From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: Time, Place, and Urban Redevelopment Michael Ian Borer University of Nevada, Las Vegas
This article is about a place that does not exist, yet. It is about residents’ perceptions of redevelopment plans involving the reconstruction of a defunct neighborhood firehouse. Interviews revealed the residents’ “collective imagination” as they actively envisioned potential future outcomes for a firehouse-turned–community center. When asked about the needs of the community, interviewees discussed the current conditions of their neighborhood (the present), its history (the past), and how they would like to see it change (the future). This corresponds well with George Herbert Mead’s ideas about temporality. I argue that connecting the identity of a place to a sociological understanding of time (especially Mead’s) is a necessary step for gaining a better understanding of the subjective side of urbanization and ultimately creating a better vernacular knowledge base for urban redevelopment plans. Keywords: imagination, place identity, time, community, civic culture, urban
It is impossible for any individual to experience the city, any city, in its totality. As such, we tend to endow cities with personas or identities, and we tend to speak about them and act toward them as if those characterizations are, like much of the city’s built environment, concrete. The smaller places that make up cities, such as districts, neighborhoods, or streets, also have their own respective characters that are often, though not always, connected to the city’s overall image. The notion that cities and their neighborhoods have identities has become quite commonplace as sociologists in recent years have taken a greater interest in exploring the symbolic connections between people and the places where they live, work, and play (Borer 2006a, 2006b, 2008; Brown-Saracino 2004; Gieryn 2002; Lofland 1998; Milestone 2008; Milligan 1998, 2003; Smith and Bugni 2006).
Direct all correspondence to Michael Ian Borer, Department of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89154-5033; e-mail:
[email protected]. Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 33, Issue 1, pp. 96–114, ISSN 0195-6086, electronic ISSN 1533-8665. © 2010 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/si.2010.33.1.96.
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Sociologists who have taken an interest in, elucidated, and researched the symbolic and physical social aspects of “place” have succeeded in expounding on the theoretical and empirical importance of physical settings. Such studies have explored the places that make up what Hunter (1985) and Lofland (1998) demarcate as the public, parochial, and private realms of social life, from municipal parks (Hayden 1999) to commercial spaces (Borer 2006b, 2008; Grazian 2003; Hutter 1987; Milligan 1998, 2003), to homes and family residences (Halle 1993). Many of these studies have shown how place matters for individuals’ experiences of social life more than simply providing the background or setting for actions and interactions. In fact, we have seen how places can structure interactions between people and can act as identity markers for the people who inhabit, revere, and travel through them. Like the identities of individuals or collectives, the identities of places are necessarily fluid, dynamic, and, perhaps most significant, eminently social. Because of this fluidity, which Gieryn (2002:44) calls “interpretive flexibility,” place identities can change over time, dependent on such factors as the demographics of the population inhabiting the area and its surroundings, and the fluctuation or movement of dominant industries in and out of the area. To recognize neighborhood identity construction as a dynamic process, the idea of place must be connected to the idea of time. Predating the current interest in place, sociologists have been interested in, but have also recently begun to delve more deeply into, the socially constructed and socially experienced facets of “time.” Time has obviously been of interest to sociologists who adopt a comparative-historical disposition often rooted in the foundational work of Max Weber. And, of course, C. Wright Mills (1959) famously defined the sociological imagination as the ability and predilection to discern the connections between history and biography. Time certainly has been at the heart of sociological inquiry for many decades, though usually recognized in relation to causality and explanation or equated with time periods, eras, or epochs (see Griffin 1993). One goal here, however, is to show how time, especially individuals’ anticipation of potential and imagined future events, is of paramount importance for understanding perceptions of place. Moreover, I contend that connecting the identity of a neighborhood or a community with a sociological understanding of time is a necessary step to gain a better understanding of how individuals make sense of the built environment. This has the potential to help planners, architects, and sociologists create a better knowledge base for fostering urban redevelopment plans that correspond well with local, vernacular culture. In doing so, we can get a better grasp on the process of collective imagination and the prospective role it can play in redevelopment projects.1 This article is based on field research originally commissioned by a nonprofit organization interested in accessing and assessing an urban community’s opinions about plans for a renovated building in their neighborhood. Understanding people’s impressions of their “place” is useful, and perhaps necessary, for urban redevelopment because it affords interested parties opportunities to better access the condition of the area from the viewpoint of those who care about it the most.2 This grounded, bottom-up perspective (i.e., listening to residents’ wants and needs rather
