Cultural Cartography of Bronzeville

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Syllabus

Course Number: ARCH 24206
Course Title: Cultural Cartography of Bronzeville
Cross Registrations: ARCH, ENST, AMER, CHST, CEGU
Faculty: Andrew Schachman, schachman@uchicago.edu
Course Sessions: Fridays, 10:30-2:50 pm (in person)
Primary Location: Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 153
Other Locations: Some sessions will take place in the field.
Video Conference Sessions: Zoom via Canvas (as needed)

Rationale

In De Oratore, Cicero recounts the story of the poet, Simonides of Ceos, who, leaving a banquet in his honor, narrowly avoided death during the collapse of his host’s house. Crushed in the disaster, none of the attendees could be identified for burial. However, by recalling their relative position around the table. Simonides was able to name everyone in attendance. ¹ Cicero describes this method of loci as a technique for developing the faculty of memory, especially as a support for oratory.

If we accept that spatial references can assist with memory, then the entire urban field – and not just those objects conceived as memorials or monuments - can be understood as a mnemonic framework. We often associate major historical events with the aura of a particular scene, or where we were when we heard the news of an event. The traces of our lives are entangled with places - where we lived, where we worked, where we fell in love, where we experienced something transformative. Spaces and places help us recollect our own experiences but also empathize with the lives of those who preceded us. And in Chicago in particular, Jeffersonian subdivisions offer a cartesian-like coordinate system that resembles the ones imposed on an archeological site. The city is also an index.

When cities are annihilated by war or natural disaster – as we have witnessed in Mariupol, Aleppo, Rotterdam, Hiroshima, Tulsa, Chicago, New Orleans, etc. - its inhabitants experience disorientation. Families struggle to locate the rubble of their own homes. Citizens mourn the loss of references to cultural history. If, to paraphrase Robert Smithson, the periphery of the city is like the periphery of the mind, then our minds are literally unsettled when that urban field is destroyed.

But the annihilation of cities isn’t limited to singular moments of disaster. The city is by definition a capital process that reproduces itself in an incremental churn. Economies grow with the decline and renewal of real estate. The perpetual process of destruction, development and replacement is considered to be a feature of that system. Sometimes these processes are motivated by optimization or socio-economic change. Other times they aid and abet systems and structures of exploitation, disrespect and violence. While this process of perpetual replacement is essential to economic growth and innovation, it also contributes to a kind of collective amnesia.

Consequently, this course will introduce students to cartographic drawings (and models) as frameworks for connecting histories to spaces.

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Notes:

¹ “There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host [...] a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; [...] but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed [...] Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. [...] He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.”

Intent of the Course

This course will (1) invite students interested in pursuing architecture or the study of cities to develop an understanding of urbanism as a process (2) expand students’ ability to ‘read’ cities, and Chicago in particular, to recognize ‘deep structures’ and their physical expression in urban orders and distributed networks (3) relate these pursuits to expand the ‘ecology of the mind’² via texts (and media) (4) connect histories and historic archives to spaces (5) provide students a platform to appreciate the cultural history of the region immediately surrounding the University of Chicago in Hyde Park and Bronzeville.

Structure of the Course

In successive steps students will develop maps to guide walking itineraries through the lost city of Bronzeville.

These maps have a three-fold purpose:

They are a cartographic interface for conversation, data collection, and inquiry. If structured with intention, they are open frameworks that can evolve as subsequent researchers uncover new archives or residents with a living memory of Bronzeville add new layers of information.

The development of itinerant maps can assists with the collection and recording of first-person testimony. We are rapidly losing the generations of Chicagoans who have a living memory of Bronzeville. Those who remain, such as the members of the Bronzeville Historical Society, feel the urgency to record their stories and experiences. This interface would work as a mnemonic support, but also has the potential to link testimonies to spaces, allowing transcripts of conversations to be encoded and retrieved as a collection indexed to a map.
Maps can support an understanding of the built environment as an index of cultural development, and expose questions about when the annihilation of the built environment literally unsettles histories, lived experience, memory and political agency.
Experiments in cartographic display are a step toward the development of a Cartographic Interface to assist with collections research.

Students pursuing this option will be asked to develop a cartographic interface for indexing assets contained within Chicago collections. Currently, someone researching a particular Chicago site needs to visit many distinct institutions, mine each of their collections, and piece together fragments of information. However, many Chicago institutions are in the process of digitizing their collections and, where relevant, indexing them to spaces. Sometimes this index is listed as an address, sometimes it’s a more general verbal description. A cartographic interface would assist the Chicago Collections Consortium to coordinate each institution’s spatial metadata to maps. Robust maps derived from Chicago’s collections have not been developed, but they would be a useful entry point for researchers to survey assets that are already associated with specific spaces. Such a map would easily coordinate with the City of Chicago’s Data Portal, which is already an open-source platform for researchers to create maps and graphs about the city, and freely download data for analysis.

