Dr Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Caitlin Morrissey

Well, thank you so much, Gabrielle, for joining us. We wanted to start by asking you about what the DNA of cities might mean to you. To set the scene for that, when Greg and I talk about the DNA of Cities in our work, we use in a metaphorical sense, as a starting point for understanding the authentic or unique identities of cities and how their traits and their characteristics are acquired and how they’re inherited over time, over these long histories. But what does The DNA of Cities mean to you?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

That’s a great question and thanks so much to both of you for having me on the podcast. It’s really great. And it’s such a nice context to talk about this work. So for me, the DNA of Cities-- I mean, one of the things when I think about it beyond any particular city, one of the things I think a lot about and I thought a lot about in writing the book was this, the DNA of Cities being the capacity to be together with strangers. So others have written about that, certainly, but that idea really feels like an important thing that that’s part of what we gain by being in cities. That’s part of why they’re valuable. That’s part of something that’s sometimes at risk in cities, our capacity to be together. So for me, that thing of like, well, where is it? And I think maybe then we find the DNA of different cities in the different kinds of places in which we’re able to be together with strangers, right? But the quality of that or the spaces in which that happens is very particular to any given city. But doing that work and that necessity and interest in being with people you don’t know, that’s a really powerful part of cities.

Then I think that’s really interesting is when you start to see like, well, what, does it look like when, you know, we’re in different places? How is it that people kind of feel comfortable being with people they don’t know, or outside of their family, or they’re outside of their friend group, or in that kind of almost interstitial space between like the familiar but the not well known? Like, what does that look like in a city? Where are the places that help support that? So that’s what I think about a lot when I think about kind of what makes a city and what builds the character of the city or those kinds of spaces.

Caitlin Morrissey

And a core thesis in your work is this idea that it’s the mundane, everyday places that help us to become ourselves and that it’s these places that really shape, that are sort of part of the fabric of the way that cities shape us as individuals. And also that these mundane spaces that we encounter in an everyday way really foster communion with other people and they allow us to be together in the ways that you’ve just described. But what is it about these everyday spaces that makes them so essential to our human experience of the city?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

You know, it’s interesting. I’ve spent a long time-- so I spent over 20 years kind of doing this work and researching people’s everyday places. And in some ways, I think it took me a long time to figure out kind of the what was at stake in doing that. Like I had this sense that understanding those places was important. And I was curious, I almost came to some of this work early on as a photographer because I was interested in making photographs of places and of cities and of neighbourhoods. But I thought, well, I better understand what’s important from the perspective of people who actually live there. And so how might I do that? Not interested in the sort of like aestheticised look at a city to say, okay, well, I’m just looking at it from the outside. I’m interested in what does it look like? You know, what are the places that I might not understand to be important, but actually are important to the people who live there? And so I came to it through that kind of asking people and wanting to understand people’s connection to place by asking them, you know, what was important. So the book, The Cities We Need, it looks at a neighbourhood in Brooklyn in New York and a neighbourhood in Oakland in California. But I’ve also done this work in London and also in Buenos Aires in Argentina, and in other neighbourhoods, kind of in other cities around the world. And one of the things that I’ve started to really notice was not only what people were telling me about the particular neighbourhoods, but I started to see a lot of similarities between their stories, where somebody’s story in one neighbourhood would remind me of somebody else’s story in another neighbourhood.

I was always asking people just to take me on tours of their neighbourhoods and generally in people’s neighbourhoods, you know, there isn’t like a big important place, like this is a place you should go to if you’re visiting this city, unless you’re me and that’s all you want to see when you go to cities. But, you know, so people were by necessity taking me to these very everyday places. And the two things that I saw, as you say, really were both this thing where people were taking me to where they gathered with other people, but they were also taking me to places where they talked about how they kind of became themselves in public. And I think that kind of understanding those two parts was part of what was really essential to me. Where I saw that across a lot of different places, a lot of different neighbourhoods and a lot of different people’s stories of long times in neighbourhoods and shorter times in neighbourhoods, but the places that they cared enough about to tell somebody else about, did these two kinds of work. I talk about it in the book as place work, they talk about it as where-- like people told me about places that were, you know, they took me to their supermarkets and it wasn’t because it was a very nice place to gather. It was because something about the quality of the supermarket, not the quality, like it’s a good supermarket, but like it’s about the way it felt to be there or the foods they were able to get there or who they saw in the supermarket. Those things were parts of what enabled them to have a sense of a larger ethics of care, or a larger ethos about who’s in their neighbourhood and who should be welcomed in their neighbourhood. And that if they saw that reflected in their supermarket, then it became a really powerful piece to think about for their themselves and kind of who they thought they wanted to be. And to see that kind of really important, like that’s a lot of work for a supermarket to do beyond the selling of food. That to me, started to really say, okay, well, what does it look like to understand people just doing this really personal work of becoming themselves, but that that doesn’t happen by yourself in your house or even with your family only. Partly with your family or partly with the people who are close to you. But also, really, these are like, the becoming yourself also happens very much in public. And I think that was such an important piece of it.

It’s not only about the kind of essential qualities of cities and these everyday places as being the places that we gather and how we’ve built connection, but also, we can say it’s a little selfish. Like it’s really about how we become ourselves too. And so looking at those two together started to be really important to me. And it feels like that balance of, you know, these places are essential not only if we want to see ourselves as part of a connected society, which arguably we should, obviously, but also if we want to be happy and healthy individuals and be the kind of fullest selves that we can be, we need these spaces in which we can do that.

Greg Clark

Gabrielle, I wanted to ask you the stupid question, if I may, which is just to be clear, when you say becoming ourselves, you then said something about happy and healthy. What do you mean when you say becoming ourselves?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

I think the two biggest things that I thought in that notion of becoming ourselves, which becoming ourselves, we may not be happy and healthy, that might not be ourselves. But ideally, would be a sense of one of-- the big things that people talked about were, kind of a sense of developing a personal ethos. A kind of, what does it look like to understand what’s meaningful? What matters in the world? How they see themselves as part of it, what are the things that they value? That people saw that kind of work, you know, that being worked out in public. That wasn’t, you know, what you deeply care about and deeply held beliefs weren’t only something that you hold in a private space. So that gets worked out with other people, like with other people, but maybe not even through interaction, but just by being in the world together.

So that piece, and then the other piece, really would be the place where people talked about where they felt free. And that sense of being able to become most fully themselves within the places that they felt free. And that people didn’t always describe it as feeling free, but a lot of what people were describing were a sense of freedom of thought, and also just even a physical freedom of where their bodies felt free to move. Where they felt a sense of confidence or they felt a sense of ease. And that sense of freedom also, I mean, I talk about it in the book, and it’s something I kind of really grappled with, is that’s not an easily won thing. You know, I mean, we live obviously with histories of deep oppression, and they’re so embedded in so many of our cities, and are so much apart-- and our not very long past and maybe even be very present for many people’s experiences. So one of the things that people really talked about was that I could see even happening in these very, very everyday sorts of spaces were the spaces in which they felt free. So even, you know, I think of an example of David in the neighbourhood in Brooklyn and Prospect Heights talking about a playground and where he said, you know, it was where-- he talked about playing handball. And the way he talked about his sense of kind of himself as a champion and himself as kind of being able to be this fuller sense of himself in this space was really, really important to him. And it was one of the first places that he took me on our walk. So it’s not just because it’s a space of play when he was a young teenager, but also because much of what he talked about in those spaces were about where he felt like he could really be himself. And he talked about his identity of who he thought he was in relationship to this handball court and this playground. And that kind of quality of, like, where people feel a sense of lightness and freedom that becomes really important.

Greg Clark

Does it follow, Gabrielle, that those two things that you’ve described of becoming oneself, that there’s a sense of differentiation, of discernment, finding one’s values, sense of what one believes in, what one cares about and then also experiencing this personal freedom in this collective space where you’re able to express yourself without fear as it were of having to self-censor? Does it follow that those things help people to feel a sense of place, a sense of belonging, a sense of loyalty to those locations? Does it become a reciprocal relationship is the question?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Yeah, I think absolutely. Because I think then, you know, everybody who talked about those kinds of places, they talked about the kind of care that they wanted to bring to those places that had helped them feel that way. And, you know, I think even in the example of the playground, one of the things that David had talked about was a small renovation that had happened in the playground. But one of the things that had happened was they had changed the way the swings were. They weren’t flat, and they turned them into ones that were more made for smaller children. And so he said, you know, one of the things that, you know, it makes me feel like they don’t want bigger kids here anymore. And so where are we supposed to go? And so even in this, like, he was like, I’m noticing so much of the details of this place. And the switch in details really changes the way I feel a sense of belonging in this place.

