Mapping race, ethnicity and culture in urban linguistic landscapes
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GALLERY
To kickstart The City Talks network and to inspire future members, we sought to gather creative mapping and data visualization projects from individuals or groups interested in the intersection of text/language, race/ethnicity, and urban space/place. While we are building upon the work of linguistic landscape scholars, we hope to inflect this work from a “maker” perspective. So, we invited artists, makers, designers, activists, and cartographers — and those who defy categories. We are delighted by the wonderful array of submissions we received from around the world. Enjoy visiting our gallery below.
Dark Infrastructure
Triton Mobley
Computational drawings scripted in Python depicting the indelible markings of architecture's violence through vignettes of constant agitation.
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Soft City
Sophie Chien & Amanda Ugorji
Soft City is a large-scale textile series that maps the urban fabric of Black neighborhoods in the Boston area. The tapestries map historic (redlined) and contemporary Black neighborhoods, including Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Cambridge, and they tell the story of the past, present and future of Black residents, and the ecological resilience of the neighborhoods they live in.
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Illustrations from The Possible City
Patrick Lydon
Part of a series of hand-illustrated stories from East Asia that peek into the cities we dream about.
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More Than CHINAtown
Lennox Chaiveera
“More Than CHINAtown” explores the lives of business owners in Los Angeles Chinatown. It historically served as an ethnic enclave for Chinese immigrants but has grown to become a port of entry people primarily from Southeast Asia
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The Bittersweet Harvest: Navigating Manhattan Chinatown's Changing Produce
Zoe 'Tzu-Jo' Lin
This archival advocacy project documents the changing landscape of Manhattan Chinatown's Produce Network - an ethnic food system overlooked due to its informal and analog operations. By mining historical Google Street View Imagery, Lin conducted virtual fieldwork through time to find spectral remnants of where fresh fruits and vegetables used to be, creating a time series illustrating a shrinking network that underlies a history of immigrant hardship, tenacity, and an aspiration for change.
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How We Faced A Pandemic: Asian Pacific American Narratives of King County, WA
Nola Liu
The purpose of this platform is to present the APA community members' response to this pandemic on a personal level by preserving, presenting, and connecting individual stories using oral histories, photographs, and videos collected throughout the pandemic.
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Commercial Gentrification in a Downtown "Made in Mexico"
Erualdo González Romero and Alyssa Pelayo-Flores
What does commercial change and continuity look like across time in a downtown of central cities?
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Seeing the Unseen: Signs as Immigrants' Identity
Keebaik Sim & NJ Namju Lee
Seeing the Unseen uses algorithms conducting visual analysis to examine to what extent an area retains or loses its immigrant identity. This project analyzes the visual changes through time in signs in Chinatown, NYC.
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Vibrant Voids of War
Natalia Volvach
In this photographic essay, I present instances of vibrant voids – the material vestiges of violent erasure resulting in holes, cracks, shades, and shadows in the semiotic landscapes of Ukraine, as caused by the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war all over the country. Rather than simply viewing them as dead semiotic landscapes, I treat them as vibrant. Building onethnographic fieldwork conducted in Crimea and Southern Ukraine between 2017 and 2019, affectively charged voids of varying forms, shapes, and sizes, reify acts of committed violence, and illuminate the social afterlives of devastated and destroyed landscapes.
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Cüirtopia
Regner Ramos
A queer mapping project of Caribbean buildings and territories
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We Were All Here
Dan Kwong & Paulina Sahagun
Documentary feature about the Casillas family who beginning in 1918 emigrated to Santa Monica from Mexico. Their story reflects the 20th century immigrant experience, the evolution of the City of Santa Monica, and the making of citizenry.
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Crossing City Limits
Eduardo Guerrero
Join Eduardo Guerrero, urban designer based in Tucson, as he talks with urban idealists and designers about their work and stories. Listen in as he engages these relevant thinkers in reflections and conversations about the environment and culture.
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The 22 Blocks of 1108 North Claiborne Avenue
Anna Livia Brand
Employing both visual collage and textual examinations along New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue, this paper argues for a new spatial analytic that argues for a representation and reading of Black geographical praxis and focus on a vast imaginary of freedom.
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Black Santa Monica: Reframed and Reimagined
Adam Lubitz & Corinne Odom
African-Americans have lived throughout Santa Monica but the histories we attempt to visualize begin with the “Belmar Triangle” neighborhood, which is a genesis story of the broader trends of Black displacement in Santa Monica. We have divided our research into the past (the Beaches and Belmar) and future (1819 Pico and the Beach Club reimagined in 2070). By layering a 1926 land-use map, the 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining data, and present-day satellite imagery of Santa Monica, the map demonstrates how Black Santa Monica was demolished and reconfigured through city planning and urban policies.