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than telling the community what it wants or needs) can show the utility of microlevel analyses for future urban renewal, renovation, and redevelopment projects. Moreover, following the respective leads of Wohl and Strauss (1958, 1976) and Lofland (1998), this type of analysis attends to the oft-neglected and unexplored subjective side of urbanization. Residents, as well as other interviewees, engaged in acts of collective “impressionmanagement” (Goffman 1959) as they, first, discussed the past and present conditions of their neighborhood and, second, sought to imagine and portray the “right” type of place for their neighborhood. Here a process of collective memory selection morphs into collective imagination. That is, based in part on their selected memories of their neighborhood, interviewees implicitly engaged in imagining a future of their neighborhood aided by a bit of utopian desire and future-oriented nostalgia (see Davis 1979). It became clear that the imagination, rather than instrumental-rational thought, played an important and necessary role in how residents sought to make sense of the past, the present, and especially the future of their community. In what follows, I first introduce the research project and setting. Next, I explain and show how the “urban culturalist perspective” was used as a tool for theoretical sampling and qualitative data analysis. This perspective was used to analyze individuals’ perceptions and connections to place. Based on interviewees’ responses, I focus on the fruits of their collective imagination: (1) fostering an active and healthy civic culture and (2) developing a new image of their neighborhood. After this evidence of neighborhood residents’ collective imagining, the next section explores and clarifies the sociological significance of time. Instead of reviewing the contemporary sociological literature on time (see Bergmann 1992, Dickens and Fontana 2002, Flaherty 1999, Maines 1987, Zerubavel 2003), which would take us away from the focus of the present article, the discussion examines how time factors into the collective imagination of residents’ perceptions of their neighborhood. The clearest areas where sociologists have already begun connecting place and time are in studies of collective memory (Borer 2008; Hayden 1997; Olick 1999; Schwartz, Zerubavel, and Barnett 1986; Walton 2001; Zerubavel 1996) and historic preservation (Barthel 1989, 1996; Milligan 2007). These studies have clearly shown that the symbolic building of collective and community-based memories and meanings is often connected to actual physical buildings. By studying a place that does not exist yet, it is necessary to make a conceptual shift away from collective memory toward collective imagination. Our focus, then, swings from perception of the past to perceptions about the future. Presented in this way, collective memory and collective imagination are on opposite sides of the same temporal coin. While collective memory is part history and part commemoration (Schwartz 2000:9), collective imagination is part fantasy and part investment. Any type of investment in one’s community—whether it is through time and participation, funding and financial support, or constructing meaning and sentimental value—is necessarily future oriented. Some type of return is always sought in the future from social, cultural, or financial investments. The orientation toward the
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future is most apparent when community members actively envision changes to both their physical and cultural environment that necessarily relies on their capacity and ability to imagine a host of potential outcomes. To explore the process of collective imagination, I adopt a perspective of temporality based on both Mead’s own writings, specifically The Philosophy of the Present (1932), and the exegetical work by Flaherty and Fine (2001). Running throughout the present article is metatheme or metanarrative or metalesson about “public sociology.” I hope that this project can serve as a call to arms, so to speak, for symbolic interactionists and other “fellow travelers” (see Borer 2006a, Lofland 2003) to participate and engage in “public sociology.” If public sociology is going to be anything more than simply sociologists concerned with or attempting to change public policy, and I attest that it can be much more than that (see Borer 2008:31–32), then we have plenty to add to the debate and, in fact, can help shape the discussion and execution of public sociology in our journals, conferences, and classrooms, and in the communities we study. A focus on the constructed meanings and values of neighborhood residents surely stands as a proper antidote to the hegemonic bullying of many government-sponsored redevelopment campaigns. At its most basic level, then, we are giving voice to those who live, work, and play in the communities we study. And, more importantly, those voices can help define and redefine the physical and social redevelopment of their urban communities. As such, focusing on residents’ collective imagination can work as a buffer for creating urban redevelopment plans that are sensitive to the local, vernacular culture.
THE CITY VIEW NEIGHBORHOOD PROJECT While the name of the nonprofit organization that commissioned this research and the identities of interviewees will remain anonymous, I have chosen to present the real name of the neighborhood being studied: City View. Here I follow the advice of Wolfe (2003) and the example of Grasmuck (2005) for three main reasons. First, as Wolfe notes, hiding the identity of places encourages a lack of realism. No sociologist can bring a place to life that has no life. Second, because we are in the business of getting the story right, inventing names for locales will inherently lose some of the mystique of that place as certain identifying features will have to be covered up, glossed over, or excluded entirely. “Since these are communities with particular identities and histories,” writes Grasmuck (2005:15), “I think it is important to the meaning and integrity of the story to preserve their distinctive identity.” Third, by making the names of places known we are automatically participating in a public sociology that can move beyond the ideological tendencies of those who have vigorously espoused the term. If we want to help the communities we study, which is certainly an appropriate goal but not a prerequisite for studying them, we should freely embrace the norms of history and journalism by revealing the names of those communities and giving them the public voice and recognition that many of them so desperately need.