But other people talked about very actively trying to protect the places that they, you know, where they found their sense of self. Or where some of the people, about half of the people in these two neighbourhoods over the time that I was working with them, ended up either having to move, being displaced, choosing to move. So we’re no longer in the neighbourhood for a variety of reasons. And one of the things that they talked about was kind of really deeply missing those kinds of spaces. And knowing that maybe they wouldn’t be able to find that sort of space again, where they were moving to, and their fear about that. And so-- or people talking about, you know, well, I want to make sure I shop at that supermarket because I want them to stick around. I want to make choices about pitching in to help clean up this park because it’s really, it matters to me not because it’s so nice to have a park, but because it genuinely does this really big work for me of my sense of place and belonging. And that’s why I want to kind of care for these places.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much, Gabrielle. I wanted to pick up on something I think I heard you say slightly earlier on, which was that you’ve carried out this work in not just Brooklyn and Oakland but in London and Buenos Aires as well and that you were struck by some of the commonalities between these very different cities and the way that these sort of human relationships to place are forged. And can I ask you to say a little bit more about what those commonalities were or what was most surprising and perhaps what were some of the big differences?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

That’s a great question. I totally opened myself up to that question. It’s interesting. I mean, across the four of them, I mean, I don’t know how it is for other people who do this kind of work of long time interviewing, but these people’s stories stick in my head. I have also obviously recorded them and I listened to them again and again, but, you know, sometimes I talk to people, like when I was putting together this book, I spoke to everybody who’s in the book and I said, you know, ‘I just want to make sure that, you know, you feel okay with this part being in here, whatever’. And I’d say, ‘Well, you know, you said this’ and they were like, ‘I have no memory of saying that’. I was like, ‘Oh, but it’s really been meaningful to me all this time’. And they’d say, ‘That’s pretty good! Yeah, you can put that in’. But where, you know, people would say-- and actually this kind of goes back to this question of like care, was that people felt like such a deep sense of both nostalgia, but also like it touched something very important to them to hear, you know, stories that they themselves had told about these places where they said, ‘Oh yeah, it really did do that for me’. And even hearing myself reflect on that reminds me of either why I still care about this place or what I kind of still so deeply miss. And I think that that, you know, was such a powerful thing.

So to come back to your question, you know, I live with these people’s stories kind of across all these different places like kind of mixing in my own head all the time. And I think some of the things that really were similar across all of them were these needs for, I mean, really those two kinds of spaces where people talked about that need for a place where they felt a sense of self and a sense of belonging. But also that, and I will say this actually is certainly across all of them, was that I’m always really interested in this idea, you know, obviously my work talks about community and talks about place and kind of togetherness. And one of the things that I think is so important in all of this is not to kind of fall into this like lovely trap of like, it’s all, you know, here we are together and it’s all love. That to understand community is also to-- is both to understand inclusion, but is also to understand exclusion.

And so one of the things I think that did certainly come up across all of these places was the sense of both of a sense of inclusion, but also a sense of who was excluded from either stories that people were telling me or how they felt that they had to navigate spaces of inclusion and exclusion. And that really came up as well, that that’s such an important piece of it so that we don’t kind of get-- let that get lost in this kind of like, oh it’s, you know, kind of we’re all happy together kind of feeling. But those ideas of how powerful the sense of community and place can be, can be incredibly warm and enveloping, but then can also be drawing boundaries. And I think that actually is an important piece to see across places.

I would say, of course, also, people really talked about the sense of where they felt free. And I, you know, now that I kind of look back at all of those years of interviews, you know, I see-- and also, I’ve done a lot of interviews with teenagers and, kind of younger adults. I could see across all of these cities, people sort of trying to work out who they are. And so that sense of developing an ethos of self was like really very important for a lot of people happening in public space. And I will say a lot of this work happened prior to social media. Some of it happened prior to smartphones. But it makes me think, I think back on some of that across all of these cities to see how people, young people were working out their sense of self and their ethos and their capacity to feel free, how they were doing that in public. And I think that’s also an interesting question to kind of look at, how is that important as we go forward? And how do we think about, how do we value that piece, particularly for young people too?

