Streetnotes Winter 2004

Lisa Hoffman

Student Fieldwork in Cities: Thinking Critically about Our Public Spaces

Lisa Hoffman
Assistant Professor
Cultural Anthropology
Urban Studies Program
University of Washington, Tacoma
 
 
 

The University of Washington Tacoma (UWT) is located in the center of Tacoma, making it an “urban” campus and important player in recent downtown renewal projects. Tacoma has been struggling to remake itself and survive the shift from a history of blue collar, manufacturing and longshore work to professional, technological, and service industries.  Opening the UWT campus in the center of the city just over six years ago (1997) has been a major factor in attracting commercial and residential investments to the area, creating a great deal of buzz about the campus and the newly energized “City of Destiny.”  While some UWT students come from major urban centers, many live in smaller towns and suburbs in the surrounding South Puget Sound area.  This creates a unique situation in the Urban Studies Program where students learn about major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Beijing, and San Paulo in classes, while their daily lives revolve around smaller, often suburban, and sometimes semi-rural communities that are part of the wider Puget Sound city-region.  Students are often deeply affected by course readings, such as Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk, which offer striking portrayals of urban marginality and poverty.  Although they are aware of such conditions, their everyday lives are separated from them socially and geographically. This makes urban fieldwork exercises challenging, eye-opening, and I believe, a critical part of their urban studies education.  Thinking Public  All students in the introductory course Urban Society and Culture are required to do a fieldwork project in a public urban space, which could be, for example, a park, a plaza, a public market, or a shopping area.  In the write-up, students must explain both what is urban and what is public about their chosen setting and experience.   The objective is to get students to apply class readings (see suggested readings below) and theoretical ideas to ethnographically collected data (I am a cultural anthropologist by training).  I often require students to reference a minimum of 3 different course readings in their papers, ensuring that they go back to their texts to make sense of the data they collected.  In an earlier section of the course, for instance, students read pieces that address issues of social life and social control on city streets, including excerpts on sidewalks from Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Wilson and Kelling piece on “Broken Windows” and the book Sidewalk.  The section of the course in which they do this project, titled The Politics of Public Space, includes Mike Davis’ “Fortress L.A.”, James Holston’s piece on the “death of the street” in the modernist city of Brasilia, and William Whyte’s article on “The Design of Spaces” as well as his video, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.  In addition, we read Setha Low’s book, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture which compares two plazas in San Jose, Costa Rica. This set of readings addresses the public-ness of city spaces and the vibrancy of street and plaza life more directly. I strongly recommend covering Chapters 6 and 7 of Setha Low’s book On the Plaza before students go into the field.  In Chapter 6 she discusses the spatialization of culture, by which she means “to locate – physically, historically, and conceptually – social relations and social practice in space” (2000: 127).  She also distinguishes between the social production of public space (the social, economic, ideological and technological factors that go into constructing the built environment) and the social construction of that space through everyday experiences, memories, social exchanges and conflicts that transform the physical place “into scenes and actions that convey meaning” (Ibid.: 127-8).   Her discussion helps students understand how the process of creating (designing and building) a public space and the everyday uses of the space are social processes that continually interact with each other.  By analyzing the design principles of the two plazas in San Jose, the political and social interests which helped construct each plaza, and the social groups that use the different spaces, Low is able to explain how social boundaries and negotiations are spatialized.  In the following chapter she elaborates on how these boundaries are constructed socially (rather than physically).  Low also provides concrete methods students can use in their own research in Chapter 7, such as regular population counts (e.g., of men vs. women at regular time intervals), the mapping of the plaza physically and socially (e.g., terraces, trees, and what she calls “edge zones”), and movement maps across and within the plazas (e.g., time-geography paths).  Through these methods Low is able to collect data about how men and women use the plazas, which plazas are attractive to teens and retirees, and how social groups occupy and give meaning to certain spaces.  This allows her to discuss the kinds of social boundaries that emerge in this public urban space, also illustrating that public spaces produce social relations and meanings while also being produced through those relations and meanings.  Going Public After they have started reading Low’s book and have seen Whyte’s video about successful urban plazas, I ask students to identify a field site in the area for their own investigation.  To help them decide on a site, I suggest that they think about why they find a place or scene interesting.  In other words, what is the reason they are thinking about investigating that particular site/scene/setting?  Possible answers could be because of the forms of social control exhibited there, the extent of interaction between strangers in this site, the way social boundaries are expressed, or the legibility of the public-ness of that space. Identifying a reason for choosing a site and developing a hypothesis about the “public-ness” of the space, for instance, helps students focus their research and write-up.  Choosing a field site is often the most difficult part of the project for my students, particularly because they have limited sites from which to choose in their communities and because many of them are returning students with multiple family and work responsibilities that make travel to downtown Seattle (35 miles from Tacoma) unrealistic. Nevertheless, I encourage them to find sites with a good amount of traffic and activity so they will have enough data to analyze, which often means they do travel to Seattle or stay in Tacoma after classes end.  The combination of being located in smaller communities and the northwest’s rainy weather sometimes frustrates them.  Once they have identified a site and the issue they wish to research, they must schedule at least two hours of field research and data collection.  I suggest they schedule two separate observation sessions (e.g., morning and afternoon, weekday and weekend, two mornings on different days, etc.) so they have data they can compare. Remind students to take a notepad (and perhaps a camera or sketchpad) with them to the field site so that they may collect as much detail as possible.  The data will come in multiple forms and will be collected with their eyes, ears, nose, and even their sense of touch.  Many field research texts will give lists of what kinds of notes to take and I have constructed the following from the very straightforward A Guide to Field Research by Carol A. Bailey.   