Early on in my work in Oakland and Brooklyn, someone challenged what might be the purpose of knowing about everydayness, asking, To what use could this project be put? Thinking of the then-recent losses in New Orleans in the wake of 2005's Hurricane Katrina, I answered that if you understood everyday life and you understood how a place functioned, how it worked, then if some sort of natural disaster occurred, you would know how to rebuild, you would know what was missing in the wake of that disaster. In the subsequent years, I mulled over this question of the “use” or “purpose” of this work—sometimes rejecting it outright, sometimes allowing it to spark new questions.
When I returned to Prospect Heights in 2014 and was inspired to create the Intersection | Prospect Heights public art and dialogue project from these guided tours, it was because I realized that a natural disaster hadn't happened, but a man-made one had. I saw the damage wrought by the gentrification accelerated by Atlantic Yards and the Barclays Center arena, that large-scale development at the edge of the neighborhood. New expensive infill development and higher residential and commercial rents had arrived, with people who could pay and in preparation for even wealthier people landlords imagined would arrive once the development was finished. Many of the small businesses my tour guides had taken me to were vulnerable and priced out as their rents were raised. Sometimes those storefronts were then kept empty, waiting for luxury businesses who would pay top dollar. Many things that were special to people about the neighborhood were at risk.
In 2020, I realized that the next in these waves of crises, these natural and man-made disasters, was the pandemic that held us six feet apart for over a year. Recovering from this crisis would necessitate remembering and supporting the places in which the crucial and easily overlooked everyday interactions that help us be together happen. To do so, it is necessary to be able to name what they do: placework.
The everyday is tricky to write about because it can feel both incredibly boring and unbearably illuminating. While it can seem like nothing happens, in fact, everyday places and their people change all the time; as geographer Allan Pred has eloquently written, they are “ever-becoming.” 1 Placework is a way to understand the many ways we are all in flux, becoming in and with places over time.
Placework is the dynamic, reciprocal work that everyday places do for and with individuals and communities, enabling us to grow into being ourselves, and enabling us to be together. By doing these two things—helping us become ourselves, helping us become communities—these places do nothing short of creating the conditions for a functional society. Without places that do this kind of work, our lives are at best hollow and two-dimensional; at worst, they are filled with violence.
This is a book about the work places do to support our becoming: our becoming ourselves, and our becoming communities—or if not communities, at least becoming able to be together. Becoming themselves was what David told me about at the supermarket, Tanya at the diner, Cynthia in front of her house, and Marty on neighborhood streets. It is intensely personal work that happens in public; places can help our bodies feel free and can also shape the way we feel we belong.
Becoming community—being together with strangers—was what I heard from Tewolde in the donut shop, Neville in the electronics store, Julia at the fence. I could see how their places fostered two crucial kinds of talk: the casual but humanity-acknowledging qualities of everyday banter, and the enduring talk that grows over weeks, over years, that builds on trust, and might eventually change everything.
In this book, my tour guides in Brooklyn and Oakland take us on walks through places that do each of these kinds of work. They notice what is usually taken for granted, talking about the placework in their two somewhat unremarkable—though beloved—neighborhoods, but of course it happens in many cities and towns—probably some you know well.
