One is a term I coined, the other [environmental psychologist] is not. What does it look like to use social science to understand people’s relationship to place? People don’t exist in a vacuum; people exist in places, they exist in contexts. Environmental psychology studies lots of things. Other people study hospital spaces and their impact on health or on recovery.

Before I learned about environmental psychology, I thought about myself more as an urban anthropologist. When people bring together photographic work and social science work, they often treat the photographs as some kind of data. What’s interesting to me is thinking: How do you make photographs that are compelling as photographs and also start a dialogue with the viewer about the stories behind them? This is part of my practice of visual urbanism. 

What shifted was thinking, why does it need to be a book? Understanding what’s at stake was made clear to me during the pandemic: So much a part of grief in that time was being separated from not just the people that you know and care about, but strangers, and that capacity to be with other people. It’s grappling with the idea of places as doing work that is really existential.

Yes.

Definitely. People keep asking: “What can we do?” Well, you could have real rental protections for small businesses. We could make policy that says, it’s not just, Well, you know, the free market, which is ridiculous, since we subsidize all kinds of other things. How do we protect the tenure of small businesses over time?

That conversation was very local. Obviously, times have passed, things have changed, but many of the big ideas remain very present for people. They’re trying to come to grips with what they recognize in the book and what they miss. A sense that I still love my neighborhood, but I still feel this sense of loss.

It’s not just the Open Streets, it’s the significant gentrification of the neighborhood that was not caused by the Open Streets. But I can see how the Open Streets can reflect that. I can also see where the Open Street comes from: this real desire, in a moment of crisis: We have nowhere to connect, and these businesses have a real chance of closing if we don’t do something. One thing that’s come up in talks is this idea about care: caring about the neighborhood, or caring about the place. I do think that the Open Streets come from a place of care. But does it result in a space that everybody feels equally comfortable in or equally a sense of belonging? And I don’t know that I have the answer.

In summer of 2019, we did a neighborhood event. People had just as much to say, to talk, to tell their own stories as when we did the project in the first place. People are desperate to talk about a place that matters to them. There’s also this archive of oral histories, and that’s a particular moment in the arc of Prospect Heights.

She’s in the book—that’s Rocky. That’s a great example of some of these tensions: she’s grappling with feeling like, all of a sudden, this neighborhood is, in many ways, very white. Around the tours in 2015 and 2016, she did an oral history recording as part of Intersection, her sense of Prospect Heights as a mixed neighborhood, that she’s always felt like that was a huge part of the identity. And she feels it’s losing some of that. She told a story: She takes a friend’s kid to the park. The friend’s kid is white. And people ask her: “Does she nanny for other kids?” So she’s grappling with how she’s perceived in the neighborhood: belonging or not belonging, or interloping, or what? 

It’s part of the complication of talking about gentrification. Sometimes people have said to me, “The people who are opening new businesses, they’re not bad people.” That’s not the point, right? How do you parse out loss and loss of belonging without always saying, “Well, anybody who’s new in this neighborhood is trying to do something terrible”? If it hadn’t been a pandemic and they hadn’t put tables outside, she probably never would have gone in, and might feel really differently about the bar.

I think that displacement is real. You have more people, but where it used to be a diverse neighborhood, you have a much, much whiter and wealthier neighborhood. Of course, having a median on Vanderbilt Avenue is better and safer, and having storefronts actually be occupied is better. But what does it look like to have real protections for people to be able to stay in their homes?

Ideally, people will find connection there. In these flawed places, you hope something good is happening. For me, what does it look like where there’s connection across difference, whatever that might be: racial, class, age-wise? All of those pieces are so important.

I don’t think so. Part of what was special was different intersecting pieces. There’s the affordability of it, as a diner. The loss was also connected to some things that were happening broadly in the neighborhood. There were a lot more workplaces. And just the personality of Mike and John and Mary, facilitating those interactions, and having regulars. I think a lot more businesses are more transactional, and more expensive.

We did. Except it closed during the pandemic. It was sad, and I miss it every day. It was the first place we went after my son was born. They would take him in the kitchen and chat. He’s 12 now. One thing people have been asking me in relation to the book is intergenerational connection. I know a lot of people in my neighborhood because we were all regulars at this one diner. I would have no reason to know them other than that. I see them on the street. A lot of them are elderly, and we all say hello.