Caitlin Morrissey

Yeah, I think that’s an incredibly important point. So much of the conversation now is about young people figuring themselves out in relation to each other online on these digital spaces. So it’s so interesting for you to highlight that a lot of this work took place before smartphones, before social media. And just to see how important, like you said, place was or places were to the young people in particular, figuring themselves out and who they were.

I also wanted to ask you, maybe this is relevant as well with the rise of social media and visual platforms, but about the role of photography in your work. And I know that that’s been a really important medium for you for capturing place. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about what photography does for you and how that creative medium helps you to capture the way that places change and evolve, but also how people exist in place, I suppose.

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as I say, I started this work, you know, really trying to come to it from a photographer’s point of view. And then, you know, in 1997, and then kind of built back into it of--but that idea of doing urban research was always kind of part and parcel of it for me. For me, those two things have always been together and I’ve always had this kind of very hybrid practice. And it’s always been a little bit of a tension too, I would say, where I’m sort of, people are like, well, it’s too researchy for art and it’s too arty for research. And so a lot of my life and career and work has been sort of trying to push back on that and to say, well, what do we learn from both creative practices? Are there, you know, what is the kind of, how do we know what we know? How do we learn through looking at creative work? What is it that we can learn through that? We don’t see photographs as data, but we see them as creative practice. And we kind of lean into that and say, yes, you know, yeah, photographs aren’t truth. I think there’s been a lot written about that. I think we don’t have to rehash that.

But what if we lean into that idea and say, can we make images that are powerful and interesting about place and then use those as a way of deeper understanding of people’s relationship to place? So in terms of the methodology of all of this work, you know, for all of these neighbourhoods I have asked people to take me on their guided tours of their neighbourhood, whatever their neighbourhood was, whatever they considered it to be. And I would record their voices running from the gamut, from the tape recorder to the exciting world of the MP3 to finally actually recording on digital recording. So I feel like this book as a side is like a history of recording techniques, both audio and photographic.

So I would do that, and then I would photograph all the places that people had taken me to. So most of the time I would return on my own to photograph those places. And I really saw the photographing as both a way of A, I was taking more time with the places that these people had told me were important. So it’s a sense-- it’s even just in that amount of time spent, it’s a kind of respect and care for the stories that they had told me. I take really seriously that when people tell me a story about their place, that they’re giving me something very valuable, like, they’re spending a lot of time with me but they are being vulnerable. And in telling me those stories, that’s something I need to like actually take care of. And so one of the ways that I thought it was important to take care of them was by going back to the places that people had taken me to. So we would be there together and then I would be there on my own, which was also as a researcher was interesting and important for me to see like, well, how did it feel to be there with this person for whom this is like their home versus for me to be there on my own? And so how is that different?

So I would photograph them. And then I would return to people with the photographs. And as I said, this happened prior to smartphones and iPads and things like that. So sometimes people ask if I showed people photographs on a screen. And I was like, there were no screens that were like easy to do this on anyway. I mean, there were computers, but it wasn’t like a question of whether we would easily be sharing and looking at images this way. So anyway, they were all printed out. But I think I would go in that direction regardless now. made small prints for people to show them the photographs of the places I’d taken. But usually, I would turn up with like a stack of photographs. And I was like, you know, how about it? Let’s lay them out on the table. Let’s make piles. Show me which ones you like. Let’s talk about the ones that you’re interested in talking about. We could put the ones that you don’t like to the side. And that kind of physical and embodied aspect of dealing with photographs, I think is also really important. There’s like the tactility of the actual physical print is important, but also, you know, and I think this is a big part of kind of research skills too, is just using like, can we sort things? Sorting is very satisfying for people, so, you know, that becomes a very tangible way of talking about things that are very intangible as well. So in many ways I see both the tactility of the prints is doing that, but also the photographs themselves.