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City View, which is a generic enough name that it could pass as a made-up moniker, is an old mill neighborhood on the west side of Greenville, South Carolina. It is a predominately lower- and working-class neighborhood that from the outside might be characterized by what Suttles (1972:100) called a “defended community,” or a community that has tried to protect its territory from the “invasion” of outsiders, from immigrants to land developers. While mostly futile attempts have been made to ward off invaders, the formerly incorporated neighborhood is not really a defended area. More accurately, it can be described as a “forgotten community.” Few people, with or without capital, are trying to enter City View, and, if they do, it is only for a momentary, quick fix. Tucked away from the main thoroughfares that connect Greenville to Atlanta, Georgia (about two hours southwest), and Charlotte, North Carolina (about one and a half hours northeast), City View has remained excluded from the massive redevelopment and “urban renaissance” that has taken over and refurbished much of Greenville’s downtown area. Even before the major economic and redevelopment boom, City View was comparatively worse off than the rest of Greenville. For example, according to the 2000 U.S. census, the median family income in Greenville was $44,125, while it was only $25,208 in City View. City View’s “forgotten community” has been somewhat systematically ignored by the majority of Greenville city and county officials since 1960 when the neighborhood was first incorporated as a way to avoid annexation into Greenville to skirt the city’s taxes. The neighborhood lost its charter and officially became a part of Greenville in 1995 primarily because of financial complications. For example, in 1994, the City View town council had poorly managed its operating costs, leaving it with less than $4,000 for December. One month’s operating budget is usually about $23,000.3 Such poor financial organization led to rumors of conspiracy and corruption. Unfortunately, for residents and observers alike, such allegations were not unprecedented. In 1990 City View’s former police chief filed a lawsuit against the town charging, among other claims, that town officials had interfered with official police duty. In that same year, the fire department set fire to the old town hall as part of a training exercise but was unable to save the building, causing an uproar among residents who viewed the burned-down building as a vital piece of the town’s heritage. As if that weren’t enough, several City View officials were arrested and charged with seconddegree lynching after they physically attacked two city councilmen at City Hall. In 1977 a reporter for the Greenville News described City View as “a 2.5-square mile slab of old mill town that protrudes from the northwestern corner of Greenville like a sixth finger on a left hand.”4 City View’s outsider status still lives deep within the community’s collective memory. While this stigma remains a part of the neighborhood’s current identity, it does not mean that everyone is comfortable with it or that everyone wants it to remain intact. Regardless of whether we are talking about people or places, stigmas are hard to overcome and discard. For the past several decades, City View’s “spoiled identity” has taken on a sense of permanence (see Goffman 1963).
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After years of both direct and indirect stigmatization by outsiders, in 2006 members of the local fire department contacted a local, community-based nonprofit organization to seek financial, physical, and social support for a potential building plan. The commissioner of the fire department wanted to “donate” the old firehouse to the neighborhood to help out City View. The centrally located fire station could become a locus for change in the neighborhood, at least that was what the commissioner and the nonprofit hoped when they first approached me about this project. How could this one place help out an entire community? What sort of changes would need to be made, and by whom? Is this what the community wants, and, if so, how would it envision a new future for City View? These questions were of immediate importance as soon as I agreed to explore the potential redevelopment of this neglected, stigmatized, and almost forgotten community.
METHODS: APPROACHING CITY VIEW FROM THE GROUND UP The field research primarily consisted of observations of the neighborhood and interviews with residents, business owners, government officials, and other prominent figures in the City View community. Interviewees were asked about their perceptions of the neighborhood and its needs, as well as their ideas about the prospective reconstruction or rehabilitation of the firehouse. All interviews were semistructured. Each of the five researchers (which included me) was equipped with the same general questions but had the freedom to let the conversation flow wherever the interviewee decided to take it. The semistructured design allows for a greater openness between interviewer and interviewee than a strict format would permit, and it also gives the interviewee opportunities to (1) explore and discuss the issues that he or she believes is most relevant and (2) lets the interviewee address issues that the researcher may have overlooked or was unforeseen. Interviews were based on questions that implicitly bridged the gap between place and time. For example, we were interested in each interviewee’s neighborhood longevity. So interviewees were asked how long they lived in the neighborhood and whether they had been born there. We also asked how City View had changed over the years they had been a part of the community. And we asked how and where they spent their time, day and night. Each question was designed to elicit and detect the interviewees’ perceptions of and actions within their neighborhood. Their answers often directly revealed their imaginings about how the firehouse could suit their wants and needs. In total, we interviewed about forty persons who were identified by others, selfidentified as someone interested in the future of City View, or who made themselves available for a conversation as we walked the streets of the defunct mill town. The goal of these interviews was to understand what type of place could help make City View a “better” place, as defined by the people who care about the neighborhood’s present state and potential future.
