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The following is an excerpt from “The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places,” a book of prose and photographs by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani and published by the MIT Press. All text and photos are by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani.
When I asked Mike in Prospect Heights how he had prepared to take me on the tour of his neighborhood that I had requested, his answer was simple.
“I said to myself, we’ll take a walk around the block and I’ll tell you what I know, you know?”
Much of the work of being human happens in everyday places: We become ourselves, we become able to see each other, to be a community. Everyday places are personal but also global, intertwining history, emotion and memory. They are experienced, talked about, negotiated, and woven into lives; we create places and, in turn, places shape us. It’s not too much to say that these small public and semi-private spaces even have the potential to be spaces of liberation. It is in these spaces that we find the cities we need.
What are these remarkable everyday spaces? They’re often thought of as banal: sidewalks, diners, bus stops, churches, meeting places, barber shops, bike shops, repair shops, donut shops, laundromats, schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries.
To understand something not often verbalized, in 2001, I began to ask people in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and Mosswood, Oakland, for what I called their “guided tours” of their neighborhoods, however each of them defined their neighborhood.
Early on in my work in Oakland and Brooklyn, someone challenged what might be the purpose of knowing about everydayness. 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 manmade one had.
I saw the damage wrought by the gentrification accelerated by Atlantic Yards and the Barclays Center arena, a 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 or 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 manmade 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.
Met Food, Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, 2006.
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 “everbecoming.” 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 or 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 project is 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.
Placework is a way to understand the many ways we are all in flux, becoming in and with places over time.
Becoming community — being together with strangers — was what I heard from Tewolde in the donut shop, Neville in the bike shop, 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.
All throughout “The Cities We Need,” 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 or granted, talking about the placework in their two somewhat unremarkable — though beloved — neighborhoods. Of course, it happens in many cities and towns, probably some you know well.
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.”
Before we continue, let me share with you two stories – one that Tanya told me in Brooklyn, and one that Tewolde told me in Oakland.
“It doesn’t have to be a big thing that you do.”
George’s / The Usual, 637 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn
I really like this place. Besides the fact that you see different people, you just hear people talking, joshing around… . It’s a very mixed crowd in here, race, sex, age. You see people from all different backgrounds. You see cops come in here, you see Sanitation, you see park police, plumbers, accountants, politicians, and you hear people talking trash … it’s funny! Mike gives the place its life, ’cause he’ll talk to anybody and he’ll talk crap with anybody!
Here in New York … America … you have this whole thing about being somebody and being somebody of a certain level, the doctor, the lawyer, the Wall Street whatever… . And you have people here who have a life, they run a luncheonette, and they make people happy, and they know they make people happy. They like it? They come back. They don’t like it? They don’t come back. It appeals to me very viscerally.
It makes me realize, yeah, you need some money, but you don’t need to be chasing, just chasing a dollar to the exemption of everything else. And it doesn’t have to be a big thing that you do … I feel that they love it, and that makes me like it also. If I’m in a bad mood and I come in here, I walk out in a better mood. It’s just the place. It’s comfortable, you know? — Tanya, 2002
“We used to just sit there all day.”
Telegraph and Forty-Second Street, Oakland
I was one of the first Eritrean refugees that came into the United States in the 1980s. And there were lots of organizations to support the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, fighting for independence from Ethiopia.
Golden Gate Donut café — we used to just sit there all day. I’m not kidding you. When I say all day, I mean all day. There are hardly any people there now. But you know, it’s always been like that. Those of us who didn’t work on weekends, we’d get in in the mornings, we’d have donuts, and just sit there. Smoke and sit, until it’s time for the meeting. At that time it was not political so much as getting to know other Eritreans, just being friends and starting in this new place.
The guys didn’t mind us sitting there all day! And you know, filling the place up with smoke. This — we sat here, and this is what we saw. People would come in, buy donuts and coffee and leave, but we just sat there. Actually, people still frequented this long after independence, too. But I haven’t been there since then. So, different places, different buildings, have different emotions and different memories. —Tewolde, 2006
I have never been bored by anyone’s answer to the question “Where would you take me on a guided tour?” I never know what will come out of someone’s mouth, nor what surprising connections between people will emerge. Each tour makes clear the complex, contradictory people we all are.
It may seem unimportant that all these tours keep me interested, but making visible our complexity surely is not; most media does the exact opposite. To come back to that rankling question about purpose from so many years ago, how can we use this placework we’ve seen? Or, to put it another way, what if we continue to ignore the essential work everyday places do for people?
We need to grapple with the act that “in an urban century,” as Lorena Zárate, my friend and former president of Habitat International Coalition América Latina, writes, “the meaning of justice will necessarily include all the dimensions of social life: political, economic, cultural, spatial and environmental.”
Zárate goes on to say that in the just city, “the goal of the economic activities is collective wellbeing.” Well-being. The goal of the city is its inhabitants’ wellbeing. Not the city as an investment vehicle, not towers inhabited by global capital, but the city as doing necessary work for people to become themselves, to become community — for the city to work for people, for the city to do placework.
Neville with Lester and David Dixon, Dixon’s Bike Shop, Union Street, Brooklyn, 2001.
Placework is both a way to think about these spaces as well as an argument that everyday places are important, particularly or the ways in which people negotiate their individual lives with connections to the larger world and the development of their own worldview. People have a right to a city that works for them, not a city that works them; they have what philosopher Henri Lefebvre and later cultural theorist David Harvey famously called the right to the city, which Harvey defined as the “right to change ourselves by changing the city.”
People need (sometimes expected, often surprising) places in which our complex and contradictory identities can find shelter and be worked out. People in communities of multiplicity and of contested spaces need places where they negotiate difference, both to better know themselves and to better function as a community.
Political crises are ongoing, and increasing – but a huge concern of mine is the crisis of place and dialogue. In this “post-fact” time, wherein stating facts to seems to have very little bearing on many people’s opinions, I think this is where we can learn from my tour guides and from the places in which they were able to build themselves and then share themselves with people they did not know and may not have agreed with. The job of placework seems more crucial, and more threatened, than ever.
The work that everyday places do, that policies prioritizing a right to the city would support, this work is what enables all of us to become ourselves, to be a functional society.
We’re also in a moment where polarization simplifies and dulls identity and individual stories. When so much of our time is spent on protecting our most basic human needs to stay alive — regularly being challenged by lawmakers, corporations and police — we lose the ability to share and protect the parts of us that are the most human.
We are losing the places that facilitate our sharing of the weird, specific, funny, surprising parts of ourselves — the sharing that helps us genuinely connect, and the things about people that have kept me interested in asking for guided tours for over twenty years.
There is much we can do, and the reason to do it isn’t that equity, justice, and fairness are simply the right way to behave. The reason to do it is existential. The work that everyday places do, that policies prioritizing a right to the city would support, this work is what enables all of us to become ourselves, to be a functional society.
Without this, we are nothing but consumers, data to be bought and sold, nothing more unique than what the artificial intelligence that trawls our online detritus can create.
If we want to be human, we need placework. Without it, we can’t get to the cities we need.