Physical surroundings – What objects do you see (plants, furniture, objects, structures)?  Are they functional or decorative? Are they in good or poor condition?  Do they have political meanings or make political statements?  Are they symbolic of status or other forms of social differentiation?  What atmosphere do they convey?  What sounds do you hear and do they change over time?  What is the lighting like, the colors, the smell?  Can you identify any meanings that people attach to their surroundings (from conversations or the use of space)?  How might people “read” this built environment? People – How many people are there (population counts at regular intervals)?  How diverse or homogeneous is the population (gender, age, race, other forms of distinction)?  What fashion/dress styles do you see and does this tell you anything about the users of the space (e.g., business men/women, teen skateboarders, etc.)?  What do other kinds of markings express (e.g., tattoos, piercings, etc.).  Behaviors – Who comes to this place, who travels through it, who does what to/with whom, when and how?  Try to distinguish between routine activities and special events.  Try “mapping” where people go and what they do (see Low’s chapter 7).  What is the time of day, day of the week, the weather and temperature?  How do these factors affect people’s moods and behaviors?  Also pay attention to body language and how people interact with each other (e.g., body space, eye contact). Students on the Streets Several successful applications of these methods were carried out by students who went to shopping malls, which lent themselves well both to a discussion of the spatialization of social boundaries (class, race and gender based boundaries) and the public-ness of space.  Many students were adamant that shopping malls and plazas should count as public spaces and were determined to prove that they were as public as any outdoor park or square in the city.  After speaking to security personnel, looking into the design of the malls, and doing population counts, they began to understand arguments about the privatization and exclusive nature of many open spaces (see Mike Davis and Sharon Zukin on these points).  One student spent many hours collecting data at the coffee shop in front of Nordstroms and in the food court near the Mervyns in the Tacoma Mall.  She outlined the class-specific nature of these spaces and hypothesized about the construction of social boundaries in this space.  Several students went to Westlake Center in downtown Seattle and talked to security personnel as well as people selling goods on the surrounding streets.  One student bought a cup of coffee and sat down next to a few other people on a cement barrier along the side of the coffeehouse to watch the square and take her notes.  A policeman approached her and explained she could not sit there (at that moment she noticed the “no loitering” sign).  He explained that she could take her coffee to one of the tables.  She then realized that she was permitted to stay in certain areas as a consumer, but otherwise it was difficult to find a place to sit and “hang out.”  Another student actually tried to get kicked out of the same plaza by lounging for hours in the area, but to no avail. To him it seemed like a truly public space. These types of fieldwork exercises can be extended easily to other course projects, as I have done in my Gender and the Urban Landscape course.  Equipped with some of Setha Low’s methods, students set out to understand the gendering of space and how space constructs gender. For instance, one student went to a bar in Tacoma that is frequented by college students and did gender-focused population counts and movement maps.  She found several interesting trends.  First, there were more men than women at the bar and the number of men increased throughout the evening while the number of women remained constant.  Second, men and women were spatially segregated, and third this spatial segregation was augmented by distinct behaviors in the different spaces (playing pool vs. sitting at a table).  In addition, her data suggested women remained in place while men moved within and between sections of the bar more freely.  She then elaborated on the relevance of the public and private split and Doreen Massey’s theories about the gendering of space for the construction of gender and particularly for the learning and enactment of masculinity in this kind of urban ‘public’ space.  Another interesting project, done by a student the following year, compared gender relations in a strip club, a straight bar, a gay/lesbian bar, and a local supermarket.  The student (female) visited each site twice, once with a female companion and once with a male companion (except for the supermarket which she visited alone and then with her husband).  Not only was it an eye-opening experience for her personally, but she also collected wonderful anecdotes about territoriality and sexuality in these spaces.  She was particularly struck with the negative reception she received from the women in the strip club, yet when she went to the women’s room, which was brightly lit in contrast to the club, the women spoke to her kindly, shared make-up, and chatted.  The focus on the public-ness of urban spaces has proved to be a very successful one for students and has led to further research and writing projects.  Last year, I began advising five undergraduates who worked together on an article about social justice and the public spaces on our campus.  They raised important questions about the class-specific nature of the downtown urban renewal, the displacement of homeless people, and the symbolic importance of university campuses as sites of open political debate and even protest. Their article was published in the campus paper.  Last quarter the group expanded the paper to the social geography of the Puget Sound area, again arguing that maintaining the public-ness of our urban spaces is critical for building socially just cities and for maintaining democracy.  They will submit it for publication soon. My aim here is simply to share a class exercise that I have found successful.  Not only does it give students urban field experience, but it also challenges them to apply their readings to the world around them.  Below I have listed readings I have assigned to undergraduates.  If you have other suggestions or any comments about the project or the readings, please feel free to contact me.    Suggested Readings: Carol A. Bailey 1996 A Guide to Field Research, Pine Forge Press: Thousand Oaks, California. Mitchell Duneier 1999 Sidewalk, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York. James Holston 1999 "The Modernist City and the Death of the Street" in Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader, ed. by Setha Low, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, New Jersey, pp. 245-276. Jane Jacobs 1961 The Death and Life of the Great American Cities, Random House Inc.: New York (excerpts to supplement The City Reader).  Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout Editors The City Reader, Second Edition, Routledge: London and New York.   I highly recommend this text for undergraduate courses.  I have assigned the  following readings for this project, all of which have excellent editorial  introductions. 1. Jane Jacobs, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety” 2. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling “Broken Windows” 3. Mike Davis “Fortress L.A.” 4. William H. Whyte “The Design of Spaces” Setha Low 2001 On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture, University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas.        (c) Lisa Hoffman 2004

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