free public forum for urban residents to share, interpret, learn and disseminate information about urban places as public culture. This project is innovative because it focuses on making expert ways of reading the city available to non-specialist users thereby seeking to create a critically informed citizenry who may serve as advocates and stewards of our urban built heritage. Arijit Sen www.senspeaks.wordpress.com |
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