Every day, the meaning of everyday places, what you experience in everyday is very fleeting because generally, you are like on your way to do something else that is much more important and pressing in your life. So you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these things. So I think a lot of the methodology for me was always to try and get at that thing that is very intangible, that’s hard to grasp because it’s kind of the stuff that’s on the way to other things. And how do we call attention to that? And, you know, what does it look like to call our attention to the stuff of our lives. And so the walks were one way to do that, the photographs are another way to do that. And I really take very seriously that capacity to, you know, photography’s relationship to time, that there’s a way in which-- so the thing in which it stills time, which makes it not like experience. And hence, like, you know, you can’t just say, well, that’s what somebody saw. And that’s what they experienced through this one photograph or even through video. It’s a snippet. It’s a bounded, framed thing, stilled in time. But if we can kind of lean into saying, well, what does it do if we can then spend time with that one snippet of time that that itself is kind of a powerful way of doing research.

So I would re-interview people with the photographs themselves and ask them, you know, what they, not just what they thought of them, but to say, does it, I would ask more, does this look like your place? And sometimes people would be like, ‘I love this photo, but honestly, it’s not what I think of when I think of this place’. And, you know, I was like, ‘Well, that’s great. Tell me what it is’ because, you know, I took the photographs kind of having heard their stories. But clearly there was something either that we didn’t get to or I didn’t understand. And I felt like that was an important way of having a kind of exchange through the photographs. A lot of times people would also take home photographs or I’d say, you know, take whichever ones you want, it’s your neighbourhood. So people would take home the photographs that really did speak to them that they really liked. And so there was that, you know, I felt like that was a small thing that I could give back to people in doing that work that they had spent so much time with me and, you know, beyond time had given me so much more value in terms of valuable things, the kinds of stories people have to tell that, you know, being able to give them a photograph was like a small token of that, to have a sense of exchange.

So, you know, long story short, I do think that that sense of photography, as a kind of stilling of time and a way to hold on to things that might be otherwise intangible is a really powerful part of a kind of research process and a way of understanding place. And I think one of the things that can be so useful, not just as research, but for the broader project of many people understanding and being able to respond to place and think about what it means for their own selves, is that when other people look at these photographs, they see different things in them or they find connection to their own place. Even if sometimes it’s very, very small, even if they’re like, ‘the neighbourhood I live in looks nothing like that. But actually that little corner reminds me of the corner of this place, you know, a thousand miles away. And that helps me find connection to this’. And so I think that there’s in the specificity of the photographs, similarly in the specificity of the stories, I think people can find connection to their own specificity and that seems really important too.

Caitlin Morrissey

So fascinating. But I also had never quite considered the challenge of representing in the way that you were doing through photography, a sense of place as told to you by somebody else. And trying to capture that just sounds like such an incredible challenge, but it sounds like a really fascinating research process to go back and show the interviewees and the storytellers the photographs that you took and to say ‘see, did I manage to capture what it was that you were telling me about?’ I just hadn’t quite considered that as part of the relationship I suppose between capturing place through photography.

So, when Greg and I are doing our work on the DNA of Cities, we think a lot about our own starting points for thinking through the individuality of different cities. And so we go right back to before settlement ever became continuous there. And we begin to look at the sort of planetary conditions and that’s our starting point. And then we look at history and so forth and so on. But when you’re trying to understand the individuality of cities or places, what are your starting points for doing that?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

That’s a great question. Although I think I might say something similar. So I should say so from my perspective, so I talked about being a photographer, but I’m also an environmental psychologist, which I don’t know, some people have no idea what that is. So very briefly, the way I would define it is taking a kind of social science approach to understanding people’s relationship to place. And I think I’m quite interested in the sort of multiple layers of a social science approach. So both from the very individuals from like environment psychology aspect, like what are the impact on the actual individual to kind of more cultural and anthropological look at things and then sort of a more society structural piece.