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Language in the City
Sophia Chow
A multilingual, introspective investigation in the intersection between language, identity, culture, and urban space.
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EXIT
Laura Kurgan
Video installation about deforestation and the loss of indigenous people's language and culture, and lists 2700 endangered and extinct languages, starting at 16:37 in the video.
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Bi-lingual Signages
Dongwoo Yim
The Bi-lingual Signages maps out Korean-Chinese signages and shows ethnic diversities of Koreans, such as Korean Chinese, South Korean, North Korean, and North Korean defectors, in Dandong, China, the border city between North Korea and China.
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City Stories: Mapping the Narratives of Singapore’s Landscapes
Kristy H. A. Kang
City Stories is a community storytelling platform on the multicultural identity and evolution of Telok Ayer and Amoy Streets in Singapore. Scroll streetscapes and select shophouses to uncover their stories. Explore maps to see the area transform from shoreline to skyline.
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Sites of Wounding / Sites of Healing
Linda Samuels & Bomin Kim
The ‘first page’ of an Alternative Atlas for St. Louis, leading to new ways of thinking, seeing, being and thus making the city through fugitive mapping. It accumulates the violent injustices (red) and liberatory memory-work (yellow) over 220 years and overlays them on the changing racial composition of the city to expose the contested urban landscape of St. Louis.
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Foreigners in a medium-sized city in Korea
Janghwan Lee & Sanghyun Lee
The most traditional and conservative urban areas of South Korea's mid-sized cities located outside the metropolitan area are creating a new transnational urban landscape by influx of foreigners in search of work. These informal foreigners live in certain areas of the city, and the urban changes and cultural clashes are shown through the mapping of Gimhae.
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Alive & Present: Cultural Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown and Manilatown
Christine Wong Yap
This 56-page comic book is available in English and Chinese, and presents the perspectives and narratives from residents and visitors about places and experiences that give them a feeling of belonging. The comic book includes illustrated maps of places of belonging, and results from a community-engagement process in collaboration with Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and the Chinatown Arts and Culture Coalition.
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False Friends, Amigos Falsos
Kimberly Lyle
Two voices recite a list of Spanish and English false friends back and forth as if in conversation. False friends are words that sound and look alike in both languges, but have different meanings.
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The Martins Beach Project
Catherine Herrera
I am creating a project called The Martins Beach Project, documenting in photo and film coastal public access and the changing landscape of coastal regions.
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Conflict Urbanism: Language Ecologies
Center for Spatial Reseach
Series of projects include collaboration with Endangered Language Alliance which finds while typical maps represent monolingualism very well, language ecology in urban areas is one of both community as well as individual multilingualism.
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ABOUT
The newly formed “The City Talks” (TCT) group focuses attention, energy, and love on the intersections of language, race, and culture in the urban landscape. We seek to grow a community of practice of linguists, humanists, urbanists, artists, designers, activists, and cartographers to nurture knowledge about the ways cultures express themselves with words in the built environment, their role in making places of meaning and belonging, and the negotiations for space and identity that take place between groups in the city. One of our hopes is to extend linguistic landscape scholarship with discoveries made through creative making, mapping, and visual analysis to contribute interdisciplinary spatial knowledge to this emergent field.We also see the spatial politics of race and ethnicity and the freedom of cultural expression and thriving as central to the TCT endeavor. More than ever, with rising, real time backlash and assault on recovering erased histories and celebrating diverse cultures, we visualize and speak.