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Because the future of the firehouse was our primary concern, we employed an analytic model recognized as the “urban culturalist perspective,” which is designed to help both researchers and community development practitioners recognize the connections between people and places (Borer 2006a). The model was used to analyze the interviewees’ responses in a way that would show the diverse roles a single place can play in a neighborhood or community. We were able to understand the respondents’ answers by placing them into six distinct but related categories: (1) images and representations of the city; (2) urban community and civic culture; (3) place-based myths, narratives, and collective memories; (4) sentiment and meaning of and for places; (5) urban identities and lifestyles; and (6) social interaction places and practices. Each theoretical category was “saturated” with empirical data. Though some scholars have argued that categories could never be totally saturated or exhaustively full (Dey 1999:257), sufficient saturation can still provide enough weight to declare each category empirically dense and theoretically useful. By using the urban culturalist model, we were able to discern some of the possibilities for the future of the City View firehouse. Essentially, this model allowed us to see how the old firehouse could satisfy many of the needs of the neighborhood. Moreover, the model helped us arrange interviewees’ responses into definable, discernable, and theoretically rich categories that, in turn, showed the similarities of their responses. The similarities, as well as the differences, are part of the collective imagination process, and this process is about individuals’ connections to place, accentuated by their perceptions of that place through time. The boundaries of each of the six categories that make up the urban culturalist model are not rigid. They are flexible and permeable, allowing researchers to mix and match, overlap, and merge categories as they see fit based on their data. Such elasticity allows researchers to let the model conform to the evidence, and not the other way around, and can also help them focus on the most significant issues. In City View, residents imagined a place that could foster a healthy civic culture through active participation in community events and help the community fight against its stigmatized image by “rebranding” it in relation to its rich, local history. As such, the civic culture and interaction categories and the image and collective memory categories have been merged to focus the analysis.
IMAGINING A VIBRANT CIVIC CULTURE A city or a neighborhood’s civic culture provides ways to make sense of other people’s behavior and tends to promote an ethic of tolerance for difference. A working and sustainable urban civic culture allows members of different populations with different ideas, interests, and intentions to coexist in the same geographic and social territory. Monti (1999:104) explains that “civic culture makes it possible for different groups to claim the same piece of land as their own and to become part of a more inclusive community.” Civic culture, then, is less about a political entity concerned with the ways citizens relate to governance and authority (see Doherty, Goodlad,
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and Paddison 2001). Instead, the contours of civic culture encompass the codes that allow for civil public discourse (Alexander and Smith 1993), the principles of healthy neighboring (Kusenbach 2006), and opportunities for diverse persons to interact under a “cosmopolitan canopy” (Anderson 2004). One common goal that the interviewees expressed for the firehouse was for it to become a place that serves the multiple populations that exist within City View. In effect, they collectively imagined that the firehouse could be a pluralistic civic space. City View’s different populations were defined in a number of ways, but were predominately based on the following attributes: race (primarily whites, blacks, and Latinos), social class (home owners vs. renters; permanent residents vs. transients), and age (children, teens, young adults, adults, senior citizens). The specific words applied to these attributes by City View residents ranged from banal labels to colorful slang to offensive slurs. Despite the importance of discourse for civic culture, such language was not particularly germane to the focus of this article. I expected residents to view the divisions of race and social class as the biggest obstacles to a vibrant civic culture, which would be consistent with much of the literature on urban neighboring (see Lee, Campbell, and Miller 1991). Of particular interest for a number of residents, however, was the need to create connections between generations. Of course the talk of generational disparities could be a veiled way to discuss racial differences, since the younger generations consist of the children of blacks and Latinos who moved into City View after the mills closed. Yet the generation gap itself should still be considered a significant obstacle. This should not be that surprising, since the worldviews of older generations are consistently confronted by new generations who may not be satisfied with their elders’ view of reality (see Schuman and Scott 1989). According to one local resident: The young kids running around this neighborhood need a place to go after school, but us old folk need somewhere to go to. I don’t even know these kids. Maybe we could do something together? Maybe the firehouse could be a place for both the young and the old? I don’t know how or what, but that would help both of us, the young and the old folks. . . . Since my kids grew up, I don’t know any of the children around here, but I sure see them a lot. They’re usually just hanging around, probably getting into trouble. It would be nice to know ’em and teach ’em a thing or two.
Hoping to create those connections, a local resident imagined that the firehouse would not simply be a place where teenagers and the elderly have their own separate spaces but a place that could be home to activities that both age groups could participate in together. Another interviewee, who also wanted to foster those intergenerational connections, suggested something akin to a reciprocal mentoring program, though she did not use those exact words. Like the resident quoted above, she wanted the elderly and the teenagers to learn from each other. Maybe, the olds can teach the youngs about values and responsibility and the youngs could teach the olds. I don’t know, but that might work. At least it would
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be some sort of bridge. We could tell them all the stories about this place. It doesn’t matter if they just moved here. They should know what happened here, what life used to be like. I try to do that with my own grandkids, but they don’t even like coming here. . . . Maybe telling them about the way it used to be would help them do a better job with this neighborhood then we did, ’cause right now it’s a mess. Maybe that bridge—I keep using that word “bridge,” don’t I—well, maybe that bridge could help us all make this community better.
