Place Identity and Pattern Language: Participatory Research to Envision and Contribute to the Sustainable Urban Future

Karen Steinmayer (City University of New York/Hostos)

This project is inspired by, and will be explained in terms of, Lefebvre’s vision of a new “science of the city,” aimed at achieving the synthesis necessary to address the holistic city and incorporating social forces and a constant feedback from praxis. A professor of psychology at an urban community college in CUNY, Hostos CC, will present a project combining research and education, which involves faculty and students in both comprehending and contributing to the development of the democratic, sustainable city. Many members of the college’s highly diverse faculty and student body have recently immigrated to the US and regularly encounter others whose places of origin, ethnicities and cultures differ from their own. While diversity can enrich human experience, it can also lead to hostility. This project begins by involving faculty and students in research using the biographic, narrative method of very open-ended interviewing to investigate how they themselves construct their Place Identities, a concept drawn from the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Psychology, which refers to their unique, biographical narratives of who they are and where they think they belong in the world. Next, drawing on models of holistic education, participants will become involved in discussions in which individuals communicate their personal, subjective narratives of their lived experiences of Place Identity to fellow participants, creating an intersubjective experience of increased mutual understanding. Finally, participants are helped to connect these personal narratives and shared communications to third-person, cognitive analyses such as the work of Lefebvre and the “master narratives” of critical urban scholars who describe globalization as a process of urbanization driven by capitalism and colonialism that brings people together in the urban core through immigration. This project will conclude with participants’ use of Alexander’s Pattern Language to address Lefebvre’s question of what are and would be the most successful places.