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Notes:

²Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. University of Chicago Press

Bronzeville

Bronzeville is an ideal region for this inquiry.

Its boundaries are relatively compact, but its cultural significance is uniquely layered, dense, and integral to many of the cultural achievements that are considered to be quintessentially “American.” Fragments of Bronzeville are also well-documented: in the testimonials collected by Timuel Black, in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, in the writings of Margaret Burroughs, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, in the maps of the Chicago School of Sociology, in the statistical graphics of W.E.B. DuBois, in journalistic sources like Ebony, Jett, Chicago Defender, and the Chicago Sunday Bee, in audio interviews with Studs Terkel, in the musical recordings of Capitol, Chess, Sphinx and other corporations, in the sites of development of gospel, and the innovations in jazz and blues. This history is also encoded in architecture, as on Cermak and Michigan Ave where the production and sales of farming equipment was eventually transformed into Motor Row.

This density of cultural activity is partly a consequence of Bronzeville’s proximity to Chicago business, but also the restrictive legal covenants that were imposed upon black citizens who migrated from the south, disenfranchising them from full participation in the economy or ownership of real estate. Those restrictions also express themselves in the character of cultural life and institutions – which often persisted for generations in informal spaces that were not officially designated or developed for that particular cultural use. Consequently, it is insufficient to simply trace changes in the built environment to understand the full significance of Bronzeville’s cultural life. Unlike conventional forays into urban history, research on Bronzeville often depends on mapping places and spaces mentioned in first-person narratives, testimony and related accounts.

For these reasons, this course will introduce students to cartographic drawings and models as companions to research and the writing of history. We will focus on cartographic display to:

Reconstruct the spatial and relational dimensions of recorded testimony.
Recollect lost or forgotten features of the urban field.
Prototype a visual interface for reconnecting the artifacts scattered throughout Chicago’s disparate collections to an index of spaces. This will be used as a proof of concept for fundraising and subsequent work .

Readings and Seminars

Since this is a studio course, readings will nourish the studio’s understanding of the cultural history of Bronzeville, but also contain evidence that can be translated for cartographic display. Each week’s seminar will focus on history but each session will end with speculations about how the data within the text might be translated into a drawing.

Students will be encouraged to establish a Conversation Group to share reading responsibilities, discuss via an asynchronous platform, and give each other feedback. Each Conversation Group will be asked to lead one seminar conversation.

Studio / Workshop Sessions

Studio Sessions will focus on techniques of cartographic display and the agency of those techniques for shaping the interpretation of data. Students will receive regular feedback on their drawings or models. Feedback will tend to identify unchallenged or unconsidered modes of inquiry and representation as a grounding for future development.

Final Documentation

Students will upload digital facsimilies (pdfs or scans) of their work.

Grading and Evaluation

Final grades will be determined as follows:

30% - Seminar Participation
40% - Weekly Studio Participation and Progress
30% - Final Project

At midterm, students will receive an evaluation of their work produced to date, participation, and progress. This will include a letter grade, but also a written assessment.

Recording and Deletion Policies:

The Recording and Deletion Policies for the current academic year can be found in the Student Manual under Petitions, Audio & Video Recording on Campus. (1) Do not record, share, or disseminate any course sessions, videos, transcripts, audio,or chats. (2) Do not share links for the course to those not currently enrolled. (3) Any Zoom cloud recordings will be automatically deleted 90 days after the completion of the recording.

Meet

Noon — 4:00 pm
Meet at CWAC, Room 153 (TBC)

Review

Review Session of Final Maps

10 — May 24

Submit

Final Map and All Process Documentation

Upload by Noon on May 24

Google Drive / 7_Final-Maps

11 — May 28 (Tues)

Relax !

Gather

5:00pm
Gino’s North
1111 W Granville Ave.

Visit

8:00pm
The Green Mill
4802 N. Broadway Ave.

Studio Project

Overview

There is an enormous amount of information to assist with the recovery of Bronzeville across its various stages of development and change. This data exists in the maps of the Chicago School of Sociology, in works of fiction and poetry, in collections of street photography, in the archives of famous residents, in the myriad histories that have been written about its enormous contributions to American culture, in the testimonies of living memory collected by researched like Timuel Black, in interviews with Studs Terkel and the recordings of Alan Lomax, in the archives of historic newspapers like the Chicago Defender or Chicago Bee, and in the special collections of the University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Library, and institutions across the United States and Europe.