By focusing on the future place as a potential site to “bridge” the generation gap, these respondents were already making connections between place and time (in this particular case, time was related to age and the life course). They imagined that the firehouse could be a place where members of different generations, who grew up in different times, could share their experiences through designed communal activities. A necessary part of creating or salvaging a vibrant civic culture or community is the variety and depth of social interactions. Social interaction, as Kusenbach (2006:281) has pointed out, has not received as much attention by urban and community scholars as have the other two main elements of community, namely, shared territory and social ties. The way a place is planned and designed can help facilitate social interactions between neighborhood residents. Lofland (1998:181) writes that “the built environment certainly does not determine exactly how people are going to interact with one another, but it does amplify or constrain the range of interactional possibilities.” Understanding how a physical place creates interactions between people and how those interactions are the actual foundations of community building is an important part of using residents’ collective imaging to cultivate vernacular urban redevelopment plans. The types of interactions and activities that persons can engage in are affected by the physical layout of a place (Milligan 1998). City View residents imagined that their new firehouse would influence the forms that community relations would take and grow. Interviewees provided a host of activities, from the academic (tutors, GED, SAT prep, adult education classes) to the athletic (indoor exercises, outdoor recreation), that they imagined would be beneficial for their community. Many talked about the need for a place where the younger generations could either learn (as in an educational setting) or play (as in a recreation setting), or both, in positive ways. If there were enough activities geared toward the youth population, then there is a chance that they could develop their identities and lifestyles by way of the new firehouse rather through other potentially negative means (e.g., gangs, drugs, prostitution). In this way, the firehouse could provide a physical setting for developing a newly refurbished “generalized other” that, following the Meadian formulation, could be internalized and thereby alter the children’s and teenagers’ interpretations of their self-identities. A local city official suggested that an urban agriculture project could be a promising activity that would promote positive interactions between people as well as between people and the natural and built environments. There was a modicum of
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consensus suggesting that even though many of the potential activities at the firehouse could be separate and distinct, there should be significant overlap between the activities and those who are participating in them. That is, residents collectively imagined a place that could foster interactions between races, classes, and ages through the potential activities and services offered through and at the new firehouse. As such, if the activities at the firehouse are granted high priority, then the building’s design, both interior and exterior, will be determined by the prioritized activities. The desire for a healthy civic culture built around social interactions and common activities, if understood by the planners and architects, would then become the impetus for the new firehouse’s design rather than a predetermined set of design principles (see Lofland 1998:78–79).
REIMAGINING A STIGMATIZED COMMUNITY Because cities, and even neighborhoods, are too immense to grasp in their entirety, symbolic representations are necessary as a way to gain at least a minimal cognitive understanding of the built environment. As Wohl and Strauss (1958:526) make clear, it is not necessary to see the entire city if individuals are able to recognize the symbolic representations of it and understand what they mean. The smaller places that constitute a city become the fodder that people use to create identifiable and interpretable images and representations that, in turn, can become “common referents” as part of a common “cultural literacy” for urban dwellers and visitors (Demerath and Levinger 2003:221). As common reference points, they allow for the possibility of dialogue between groups within and across neighborhoods and communities. The content of the dialogue, however, is often dictated by the meaning given to those symbols, and those meanings can be very negative, as in the case of City View. For over three decades, the image of City View has acted as a negative exemplar for the rest of Greenville. Many of the residents, in their own estimation, have a low self-image, both personally and communally. We repeatedly heard comments about residents’ loss of hope for themselves and for others in their community. Many of the comments juxtaposed what they saw happening in other areas of Greenville with what they did not see happening in their own neighborhood. A local business owner who also lives in the neighborhood felt that city officials had neglected City View, so much so that it was hard for him to imagine the possibility of any making positive changes to the neighborhood. The newspapers keep saying that Greenville has changed and is like this great place for people to live and shop. But I look around, and it’s not happening here. The sidewalks are so messed up that people can’t even get to my store. I got senior citizens in wheelchairs. How they supposed to get here [his pharmacy] if the sidewalks are all messed up? Everything’s just messed up here, and it’s been that way for a long time, too long. If they going to change something, then they better change a whole lot of it. We got good people here, we do, but nobody seems to care. It’s hard to care about your neighborhood when nobody else does.
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The stigmatized image of City View has reinforced the tradition of despair and culture of fear that is prevalent in the neighborhood. Many of the interviewees imagined that the firehouse could be used as a symbol of the recent changes and potential changes in the neighborhood and, in effect, upend the perception of City View as simply the place where people go to find cheap drugs and prostitutes. They hoped that this symbol could convey a message to both insiders and outsiders that City View could, and should, be a part of Greenville’s overall urban redevelopment plans. Speaking about the new firehouse as a symbol of community attachment and affiliation, one resident, who is a third-generation City Viewer, remarked: It would be great for City View. Turning that place [the firehouse] into something special would tell everyone that we haven’t given up on our community, even though other people have. Some of us care . . . this place could show them that. . . . This is our community and we don’t need to go somewhere else to feel good about ourselves. This place [the firehouse] could really help get us lookin’ like other parts of Greenville, the nice parts.