Some of it is connected to being a parent. These people’s stories from the book have been in my head for so long. When I started this project, I was 24, 25. People were telling me things about their life experiences.  So [interviewee] Tanya, I remember talking about how at Met Food, there was an important sense of just chit-chatting with the cashiers. They’d say, “Oh, you know, the baby is getting big!” That’s part of what it felt like to be grounded in a place where somebody was noticing change.

I think about that all the time. You’re always thinking about safety and whatever, and strangers, and then part of me is, like, you have to cultivate your strangers, your people in your neighborhood—people who might not be close friends, but know him, and he knows them, even in passing. I grew up here too, and that was always a part of knowing the city. He’s like, OK, I get it. He could really express what we’ve lost by not having that diner, Vicky’s. There’s another restaurant we’ve also been going to, a Salvadoran restaurant. They all know his name, and every time we go in, they remark on how much he’s grown.

It’s an interrupter in a moment when rental pressures are very real for small businesses. So we’re also losing a lot of those spaces at the same time as the rise of smartphones. There’s a reason my son doesn’t have a smartphone; I can see how much it takes people away from where they are. People have headphones, or voice-canceling headphones, and that further separates you from the environment. It’s this ability to just shut the world out. Acknowledging not only good things, but acknowledging pain—shared pain is quite important to this sense of place and sense of exchange.

Yes, it’s over this 20-year period, but I never intended it to be Let’s understand American cities in the early 2000s. It’s more about saying: “What were people talking about, what was important about their place?” And how do we still say: “That’s a value.” What is it that maybe looks different, but where do you have that sense of being fulfilled? How do we protect for that? How do we plan for that? There’s also the methodological piece: How do you talk about the everyday? It’s hard for individuals to talk about, and it’s hard to research. So thinking about strategies and methodologies to do that.

I have such complicated feelings about that. Again, it’s impossible to separate what happened from the pandemic. A lot of it is empty: the Market Line [an underground food hall], but also a lot of the office, not the housing.

It’s a mixed bag. I think Essex Market itself is very successful, in large part due to the advocacy of the vendors, since before the move.

We thought about it. Telling that story is so painful, and trying to pitch it to developers—You should really leave this spot to tell this terrible story—I don’t know how we’re gonna sell that. I have worked with the Tenement Museum to think about how they tell the story of SPURA.

The most successful thing to me about Essex Crossing is the advocacy for former city tenants and the fact that—I will not say it is half “affordable,” I would say it’s half below market-rate, but it’s (A) a large percentage, and (B) is permanent. Those two things are huge. That’s an example: We did it here. There’s no reason that we can’t continue to do that.

That’s part of it, but they would have been happy not to do it that way, too.

There’s much to be learned from an in-depth look at suburban spaces and towns and rural spaces. I brought the Intersection guidebooks to other places. I have people read the stories aloud, and people would say, This actually reminds me of my town in New Hampshire, reminds me of my dad’s shop. When you lean into specificity, it sometimes can make looking at bigger-picture things easier, because it leaves space for people to see themselves and say, That resonates with me. I was always excited to see people on the tours start to talk amongst themselves.

“The sought-after one.” At some point, I realized that it’s [also] on Spanish “Wanted” posters. So that’s totally awesome.

We make spaces for conversations that couldn’t otherwise happen. We do that in collaboration with, generally, community-based organizations, and very often in some sort of contested setting. That’s totally what we were doing with Contested City, with work at SPURA. I wanted to call that book In the Same Room Without Screaming.

That was the compromise. Just to get people to have a civil conversation is actually really huge. That’s part of what I saw in all these spaces, in Prospect Heights and in Oakland: How do, especially in this moment, in an extremely divided nation, and very segregated cities for many years, how do we lean into the spaces where that can happen? And how do we value that where it exists already?

Because I started writing the book deep in the throes of the first Trump presidency, much of the book already grapples with these issues. The dearth of spaces in which people have low-stakes ways to practice being with strangers is detrimental to our democracy. When we need to talk about high-stakes things, we’re very out of practice.

While the result of the election appears to be an attempt at blowing up the federal government, there is going to be real need—and maybe even interest?—in doing things at a local level, at the state and city level. So, what we do in our cities (and towns!)—how we gather in our cities, how we talk to each other—will become even more important.

Finally, the role of tech and social media echo-chambers are important in understanding this election, and also in driving people’s sense of loneliness and isolation. The cities we need—in which there are gathering spaces that cut across difference, that build belonging, that allow people to see themselves as part of something larger—are one part of coming back from this nihilistic brink. 

Featured image: The Intersection | Prospect Heights guides installed at the Met Food supermarket. Images courtesy of MIT Press and Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani.