In the new book, The Cities We Need, a photographer and urbanist share images and stories from overlooked but vital city spaces!
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In the new book, The Cities We Need, a photographer and urbanist share images and stories from overlooked but vital city spaces!
Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? Your local bike shop? A favorite restaurant? The neighborhood playground? Photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Vianni has been asking this question for decades and finding answers on guided walking tours led by city residents.
In her latest book, The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places, Bendiner-Vianni shares some of the touching stories she has collected in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California over the past twenty years. Through stunning photographers and heartfelt interactions, she reveals the vital role that unassuming places play in creating vibrant communities, fighting loneliness, and creating a sense of belonging—all aspects of placework.
Join Untapped New York Members on December 10th for a live virtual talk with Bendiner-Vianni to see images from the book and learn more about the essential role of everyday places. Below, the author shares an excerpt from The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places:
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. 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 for 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.
The Cities We Need is a book 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. In this book, 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 for granted, talking about the placework in their two somewhat unremarkable—though beloved—neighborhoods, but of course it happens in many cities and towns—probably some you know well.
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.
Becoming community—being together with strangers—was what I heard from Tewolde in the donut shop, Neville in the electronics store, 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.
These valuable places sustain us and are where we build the networks that help us get along. Placework is all the more vital now because in this late pandemic moment, in climate crisis, in racially segregated neighborhoods, in a corporate, distracted culture, we need all the support possible to honestly become ourselves, and to become that messy, valuable thing that is community.
Excerpted from The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2024.
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