When Rocky recorded her oral history for Intersection | Prospect Heights in 2015, she was thinking back on the public walking tour we'd just been on, all the places we'd heard neighbors talking about, and she told me a story about what was bothering her lately in this neighborhood she'd lived in for years. She told me:
One of my great distresses right now in terms of the neighborhood is that new people come in . . . they have no idea how to be neighborly. . . . So I'm sitting on the stoop one afternoon, and this lady comes out, and she's like, “Can I help you?” “No, I'm just sitting here.” “Do you live here?’ “You know I don't live here. It's Brooklyn. It's a stoop. I'm your neighbor.” I said, “This is something that will happen. This is how you get to know people. Some evening, just come out here, sit down, smile at all the people walking by. Wave to them.” Everybody, even if they don't know your name, or remember your name, they will know there is this neighbor that's there, and we form this community.
Places can help us become ourselves, to feel we belong, to shape our values, but they can also do important work helping us be together with others, maybe even to become a community, fostering social capital and emotional support. Places that do this work—like a stoop might—are part of how we understand who our people are, who we identify with. Telling stories and shooting the breeze help us navigate time and place as deeply connected. As the novelist Javier Marías writes, “Space is the only true repository of time, of past time. . . . When you go back to a familiar city, time undergoes a brief, sudden compression.” 1 Walking the spaces of a familiar place immediately brings stories that are important to us into the present, even if those things happened many years in the past.
Beyond the power of moving through places for individual memory, moving through places is a kind of practice of culture. In Cibacue, Arizona, the Western Apache people use places as mnemonic devices, compiling their stories, values, and cultural heritage in the landscape; and in Australia's Western Desert, people's individual sense of self as Pintupi is linked with a cultural and spiritual history and belief structure told through, and of, the land of the Pintupi people.2 These landscapes are not just intertwined with stories but themselves tell stories that can be felt. These connect the living and the dead, and connect us over time in natural places as well as in urban places. In Minneapolis, the inimitable bookseller Tookie in Louise Erdrich's novel The Sentence wonders if “perhaps before the Dakota War, her ancestors were connected to this spot of earth, or to the ground beneath the bookstore itself.” 3 And grounding us in Oakland, Tommy Orange's characters in There There, his “urban Indians,” are deeply connected to place, and in their connection, they describe the place itself:
We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread. . . . Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.4
Who we identify with in a cultural sense, writes social theorist Stuart Hall, is continually “becoming,” pushed and pulled between similarity and difference, inclusivity and exclusivity, working at a personal and a structural level.5 This is about “feeling yourself through the contingent, antagonistic, and conflicting sentiments of which human beings are made up. Identification means that you are called in a certain way, interpolated in a certain way: ‘you, this time, in this space, for this purpose, by this barricade with these folks.’” 6
Places help us be together, help us make culture together, and are where we are called to “this barricade” when they foster two kinds of talk: the enduring talk that comes from long-term relationships, and the casual talk that is fleeting and sometimes lets us take small risks with less commitment. This talk, and the negotiation inherent in it, is essential in a city, which by its nature is what political theorist Iris Young called “the being together of strangers”—strangers who need to navigate place together.7 I think about this kind of work that places do as the work of helping us be together: not even necessarily to become a community. Just being together, acknowledging each other's humanity can be hard enough without the reciprocal care community implies. I also take the word community very seriously, and often use it with trepidation. Its potency is compelling, and the coming together of people who share a place or experience can be powerful and sustaining. Yet, as a word community can be dangerous because it can be used too simplistically, can mean entirely different things for different people, and, most dangerous of all, easily lends itself to being exclusionary, rather than what cultural theorist Raymond Williams has called the “warmly persuasive” way the word is often thought of.8 It's too easy for a group of people, in defining what draws them together as a “community,” to simultaneously define who is outside of it, who is different and hence not welcome.9 Hence, here I'm working with a notion of a neighborhood—made up of many overlapping, intersecting, and sometimes oppositional communities—and the possibilities of city life, in what Young elaborates as not just strangers being together, but being together “in openness to group difference.” 10
Yet this vital openness while being in the same place at the same time does not just happen; it requires acknowledgement of each other, talk as negotiation, and places in which that acknowledgment and that talk can be enacted. As I began to notice the amount of talk on the tours people took me on, I wondered if some of it could even be called dialogue. The work of radical educator Paulo Freire has most informed my thinking on how interpersonal dialogue engages with, and is part of, the larger community. Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and later works imagine a liberatory potential for praxis-based dialogue, “the encounter between [people], mediated by the world, in order to name the world.” 11 This kind of talk has power to awaken consciousness and enable resistance to structures of oppression, and it can be of particular power for people who have connections to multiple places and cultures, who critical theorist and linguist Donaldo Macedo calls “forced cultural jugglers.” 12 On a modest scale, we can see the need for a similar kind of dialogue in those heterogeneous neighborhoods like Prospect Heights and Mosswood that struggle with the legacies of American segregation, class structures, and discriminatory history. Places that enable the kind of talk that allows individual realities to negotiate with each other, and with the larger neighborhood, are vital, in whatever form they take.
At the Valois Cafeteria in Chicago, a place that evoked the social life of an old neighborhood now mostly gone, one of sociologist Mitchell Duneier's interviewees explained it this way: “Lots of people—even though they don't live in the neighborhood—make a point of coming to Valois to eat. It's sort of like a meeting place. You suddenly run into someone you haven't seen for a while.” 13 When I read this, I can hear Tewolde's voice in my ears, telling me about the Oakland donut shop where his diaspora community came to “just smoke and sit” and, most importantly, “just got to be friends.” Places that foster these kinds of talk are special, and the people who facilitate them (or, to be clearer, run them) are often what make them what they are.
To reap real benefits from this talk, for conversation to rise to the level of dialogue, there needs to be trust, respect, a willingness to listen, a bravery to risk one's own opinions, and an inclination for people to work together in a cooperative process.14 It is this kind of talk that builds social capital, that builds networks that allow us, in social scientist Xavier de Souza Briggs's words, to get ahead and to get by. These places make space for this kind of trust and risk-taking, the engagement and conversation with friends, acquaintances, and strangers that validate a sense of self-worth and relationship to community.
These kinds of interactions between place and people are essential for a functioning community, functioning neighborhood, or, we can imagine, even a functioning nation—shared by strangers together. A wide range of sites can do this placework, as long as residents feel they are safe and they are heard. In the following chapters, we'll look at the work places can do to support the kind of enduring talk that happens regularly over a long period of time—in Neville's words, “we still meet every Thursday”—and the kind of talk that is more casual but no less potent—in Tanya's inimitable words, “where are you able to connect?”