Others also imagined that the new firehouse could help show the rest of Greenville, and others outside the city’s limits, that City View has not been lost—and is not forgotten—and that some people still choose to live there even when they could live somewhere else. One interviewee spoke about the disappointment she felt when she saw a news team, a few days before our interview, reporting on a recent crime wave in City View. She was less concerned about the content of the reportage (i.e., the criminal activities), focusing her intention instead on how her neighborhood was being represented. That is, she quickly recognized the symbols the news team was using to frame City View as a “real bad place where nothin’ good could ever happen.” Not only were they talking about the robbery, but they were standing right in front of a big pile of garbage! I mean, sure, City View ain’t the cleanest neighborhood, but garbage day was the next day, so of course there was a lot of trash around in front of people’s houses. They was just trying to make us look even worse.
Clearly this longtime resident was upset about the way her community was being portrayed and expressed her dismay about how powerless she and her neighbors were in managing City View’s image. She wanted everyone to know that City View is more than simply a place for drug dealers, prostitutes, and trash heaps. She thought that perhaps the firehouse could help City View change its image. By becoming a symbol of growth, the new firehouse could help show both insiders and outsiders that City View was willing and able to change. If so, she imagined, it could help community members turn City View into a thriving neighborhood rather than a starving one. One way that City View could change its image would be to change the types of stories told about the neighborhood. As interviewees told us about City View’s past via their collective memory, they began telling us about City View’s future via collective imagination. They imagined narratives about City View that spoke of promise
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and progress rather than despair and desolation. But their collective imagining is, of course, as selective as their collective remembering. Place narratives are never filled with complete, unadulterated facts. Nor are place narratives necessarily coherent or comprehensive, and they can tend to favor ambiguity (Simpson 2000) or fragmentation (Gottschalk 1995). Varying emphases on certain characters and plot lines offer multiple interpretations of similar events that affect the telling and retelling of stories about places. These stories are not any less real than the raw data of facts. They may even be more real because they are directly chosen, felt, told, and retold. As Johnstone (1990:26) notes, “Stories do not simply describe worlds; stories also create worlds.” The factual accuracy of a story is often less important than the purpose of the story or the way that it is used. Nevertheless, specific collective memories and narratives can favor powerful groups, those who choose which stories to commemorate or conceal, over those who accept such stories as verifiable and irrefutable history. Walton (2001:99) writes in the last chapter of his analysis of collective memory in Monterey, California, “Multiple historical narratives are the rule, sometimes as oppositional positions and other times in complementary relation.” Walton tracks the “waxing and waning” of Monterey’s collective memory through five diverse periods of dominance that begins in 1770 as a Spanish missionary settlement and ends in the multicultural present. He shows how the interaction between dominant narratives and “countermemories” through these periods, seen from the contemporary viewpoint, become organizational strategies for civic action and interest group politics. The reworking of these stories creates powerful means for group solidarity, cohesion, and collective action whereby “public history is at once heritage and rhetoric” (p. 294). Many City View residents believed that a key way for the firehouse to connect to the neighborhood would be by connecting it, in some way, to the stories of and from City View’s past. This could be accomplished aesthetically, or functionally, or both. That is, a place can be designed to look like or imitate a place from the past—as an “authentic reproduction” (Bruner 1994)—or it can even house similar activities that once existed in that neighborhood or region. A common narrative we heard from many of our interviewees was the loss of the local textile industry and the mill culture that accompanied it. A resident whose father and grandfather worked in the local textile mills spoke nostalgically about the “ol’ mill culture” and imagined ways that City View could benefit by resurrecting some of its past. Once the mills closed down, nothing replaced them. This neighborhood’s been going downhill ever since. Instead of hard-working men, we got drug dealers now. Not that there aren’t good people here, too. We got plenty of them. . . . Maybe the firehouse could have a room with some ol’ ’quipment from the mills. And there can be little plaques or pamphlets with stories about the mills and the people who worked there. If it wasn’t for the mills there’d be no City View. So maybe the firehouse could be a memorial . . . or a museum, a way to give the ol’ mill culture its respect.
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We heard this sentiment echoed by others. By trying to connect the lost mill culture to their present conditions, the City View residents were attempting “to mentally transform essentially unstructured series of events into seemingly coherent historical narratives” (Zerubavel 2003:13). Symbolically connecting the new place to the old mill town culture would be one way to make the new firehouse “fit” into the almost lost culture of City View. One interviewee even suggested putting pictures from the “old mills in the new community center [the firehouse] so the young ones can learn about and appreciate where they live.” The nostalgia for mill town culture played a strong role in the way that people, even those who were new to the area, imagined and reimagined the past, the present, and the future of City View.