There are also abundant techniques and technologies for producing visualizations. Some involve the disciplinary conventions of urban analysis, planning, urban design, landscape and architectural practice. Some involve the discipline of cartography, psychogeophy, cognitive mapping. Some relate to the inventions of 20th Century and contemporary artists.

However, attempts to translate raw data about Bronzeville (which is often structural) into visualizations that communicate and interpret its history are fairly limited.

This project invites students to make some attempts.

Instructions

In teams of 2 or 3, students are asked to produce two (2) complementary visualizations of the “Ghost City”:

A. Reference for Walking

Via reckless neglect and active annihilation, the urbanistic and architectural spaces that once formed the scenography of Bronzeville have been collapsed into their own foundations. Like an archeology of the recent past, these spaces now reside just beneath the surface of other sites and myriad empty lots. Students are invited to plot an itinerary through Bronzeville’s urban field to reconstruct a visual reference to assist others to understand the degree of change that has taken place.

This reference can integrate many time periods into the following frameworks for visualization:

A street plan, which could be continuous or discontinous depending on the topic of interest, showing the location of spaces in relation to both sides the street.
Elevations of buildings or interiors (if significant) on either side of street. These can be photographic collages or drawings.
Annotations about the cultural significance of sites and any notes about time if these drawings reflect multiple periods.

B. Constellations or Networks of Cultural Development.

The itinerary above would intersect with one or more constellations of spaces that supported various forms cultural development in Bronzeville. Because of the history of disenfrachisement, these sites might include both formal institutions and informal spaces, for example:

Jazz Venues
Blues Venues
Theaters
Churches
The living rooms of famous residents.
Policy sites.
Newspaper publishers.
Recording studios.
Fine Arts Institutions

Instructions

Map Prototypes to pin-up — every week — starting Week 6.

Data should already be abundant / established, however additional sites may continue to be added.

a. Spreadsheet(s) printed so we can evaluate classes of information.
b. Display via Google Maps, ArcGIS or QGIS, for visual reference
Scope of and scale of the map aligned with size and shape of paper or other interface.
Map Legends defined and tested via well-crafted graphical attempts.

a. Least challenging sample area — min 3 tests (permutations/iterations)
b. Mots challenging sample area — min 3 tests (permutations/iterations)

Identify folding and display strategies to support (a) portability and/or (b) content. Does the inquiry of narrative require that you zoom in/out, move from exteriors to interiors, communicate change over time, or address/communicate another crucial phenomenon?

Final Map

After 2 weeks of in-studio discussion around your experiments, permutations, and iterations you should have good idea of the narrative, the data, and the techniques you’ll pursue to produce the Final Map.

Note Bene:
Although you are expected to present a well constructed single map at the Final Review, a map tends to synthesize constituent bits of information, and often in specific layers. Identifying your map’s constituent parts and breaking them down into managable pieces will help you divide your group’s labor and schedule weekly effort. This will require some advance planning .

In support of that, in Week 8, you should be able to present your group’s Work Plan for discussion and advice. This would indicate how you plan to organize your group’s division of labor, your process deadlines, and how things need to coalesce for synthesizing.

At the Final Review you should present the final map in relation to all supporting process work.

Readers

Testimonies

Bridges of Memory (First Wave)

Bridges of Memory (Second Wave)

Name Pg.

Jewel Stradford Lafontant .................. 03
Eddie Casey ................................ 22
Muriel Chandler ............................ 31
Reverend A. P. Jackson ..................... 42
Lawrence Kennon ............................ 54
Bill Adkins ................................ 78
Alvena Henderson ........................... 88
Earl Neal .................................. 93
Reverend Dr. Louis Rawls ................... 100
Sam Nolan .................................. 107
Ella Saunders .............................. 116
Fred Rice . ................................ 128
LeRoy Winbush .............................. 143
Floyd Campbell ............................. 151
Clark Burrus . . . . . ..................... 158
Burnett "Bo" Carter ........................ 167
Jerry "Iceman" Butler ...................... 173
Mattie Butler .............................. 187
Jesse Brown ................................ 203
Dr. Emil Hamberlin ......................... 209
Dillard Harris ............................. 226
Roger Salter ............................... 242
Professor William Daniels .................. 259
Wilks Battles .............................. 277
Milton Davis ............................... 283
Doris Smith ................................ 293
Betty Stell ................................ 306
Standish Willis ............................ 312
Sylvia Walton .............................. 330
Charles Mingo .............................. 345
Hermene D. Hartman ......................... 360

Resources

The University of Chicago

ARCH 24206 ENST 24206 AMER 24206 CHST 24206 CEGU 24206