Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Friday, October 11, 2019

Reopening of Anacostia Community Museum: Sunday October 13th

Why this is important is not so much a chance to meet the new director, but to see the fabulous "Right to the City" exhibit, which I think is a great model for showing how to present community history at the neighborhood scale.

The neighborhoods it covers are Adams-Morgan, Anacostia, Brookland, Chinatown, Shaw, and Southwest.

It takes 3-4 hours to go through the exhibit. It is rich and deep. One of the great scores is footage from ABC-TV featuring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding in a parade and his speech to the group, a Shaw neighborhood improvement initiative led by civil rights activist Walter Fauntroy, Jr., who later became DC's Congressional Delegate.

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For me, having been in DC since 1987, I feel like civil society today here is pretty weak. The exhibit shows that in the 1960s and 1970s especially that was decidedly not the case.


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