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People
Project Team and Staff
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Bryan Carter
Associate Professor,
Africana Studies Director, Center for Digital Humanities University of Arizona
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Sonja L. Lanehart
Professor of Linguistics and Teaching, Learning & Sociocultural Studies, University of Arizona
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Jonathan Crisman
Assistant Professor
Public & Applied Humanities
University of Arizona
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Jiyoon Kim
Master of Urban Planning at University of Southern California
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Annette Kim
Associate Professor
Price School/Roski School
Director, Spatial Analysis Lab
University of Southern California
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Emily Thomas
Master of Public Policy at University of Southern California
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2023 Workshop and Co-Jury
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Taifha Alexander
CRT Forward Project Director, Critical Race Studies Program, UCLA School of Law
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David Malinowski
Assistant Professor,
Linguistics and Language Development
San Jose State University
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Jamie Thomas
Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Santa Monica College, Adjunct Lecturer, Linguistics and Social Justice, California State University Dominguez Hills, Senior Equity Facilitator, CCC California Virtual Campus Online Education Initiative
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Antero Garcia
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
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Madison Moore
Artist-scholar, DJ,
Assistant Professor of Critical Studies, Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California
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Matthew Vestuto
Cultural Specialist Consultant, Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians
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Silas Munro
Faculty Co-Chair, MFA in Graphic Design
Vermont College of Fine Arts
Founder, Poly-Mode
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2023 Digital Gallery Submitters
Anna Livia Brand
Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
UC Berkeley
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Sophia Chow
Undergraduate student
Washington University in St. Louis | Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art
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Kristy H. A. Kang
Associate Professor, School of Arts, Media and Engineering, Arizona State University
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Janghwan Lee & Sanghyun Lee
Urban Operations & Daegu metropolitan city hall
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Nola Liu
senior grants and contracts specialist, City of Seattle
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Kimberly Lyle
Assistant Teaching Professor, Digital Art & Media Design, Penn State University
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Alyssa Pelayo-Flores
Research Volunteer
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Paulina Sahagun
producer
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Natalia Volvach
Stockholm University
Centre for Research on Bilingualism
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Lennox Chaiveera
Master of Urban and Regional Planning
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
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Eduardo Guerrero
College of Architecture + Planning + Landscape Architecture. The University of Arizona
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Bomin Kim
doctoral candidate Washington University in St. Louis, part-time faculty Parsons school of design
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Laura Kurgan
Professor of Architecture, Director Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University
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NJ Namju Lee
Product Engineer, Research and Software Development Engineer at Esri
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Adam Lubitz
PhD Student, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
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Triton Mobley
Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University
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Regner Ramos
Associate Professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture
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Linda Samuels
Professor in Urban Design, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
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Christine Wong Yap
Artist
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Sophie Chien & Amanda Ugorji
Designer-Organizer & Designer and artist
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Catherine Herrera
Indigenous, Latina & European American photographer
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Dan Kwong
Writer, Director, Editor
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Zoe 'Tzu-Jo' Lin
Master's Candidate, Data Analyst Fellow, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture planning and preservation
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Patrick Lydon
Director, City as Nature
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Corinne Odom
UCLA Master of Urban and Regional Planning Graduate
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Erualdo González Romero
Professor and Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium Research Fellow, Chicana and Chicano Studies Department, California State University, Fullerton
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Keebaik Sim
PhD Candidate in Architecture History, Theory, Society at UC Berkeley
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Dongwoo Yim
Professor of architecture, Hongik University, founder of PRAUD architecture
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Workshop
Workshop
Welcome Video
The City Talks, in partnership with the MAK Center, held its inaugural workshop in May 2023 with a group of scholars, artists, activists, and designers who all hold a diverse range of expertise in questions of race, ethnicity, culture, cities, and language. We shared knowledge, projects, and food with each other, learning about each others’ creative, intellectual, and critical practices through a series of lightning talks — we share videos of these informal presentations and conversations with you here so that you can also be edified and inspired by the participants’ and their work. It was also at this workshop that we selected the projects for inclusion in the gallery above, along with the first TCT Prize winners, Sophie Chien and Amanda Ugorji, for their submission titled Soft City. Stay tuned for future activities from the budding TCT network.
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Lightning Talk:
Jamie Thomas
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Lightning Talk:
Sonya Lanehart
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Lightning Talk:
Jonathan Jae-an Crisman
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Lightning Talk:
Bryan Carter
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Lightning Talk:
Annette Kim
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Lightning Talk:
Silas Munro
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Lightning Talk:
Taifa Alexander
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Lightning Talk:
Madison Moore
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Lightning Talk:
David Malinowski
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Lightning Talk:
Antero Garcia
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CONTACT & MORE INFO
The City Talks community and digital gallery is funded by a generous grant from the American Council of Learned Societies as part of their Digital Extension Grant Program.The ACLS grant supported collaboration between SLAB at the University of Southern California and digital humanities scholars at the University of Arizona to extend SLAB's “EthniCITY” research methods and resources for comparative research, to colleagues at other institutions, and the development of American Culture and Ethnic Studies curriculum at K-12 public schools.
EthniCITY: Mapping Places of Belonging
The city literally speaks out into public space through millions of words written on signs, in many different languages, and with layered meanings and histories to help create meaningful places. “EthniCITY” is a digital, spatial humanities database about language and space in Los Angeles. In addition to generating computational data, “EthniCITY” collaborates with community-based non-profits to unite their smaller scale cultural asset maps into a larger regional map as well as creates cinematic, narrative map layers about the intersections between places and peoples.