I’m interested in how do you look at all of those sort of through the lens of place? But I would say for me, the DNA of Cities, I think in that kind of, that individuality, I think it does really come from the histories of the people who are there. And that I think that seeing how those histories filtered down to people’s everyday experience in the present, that to me starts to feel like where things start to unlock and things start to make sense. So both connection, but also, you know, histories of policy, histories of how the city was shaped. And I think that’s also something that I find in all of the work that I do kind of more in public, so the work-- all of these stories and this project and these photographs, the work in Brooklyn itself, I turned into a public art and dialogue project and one in which I made these kind of guided guidebooks to the neighbourhood that people could pick up around the neighbourhood. And one of the things-- what we did as part of that was that I would lead tours of the neighbourhood and everybody on the tour would read somebody else’s story. So having to build a sense of empathy to tell that history. So at that time, many of the stories were either 10 or 15 years old at the oldest, but because there had been so much change and development and gentrification in the neighbourhood, it felt like people were telling a story about a neighbourhood that was like, you know, so often very far away from people’s current experience. And I think even that little bit of distance, that little bit of kind of the not too distant past, was a way for people to see their present in a powerful way and to say, wow, I didn’t even realise that that had been here or I didn’t-- how did this change? And it made people ask questions about, well, what were the policies that allowed this to happen? And wait, didn’t that just happen, like, in my time here? And it kind of allowed people to hold on to the passage of time in an important way.

But then it was like, well, let’s go back a little bit further. So, you know, in my hat as a Professor of Urban Studies, I was like, well, let’s explain, you know, urban renewal to you. Let’s look at why cities developed in this way. Let’s look at, you know, 19th Century large-scale development. What does that look like? How do we start to see this place? How do we go back even further? So even looking at kind of a short period of history allowed us kind of the capacity to look back a little bit further into a longer period of history. And I think that individuality of place really does come from both people’s experience of their own histories, but then also to say, well, if you know the history of your place and of your neighbourhood, you have a much deeper and better understanding of the place and a much richer connection and commitment, I think, to it.

So I think that that piece of history becomes so important, but it also is like, how do people kind of understand the history in the present? Either how do they live with it, how do they make sense of it, or when they are kind of told that history or kind of so that history becomes made relevant to their present, how does that really sort of switch the way they might have a connection or commitment to a place?

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you, Gabrielle. So my final question to you is to ask you to tell us about a city or cities that are meaningful to you or your work.

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Well, there’s a lot of them. But I think, you know, obviously, in the context of the cities we need, you know, both the Oakland and California and New York are very important to me. And, you know, I am a New Yorker. I was born here and have spent most of my life here. My family, you know, kind of we have a very, very kind of deep-rooted sense of being New Yorkers. And so even that notion of what it is to be from here kind of has informed so much of my life. And, you know, and like most New Yorkers, I always feel like, well, it’s not what it used to be. So and even that thing may be a quality of being from here. And so I think that, you know, obviously that that is a really important to me. And so much of my life has kind of also bound up with different, even kind of different histories of housing in New York. Kind of where I grew up, I grew up in a loft building, which is just sort of, you see these things of kind of the kinds of housing and the kinds of histories of post-industrial development, like they very much have shaped my experience in my life, and actually have very much shaped my sense of interest in community and neighbourhood because I didn’t grow up in a neighbourhood that was like, tight-knit and I grew up in a neighbourhood that was actually pretty empty. And also no longer exists. So the qualities of that place no longer exist. So I think that, you know, that city has certainly shaped me and knowing its histories. And I’ve spent a lot of time writing about and teaching about and collaborating with people across the city and different neighbourhoods. And so that that’s really important to me and kind of the city’s fate concerns me very personally.

But I would say the other city that’s really been a huge shaper of my life has been London. So I started really taking some of this work seriously in doing research in East London in Hackney and Tower Hamlets in the late ‘90s. And so that place and that city is a huge shaper of all the work, I would say that I have gone on to do and also say it’s the place that I met my partner. So it’s a place I come back to all the time. But as a city, it’s a place also kind of that stays very close to my heart as a place of kind of transition and a place of where I was kind of learning to be an adult in addition to obviously my adult life that I live in New York.

But I think that those two cities and those two cities, maybe their relationship have been a huge shaper for me in the way that I think about cities, kind of what I value. And also, you know, they’re both places that I would consider home.

Greg Clark

Gabrielle, I’m going to come in, if I may, with four questions or points. One of the things I’ve been thinking while you’ve been talking is that you’ve really been describing somehow the difference between a nomadic kind of human life and a settled kind of human life in that these places of familiarity and affinity create the conditions for settlement. And I wonder if the sort of the echo of the human evolutionary journey is ever in your mind as you do this work?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Wow. I do think-- that’s fascinating. I think that, you know, I mean, I think that there must be something to that in that the things that people gain through longer connection to place. I mean, that must be part of what keeps us by doing this. A kind of evolution of cities, the rise of longer-term settlement, all of that. I think the capacity to build sense of place and in so doing build sense of self and sense of culture, that that’s a very interesting part of to say, well, you know, it’s not just that, okay, we had capacity for farming or trade or, know, whatever, all the pieces that kind of lead us to moving to a more settled existence.

