Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment

Spring 2023 || Spatial Storytelling

Practicing Palimpsestry: Archives, Counter-mapping, and Spatial Storytelling

with

Amir Sheikh, University of Washington

and

Will Davis, Princeton-Mellon / Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies Fellow

This is a hybrid event. Attend in person at the School of Architecture (lunch boxes available while supplies last), or register for the Zoom webinar:

https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4I_fNrjWQfeps4HN7YeU3A

We examine the spatial-socio-ecological processes that have shaped the Seattle urban landscape, the ways that people have used and interpreted this landscape, and how these spatial narratives can further contextualize understandings of our relationship between history, place, and contemporary urban development and environmental decision making. This has been carried out through various interventions that provide windows into landscape and urban history, different ways of knowing and seeing, and various ways of presenting intersecting narratives of place. These exercises of “storytelling with the shapes of time” integrate several streams of research and disciplinary methods bringing together ethnographic and archival sources, cultural history, and environmental science with geospatial methodologies, public interpretation, artistic design practices, and informed imaginings.

The Spring 2023 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Program in Latin American Studies, Center for Collaborative History, Departments of Art & Archaeology and English, HMEI, PIIRS, SPIA, and the School of Architecture.

Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Boxed lunches are available while supplies last.