In both Mosswood and Prospect Heights, there were massive forces and histories at work, pushing and pulling the everyday spaces of the neighborhoods, as they have pushed and pulled places in your own city or town. As we walked, my tour guides expressed what it was like for them to live in their neighborhoods, how they built a sense of themselves as residents, and what memories were evoked by the places we passed by, making clear how space is never fixed and is always socially produced. As structural theorists from Henri Lefebvre to Manuel Castells have written, individuals are shaped by culture, as, in turn, culture and its spaces are shaped by individuals.2 Researchers and artists have explored how people connect to many kinds of places in their everyday lives: from homes to disparate spaces such as laundromats, barbershops, and schools to plazas and piazzas, markets, and public parks; from sites of local history, and entire neighborhoods, extant and destroyed, to national monuments and many more.3 These places’ meanings are relational—and help us figure out how we relate to worlds far beyond our everyday. “Oh, I see!” Cynthia in Mosswood exclaimed as we talked about why I was asking for her tour of the neighborhood. Echoing what sociologist Doreen Massey called “the global sense of the local,” Cynthia proceeded to find the most eloquent way of describing this project: “It's how people fit the big world into their small worlds.” 4
At the same time that I was doing these tours—and learning the important work that everyday neighborhood places did—I was also doing work with residents of unique affordable housing developments in New York City, doing tours with people inside their own apartments to understand where and how people were able to really inhabit their homes, how their homes helped them be themselves, what it felt like to dwell not just to have a roof over their heads. I was making photographs of their important places within their apartments, focusing on a chair where a resident said the sunlight fell just so first thing in the morning, or the nook another resident had set up for her son to read in, or the innovative way someone else had made space for a table large enough to seat their extended family.5 My collaborator on this project, environmental psychologist Susan Saegert, defines dwelling as “an active making of a place for ourselves in time and space . . . the most intimate of relationships with the environment.” 6 And I found that intimacy in both home spaces and neighborhood spaces. There was both vulnerability and action when my tour guides in Brooklyn, Oakland, and in apartments across New York City talked about making home, and this word, dwelling, and the idea of inhabiting kept coming to mind: a cyclical relationship of place and well-being as deeply intertwined and made together.7 I was grounded by the idea of a give-and-take between people and place, epitomized by Wright Morris's evocative photo-novel The Inhabitants, which helped me think about telling these stories with pictures and words.
Noticing the similarities between what was happening in people's apartments and in the ordinary neighborhood spaces that filled people's tours—it seemed important to think more about how these could all be places of dwelling. I could intensely feel the reality of Fullilove's assertion that “buildings and neighborhoods and nations are insinuated into us by life; we are not, as we like to think, independent of them.” 8 Philosopher Martin Heidegger's suggestion that architecture fosters dwelling when it creates and joins meaningful spaces—or locales—which “shelter or house men's lives” stuck in my mind; that a place could “shelter” a person's life took root in the way I thought about all spaces. 9 Yet I remained circumspect, as too often this word dwelling gets connected with a rustic authenticity, suggesting that modern life makes dwelling impossible—or that modern people have forgotten how to dwell.10 But modern people do dwell, in both cities and rural places, as many other writers have since explored.11 We can see it in all these places my tour guides took me to—in places that are not obviously connected to the land, but certainly build connection between meaningful places. We make our worlds by inhabiting our places, by dwelling in them. And places do a powerful work, when they let us dwell.
With all this talk about places and the work they do, we also need to think about the intense work that people do to create and protect places—the housing activists, the community gardeners, the small business owners, the neighbors. This work to create and protect places can look like lots of things: physical labor, the labor of building community, the labor of caring enough to argue, to talk, to listen, to show up regularly. The labor of making something new from what you have. The labor of taking care of others. The amount of work people do to create the places we inhabit every day is extraordinary.
We live most of our lives within what planning historian Margaret Crawford calls everyday urbanism, which is where people enact radical, necessary, creative, and everyday actions that shape place.12 When people reshape their places through their own cultural practices and everyday needs, in their own images, it is a way to insist on one's place in the world even when marginalized by large-scale or “official” planning. Roberto Bedoya, cultural activist, policymaker, and current cultural affairs manager of Oakland, has called this process rasquachification, drawing on Chicano scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's theory of rasquachismo. This potent work to make place uses the leftover stuff you have to make what you need, with an “attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style,” resulting in survival and resistance.13 What it takes to change a place, or protect a place, what it takes to imagine differently and resist—often over years, often facing intense opposition—is what inspired me through my years learning from housing activists on the Lower East Side and in writing Contested City.14 And when people do all that work to make places, there's also a cycle between people and the places they work to make and protect; there's a work that those places, in turn, do for us, allowing us to become ourselves, enabling us to be together: placework.
But why call it work? What is work? Work implies a seriousness, a routine, a regularity, a difficulty, but also a rhythm, a practice. In some spaces, work is tedious—a grind of clocking in and out, working nine to five, as both Dolly Parton and oral historian of work Studs Terkel would tell you.15 Work is constraint.
