Unpacking the Archive: Community Engagment and the Research Studio

The city is often a place of collective memory, but as the recent conflicts over monuments and memorials have taught us, some memories are prematurely erased while others live on past their shelf life. Although history and memory can sometimes leave their mark upon the city, it is more often incumbent upon later generations to construct physical markers of important, though ephemeral, events. More recently cities have invested in informative and interactive installations, and architects have created more abstract, experiential structures that convey history in a more emotive mode. As part of this discourse, our teaching project titled “Unpacking the Archive” aimed to recuperate the lost histories of those who shaped the city immediately after the Civil Rights era when white flight to the suburbs and an era of austerity permanently altered cities. In the context of two courses, a seminar and a research studio, we examined the struggles and actions of the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio that originated in the early 1970s and continues today. The People’s Movement is a coalition of activists, institutions, and residents who waged a series of campaigns to fight for housing access, schools, parks, and services against hypergentrification and a municipal bureaucracy actively working to eliminate the poor from a picturesque historic neighborhood. A true poor people’s campaign, the Peoples’ Movement unified poor Appalachian and Black residents at a time of heightened racial tensions.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.72

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1