But what are the psychological parts of that? And I think, yeah, I think that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. And I think that’d be fascinating to see if we could kind of go back historically to even see, well, what does it mean to, can we read back to say, if we sort of take that lens, and I think you probably could, I mean, there is so much writing and so much writing that is very much about place and that evokes place really potently. And I think there must be-- there’s a reason for that. That that becomes very important to people. And it becomes the capacity for building much larger societies. And I do think it ties back to this idea that, you know, these places where we gather, you know, we can think about these big important places, that are sort of full of cultural meaning or religious spaces or governmental spaces or places that are kind of deemed important. But I think also to say these kind of everyday places are where we’re really building the capacity to like stay in one place together at the same time. And I think that becomes such an interesting way of thinking about it. It makes me think a little bit of that idea of like, well, you know, one of the things I think a lot about in these kinds of everyday places is this like that most of them, you know, people’s conversations in them are not particularly important. But the part of what gives us capacity to be together and to build something together is like low stakes capacities to be together. Like if we have low stakes ways of negotiating, then maybe when there’s something that’s really important, a much more high stakes thing, then we have some practice in being able to do it. But when we need to sort of jump into that place of kind of high stakes, you know, what’s happening now, we’re very out of practice in doing it. And I think you can certainly see that in the context of the United States at the moment. So what does that look like to be able to practice that low stakes piece? I know we have a really short time, but I would love to read one little snippet, which really makes me think because one of the things that’s important to me about this book is people’s stories.

Greg Clark

Number two was going to be: Gabrielle, one of the interesting things is that the four cities that you’ve spoken about Oakland, Buenos Aires, New York, London. They’re all actually very diverse, multicultural, multilingual, multiracial cities, are you saying in effect that actually place plays a very significant role in how you construct social capital and civic capital in cities that have diverse populations? That’s question two.

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani 

My short answer is yes.

Greg Clark

Yeah, I thought it would be, but I wanted to check. Question three goes like this, one of the things that’s often said about cities is that people find a personal freedom not only through affiliation and loyalty to particular places, but that the crowding in effect of the city provides a kind of cloak of anonymity that allows people to become themselves and to experiment with who they are and how they are. Do you see that these two different versions of a sense of freedom can work together or do they just sit in complementary spaces in cities? That’s question three. And then question four is, you must have reflected and when you were speaking about urban renewal and gentrification and those things, Gabrielle, I was thinking, what are the implications of your work for people who are city planners or urban leaders or place leaders more generally, is it that they need to find the places of affiliation or can they deliberately create them?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Thank you. Thank you for those. mean, they are in many ways the million-dollar questions. But I think-- but certainly, I think kind of go starting backwards. That question of can they be created or is it about finding them, and what’s the implications of all of this for planning? I think one of, think it’s maybe it’s a bit of a both and, and people keep asking like, well, how could you create these?

And I think that is a challenging question. But I do think one of the keys to it is not just that it’s not just about the physical place, but that it is very obviously very much about the people who are in it and the people who run it. And so I think one of the things I think a lot about is this notion of the people who are parts of these places as kind of the facilitators of these places. So that how do we start to value the work that kind of people who kind of-- because, you can go into two different maybe diners or, you know, whatever, like a neighbourhood café, and they can feel very different, but maybe look very similar. And the thing that’s different is because of the person who runs it, and how they facilitate it, what they see their role is as part of the place.

So I think part of it is in the physical, like you can also be in physical places that feel terrible, but part of it, I think, is in the valuing of the people who do the facilitation and acknowledging that. How do we start to value that and say that that’s an important part of cities? We want places to thrive, that we need to really think about the people who facilitate them.