Yet in some spaces that do work, constraint can be what allows play or experimentation that wouldn't be possible otherwise. I think of art work and artist Anni Albers's explanation that the essence of weaving, of which she was a master, is in the play between structure and material, “supporting, impeding, or modifying each other's characteristics.” In working at the intersection of two kinds of constraints, she was able to make something new.16 It seems to me that supporting, impeding, and modifying each other's characteristics is what we all do everyday in the rhythms of our neighborhoods. This is not something that happens once, but rather many times, over and over, eventually making something new together. Understanding this power of repeated pattern, in Prospect Heights Mike took down the sign reading “George's” from the front of his much-beloved diner; the new sign he put up read, “The Usual.”
Work is also used in challenge, in encouragement, in celebration of someone's incredible skill. “You better work,” “Work it!,” and, of course, “Werk!” are phrases that are now pervasive in popular culture but which come from the house ballroom scene of the Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ community. While this kind of work is clearly about the effort you need to put in to really show off your talent, I love the way dance writer Jonathan David Jackson sees this kind of work on an even more elemental level—as being about the need to be truly “possessed in the spirit of the battle.” 17
And what about when something works for you? Placework, like emotional work and completely different than employment, does not produce financial capital, nor is it for the production of financial capital.18 To paraphrase Mike's description of Prospect Heights when he lived and worked there, placework is not about money. Placework and the relationships between people that it fosters produce social capital, which housing philanthropist Xavier de Souza Briggs explains as a series of relationships between members of a community—relationships that take two forms: social leverage and social support. The first helps one “get ahead,” and the second helps one “get by.” 19 This isn't a nice-to-have—it's essential; in the face of challenges and adversity, the mutual benefits of social capital allow people and communities to construct new, and even radical, futures through everyday interactions experienced at a visceral individual level.20 Physical spaces are worth money, yet the placework they do has value far beyond it—as seen in all of my tour guides’ stories.
The casual aspect of everyday places that do important placework is not incidental. This casualness lets people join as they can, when they can, and as they will, knowing they can always come back, knowing they can always rejoin. This became even more clear in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, when we couldn't be in most of our everyday places, though even then networks persisted and were created: mutual aid networks; connections by Zoom; and certainly the outrage, release, and power of the daily Black Lives Matter protests. But very often these connections needed to be formalized, planned, organized (though not always) in a way that everyday connections do not. And in formalizing them, you also lose something, some of their inclusiveness. If you were texting with people during lockdown, trying to support people, it meant that you had their phone numbers. It meant that you knew how to reach them. By contrast, in most public interactions, you don't have people's phone numbers, but you know that they'll be in a certain public space at the same time every day or every week. And that gives you—and them—stability.
In those interactions, do we ever say anything important? Rarely. But we validate the fact that we're all human, that time passes, that we all feel things, that we feel pain, that we feel happiness, that we're experiencing the world together, not individually. The banter. The exchange. The ways in which public spaces build people's capacity to share even small amounts of their lives with people they genuinely don't know. Lacking all of that makes your life less good.
Many things threaten our hardworking places—through demolitions of the places themselves and displacement of the people who make them what they are, who facilitate their important work. For example, in the pandemic, and before and after, small businesses in New York City and the Bay Area (and beyond) are, and have been, at risk. They suffer from little rental protection and from rising costs due to supply chain crises and small profit margins, making them some of the most vulnerable parts of cities.21 Small businesses as a category are often discussed as economic drivers, but they are rarely addressed as unique and crucial places that have the potential to shelter people's lives.22 They are rarely recognized as doing this vital kind of work.
Systemic racism, neighborhood displacement, COVID-19, and climate change all intersect and hit people hardest who are already at the edge. All of these threats increase our need for hardworking local places, the kinds of places that support dialogue and make space for negotiation, that support the interactions that build community, that create more than financial capital; these places are one part of dismantling white supremacy. Yet the threats that make hardworking places so necessary are the very things that endanger those places.
These valuable places sustain us and are where we build the networks that help us get along. Placework is all the more vital now because in this late pandemic moment, in climate crisis, in racially segregated neighborhoods, in a corporate, distracted culture, we need all the support possible to honestly become ourselves, and to become that messy valuable thing that is community.