Urban Intermedia: Boston Race and Space

Date: 2016-2019
Source: Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative
Research Directors: Stephen F. Gray and Alex Krieger
Lead Research Associate: Caroline Filice Smith
Research Team: Hannah Gaegler, Emma Goode, Jeremy Hartley, Renia Kagkou, Annie Liang, Erica Rothman

The theme for the Boston portal of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, Urban Intermedia project was “Race and Space”: cautionary tales about infrastructural racism. It spans three eras of city-making and focuses on three physical infrastructures that define the spatial and political dimensions of segregated inner-city neighborhoods where many black Americans and immigrants live, experiencing dramatic disparities in wealth, educational attainment, and life expectancy as well as below-average access to jobs, open space, and public transportation. While disparities caused by systemic racism are unambiguous in Boston, open discussion of the subject has only recently become a part of mainstream public discourse. The research presented here is intended to contribute to that discourse.

“Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative presents new methods of interdisciplinary urban study developed in the context of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. The exhibition is itself a research project and experiment. In addition to presenting the findings of the research conducted in Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai over four years, the exhibition engages critically with the methods and technologies of urban research. It argues that the complexity of contemporary urban societies and environments makes communication and collaboration across professional boundaries and academic disciplines essential. Each discipline produces its own forms of knowledge, but also has “blind spots” that can only be approached through other disciplinary frameworks. Those blind spots are the focus of the research and exhibition.

We use new media-rich methods to bring those blind spots into focus and to explore sites and topics that are outside the conventional narratives and dominant conceptual frameworks of urban research. In particular, we use a range of technologies to bring physical and digital media—archival documents, digital data sets, photography, cartography, architectural drawings, graphics, text, animation, film, and video—into dialogue and registration with each other.”

Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative Primary Investigators: Eve Blau and Julie Buckler
Urban Intermedia Curators: Eve Blau and Robert Pietrusko
Exhibition Locations: Berlin, Mumbai, Boston, Istanbul