A PLACE IN/THROUGH TIME To fully grasp the ways that people were thinking about City View and how a renovated and refurbished firehouse could help their community, connecting the idea of place to the movement of time is analytically imperative. The following discussion makes empirically informed connections between place and time and how time factors into the collective imagination of neighborhood residents. The clearest areas where sociologists have already begun connecting place and time is that of collective memory (Borer 2008; Hayden 1997; Olick 1999; Schwartz et al. 1986; Walton 2001) and historic preservation studies (Barthel 1989, 1996; Milligan 2007). These studies have clearly shown that the symbolic building of collective and community-based memories and meanings is often connected to actual physical buildings. By studying a place that does not exist yet, it is necessary to make a conceptual shift away from collective memory, which pertains to beliefs about the past, to collective imagination, which focuses our attention on perceptions about the future. Presented in this way, collective memory and collective imagination are on opposite sides of the same temporal coin. While collective memory is part history and part commemoration (Schwartz 2000:9), collective imagination is part fantasy and part investment. Any type of investment in one’s community—whether it is through time and participation, funding and financial support, or constructing meaning and sentimental value—is necessarily future oriented. Some type of return is always sought in the future from social, cultural, or financial investments. The orientation toward the future is most apparent when community members actively envision changes to both their physical and cultural environment. And this orientation necessarily relies on the capacity and ability to imagine a host of potential outcomes. Though the connection between place and time can be taken in a number of directions,5 here I propose that Mead’s perspective on time and temporality can elucidate a community’s or a neighborhood’s varied thoughts and beliefs about potential redevelopment projects that are the products of collective imagination.6 These plans are not those of professional real estate developers, architects, or product designers (see Hellstrom and Hellstrom 2003) but are more like naive or “folk” geographies generated by the residents themselves within their discussion of the
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potential uses for the firehouse. Here we begin to see how Mead’s “fuzzy determinism” plays out through the acts of collective imagination whereby time is no longer dictated in the typical causal, linear manner of past-present-future but, instead, becomes more dynamic, open-ended, and imaginative when conceptualized as presentpast-future. The way individuals understand the past and the future depends on their present position or condition, personally and socially. Mead (1932:1) boldly declares that the present is the “locus of reality”; it is the present where individuals confront the “world of events.” The individual interprets the situation and considers various responses to stimuli. But this moment is fleeting, forever out of the grasp of unmediated interpretation as it quickly becomes a part of the past and, thereby, an object to be reflected on. This “locus of reality,” bounded by past and future events, is then also the “locus of imagination” for both individual and collective representations of the past and desires for the future. Those past representations and future desires are conceptually and contextually bound to collective impression management, since they are “determined” by present conditions that support the impulse to “save” the neighborhood’s or community’s collective face. So, when listening to community members’ suggestions for future neighborhood projects, we can view the interview as a dramatic present moment where interpretation and imagination coalesce into ideas about planning. Interpretation and imagination are, then, important elements of the planning process for the folk geographies of residents, which could (and should), in turn, affect the visions of urban planners and developers. With a swift linguistic twist, we can spin Mead’s understanding of the present as “specious time” (Flaherty and Fine 2001:149) into “spacious time,” meaning the time spent to conjure ideas about the present, past, and future cultural geography of a community. The idea of spacious time calls attention to the duration of time necessary for imagining and discussing development plans. Without pushing this concept too far, it may be useful for understanding how individuals think about the places before they are built or even planned, for that matter. So spacious time is grounded in the present, but both necessarily informed by the past and directed toward the future. It embodies that cognitive space consistent with Mead’s (1932:31) claim that “our pasts are always mental in the same manner in which the futures that lie in our imaginations ahead of us are mental.” Though the past (I recognize that Mead uses the plural, but I’ll continue to talk about the past in singular form for sake of clarity) is subject to constant reinterpretation influenced by present conditions, as well as future concerns, it operates as a resource for current decision-making processes. The past can be used as a resource in several ways, including (1) to provide lessons about success and failures, (2) to provide fodder for individual and collective cultural identities, (3) to connect generations across time periods, (4) to act as a nostalgic commemoration of a lost past or even of one that never was, and (5) to provide a narrative for present and future accomplishments. The past was certainly used in all these ways by our interviewees as they recalled the peaks and valleys of life in City View. Of importance was their
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seeming need, in the present, to discuss the past even while we were asking them about the future, or at least the hypothetical future of a City View with a potentially important community center: the revamped firehouse. As Flaherty and Fine note (2001:154), for Mead, the future is always uncertain; it is always open to interpretation and is hypothetical. But the future is not some distant time (or place) far away from us. Instead, it is at the cutting edge of the present and, therefore, can affect individuals’ actions in the present. Mead contends that individuals’ anticipated future actions influence their actions in the present, “like a chess player who chooses a move now because he or she anticipates a certain response one or more moves into the future” (Flaherty and Fine 2001:156). Like the anticipated future of individuals’ actions, the firehouse’s future is full of possibilities for the community, some of which will be selected, most of which will be ignored. The ways that our interviewees envisioned these possibilities were not only influenced by how they perceived the past and present of City View but also, following Mead’s insights, how their imagined future affects their present. Without making any grand claims about the positive effects our interviews had on our interviewees, we all noted how each interviewee reacted positively to our questions about the future of the firehouse and City View. The interview provided them with an opportunity to imagine a better place for themselves and their neighbors. The acts of imagining a better place, then, provided some necessary relief to these residents long before architects and developers had mocked up any formal redevelopment plans and blueprints. The key point here is that, as opposed to the logic of strict causal determinism, imagining the future affects perceptions in the present. As such, including residents’ perceptions of their neighborhoods in redevelopment plans provides a hidden benefit well before any physical reconstruction commences.