But I think just that thing of like, well, then at the same time, there’s very practical things about saying, well, how is it that we protect the places in which these already do happen? So there’s some pretty basic things around, you know, a lot of the places that people took me to were either free or fairly inexpensive, so those things are important. Or they were kind of very essential things like supermarkets, things that everybody needs. That that’s part of what can be an important sort of piece of this. And then I think there’s also the like, well, how do small businesses, which was a lot of these kinds of places are small businesses, not only kind of public spaces, how are they protected? How do they have rental protections? How do they have capacity for longer-term tenure in a space? How can they, after maybe their lease is up, how do we ensure that their rent isn’t doubled or tripled? Especially when a neighbourhood has maybe large-scale development at its edge and landlords think, there’s the potential for much more lucrative rents coming forward, how do we say, well, these places are actually very important? And if we lose them, you know, even to go back to your question about the DNA of Cities, like if we lose them, we lose something at the kind of soul of this place. And then it becomes an entirely different sort of neighbourhood or an entirely different place at all. We may as well-- and maybe that’s something about losing something in the cultural character of the place or maybe it’s just about the feeling of it that that that’s an important place where people kind of either across diversity around race, around age, gather that we have to value those things and support them. Because that’s part of what people start to feel when people start to feel like their neighbourhood becomes hollowed out. That’s part of why is because they’ve lost those places that do that.

And then I think, you know, kind of to answer that question around whether these places build a capacity for having diverse societies, I think absolutely. And I think that is one of the things that was so, so important to me and, you know, in all of these neighbourhoods, in all of these cities is to understand, well, what is it that brings people together across difference? And how do we do that in ways that are kind of low stakes, in ways that allow people to show up kind of as themselves? In many of the neighbourhoods that people, that I did this work in, people talked about as the plate-- like the very character of these neighbourhoods were there. A lot of people use the word mixed-ness and that protecting that was really important. That felt like an important piece of the identity of the neighbourhood.

And so what is it that most, many of these places that people took me to were places where people were able to connect across difference in one way or another, not always. Sometimes they’re very specific and sometimes they’re very specific to people’s sense of belonging to kind of either one cultural group or particular community. But a lot of times they were that space for connecting across difference. And, you know, I think that becomes such an important part of, well, A, how do we understand that intersection then with history becomes so important to say, well, you know, there has been so much of discriminatory planning and the way that these cities evolve and kind of what cities we are left with and kind of the long-term crises of cities, but also the cross-pollination of people and ideas and ages, that that becomes one of the things that’s actually so powerful and important about cities. And that’s something really to value and to care for. And so what do we need to do to be able to do that? And I think, you know, to be able-- and it’s not just because it’s nice to have.

A diverse and functioning society is what we need for actually moving forward in the world. Though I would say clearly that’s debated at the moment. I think that that really leaning in towards understanding that, you know, a plurality of and diversity of voices is what makes places and our lives much more interesting as well as obviously being the thing that is right and just, but that not having that, that as we move toward homogenising cities, they become a lot more boring. So even if you only looked at it from a selfish point of view, that we want our cities to be interesting and that more people bring more interest and a deeper sense of possibility. And so I think those places then become that capacity for doing that. I feel like I have talked for a long time and I know you’re running out of time.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s been so fascinating, Gabrielle. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us because it has been incredible. I just wanted to ask if there was anything else that you wanted to say that we haven’t elicited from you through the questions that we have asked? If there’s anything else that you wanted to share that you haven’t already?

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

These have been really great questions and a beautiful conversation. So I really appreciate it. I think the one thing that I haven’t gotten to do is to read somebody’s voice from the book. And so I think this might be a good place to close with. And I thought I could read a little excerpt from Tanya’s story from the neighbourhood in Prospect Heights. And it’s actually connected to the picture that’s on the cover of the book. And that was a diner called George’s at the time. Then it became called The Usual and now it’s no longer there. But she told me this story about this place and why it was one of the important places for her. So I thought maybe I could close with this and she’s incredible and eloquent and says many of the things that I’ve already said, but in a much shorter way. She says:

Caitlin Morrissey

That so beautifully goes back to what you saying about it is the place itself, but it’s the people who run these places and the sort of energy that they bring and that they put in and the way that that shapes where we experience those places in the way that Tanya just described. I think it was a very beautiful place to end a very beautiful conversation. So just thank you so much. We’re incredibly grateful to you for taking the time to do this.