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)
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.
A Note on Equitable Access:
The University of Chicago is committed to ensuring equitable access to our academic programs and services. Students with disabilities who have been approved for the use of academic accommodations by Student Disability Services (SDS) and need a reasonable accommodation(s) to participate fully in this course should follow the procedures established by SDS for using accommodations. Timely notifications are required in order to ensure that your accommodations can be implemented. Please meet with me to discuss your access needs in this class after you have completed the SDS procedures for requesting accommodations. To contact SDS: (website) disabilities.uchicago.edu (phone) 773-702-6000 (email) disabilities@uchicago.edu
A Note on Title IX:
Our school is committed to fostering a safe, productive learning environment. The University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, age, status as an individual with a disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, or other protected classes under the law (including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972). For additional information regarding the University of Chicago’s Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Sexual Misconduct, please see The University of Chicago Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Sexual Misconduct. Sexual misconduct — including harassment, domestic and dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking — is also prohibited at our school. Our school encourages anyone experiencing sexual misconduct to talk to someone about what happened, so they can get the support they need and our school can respond appropriately. If you wish to speak confidentially about an incident of sexual misconduct, want more information about filing a report, or have questions about school policies and procedures, please contact our Title IX Coordinator, which can be found on the Office for Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Support website. Our school is legally obligated to investigate reports of sexual misconduct, and therefore it cannot guarantee the confidentiality of a report, but it will consider a request for confidentiality and respect it to the extent possible. As a teacher, I am also required by our school to report incidents of sexual misconduct and thus cannot guarantee confidentiality. I must provide our Title IX coordinator with relevant details such as the names of those involved in the incident.