CONCLUSION As it relates to place and time, a neighborhood’s or community’s collective imagination is an active part of that neighborhood’s or that community’s social life. When studying individuals’ perceptions of a place that does not exist yet, or might not ever exist because of external forces beyond the control of primary interested parties (e.g., a national or global economic downturn), we are necessarily delving into some very murky waters. Because the imagination, either individual or collective, is often viewed as ethereal, ineffable, and beyond the touch of empiricism, sociologists have tended to shy away from addressing the role it plays in the lives of individuals or collectivities (see Adams 2004). Though the role of imagination has been explored in regard to role-playing games and other fantasy outlets (e.g., Fine 1983, Waskul and Lust 2004), its role in everyday life experiences, especially as it relates to collective practices, still needs to be uncovered.7 Like the Husserlian, phenomenological recognition that there is no such thing as consciousness unto itself but only consciousness of something (material or symbolic or both), imagination is always fixed on something. Imagination is always about the
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imagining of something. Looking at individuals’ collective imagining of places is one way to empirically ground sociological analyses of imagination. Imagination is best understood as a process. As such, symbolic interactionists are likely the most properly equipped candidates to study collective imagination. And because it is a process, it is necessarily connected to time. Mead’s thoughts on temporality, of which I have invoked only a few, provide ample material for motivating empirical and theoretical research on the connections between time and place. The meanings of places do not reside within them but between the people who use and inhabit them. When sociologists investigate potential plans for neighborhood redevelopment, we must always be aware that meaning resides somewhere between the residents’ past experiences and their imagined future. As such, even if planners and architects never consult residents, the latter are involved in the collective imagining of their neighborhood. With the hope of garnering information as part of the place-making process, qualitative sociologists can play a role in helping developers create “better” places that suit a community’s perceived needs. Moreover, providing residents with a platform to discuss their neighborhood’s past, present, and future can summon the implicit positive effects of collective self-reflection and place attachment. In this way, we can take part in a public sociology that does as much listening as it does speaking.
Acknowledgments: A special “thank you” goes to my student field research team—Joanna Vescey, Lauren Senesac, Anna Bartolini, and Quinton White—for their hard work and kind hearts, both of which were necessary for carrying out this project. Parts of this article were presented at the 2007 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction annual meeting. I thank Melinda Milligan, Simon Gottschalk, Carol Rambo, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
NOTES 1. I use the term “collective imagination” to denote an active process of conceptualizing future events and situations engaged in, either implicitly or explicitly, by multiple persons. Differing from Anderson’s (1983) seminal work, I am less interested in, say, nation building as a result of collective imagination and more concerned with how accessing a community’s collective imagination can foster more vernacular urban redevelopment plans. Moreover, whereas collective memory is generally understood as a selective reading of the past based on a public’s concerns in the present, collective imagination is a selective envisioning of the future based on a public’s concerns in the present and their interpretations of the past. 2. Gans’s (1962) study of Boston’s now-defunct West End stands as a remarkable testament to the consequences of divergent perceptions of places between residents and outside planners. While the residents of the West End never thought of their neighborhood as a “slum,” the Boston Redevelopment Authority labeled it as such and consequently razed the area. See Mele’s (2000) study of Manhattan’s Lower East Side for a more contemporary example of conflicts between residents and developers. Mele details how designations like “slum” or “ghetto” mask the specific experiences within the labeled area as well as the outside conditions that affect such labeling.
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3. See Adams 1995. 4. See Smith 1977. 5. Molotch et al. (2000:792) propose a way to understand “how places achieve coherence and how that coherence reproduces itself.” That is, they try to show how places retain their distinctiveness over time. My use of Mead’s understanding of temporality, along with a focus on collective imagining, is complementary to their more structural approach. 6. Maines et al. (1983:167) make a similar claim about Mead’s ideas of time, but instead focus on “community organizer” Saul Alinsky’s use of a “mythical past” to anticipate a “successful future” for his organization. 7. The social philosophical/theoretical work of Castoriadis (1998) provides interesting arguments about the importance of imagination, positioning it above instrumental rationality and reason. How well his insights correspond to empirical studies of everyday life remains to be seen, but he certainly provides a good starting point, as well as mental fodder, for those interested in the sociological aspects of imagination.
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