The Five Senses of Chinatown
Updated: Oct 6, 2020
What Urban Exploration Can Teach Students about
Learning to See and Question
On a cold winter day a few years back, we brought 20 students from our Mapping Meaning class on the T to Boston’s Chinatown. They were equipped with notebooks, cell phone cameras, a work partner, and instructions to notice both vortexes and things that pushed them away.
Mapping Meaning had grown out of our shared love of all things maps: Doug coming to it from a historical, political, and urban planning interest, and Alison through a filter of the fine arts, architecture, and interest in the Situationists. With the students we aimed to share how maps tell stories about history, power, individual and shared experiences, and much more. We aimed to use the examination and creation of maps to teach students to be culturally, socially, and visually literate, and to use art as a form of academic inquiry.
With this project we wanted to bring what we had learned in the classroom to light. We wanted to bring together Guy DeBord’s (an artist involved with the Situationist International) observations about how the city repulses and attracts us, with exploring the intentions behind the city structures. More importantly, we wanted students to do this through the students’ eyes. We wanted them to learn that their voices were part of the narrative of looking at the world, and that the maps we used to see as unquestionable “truth” came from specific points, places and people in history. There is a power in naming sources and realizing that the myth of universal truth needs to be examined.
The assignment was as follows:
You and your collaborator will gather information to be used in creating a map of your explorations. For this map, you partner both will take a “dérive" through Chinatown focusing on one of the senses….smell, touch, taste, sight, or sound.
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”
-Guy Debord (1956)
Use the following ideas Debord talks about:
-let yourself be drawn through the streets
-look for areas that discourage your sense or movement: what discourages you from accessing or sensing certain areas?
-identify fixed points and vortexes in your dérive
You will then create a document or object addressing your findings.
Things to consider:
How do you interpret your senses?
Do you include everything, or are you selecting or noticing some things more than others?
Are all things experienced equally?
How does the physicality of the space affect your experience? How does it affect your interpretation?
How will you present your final information? Does it need to be in map form? Chart form? Could it be a new form such as…?
What materials will you use? All materials you gather in Chinatown? Cloth? Could it be 3d?
The maps the students produced explored Chinatown through the senses, but specifically through the senses and experiences of these particular students. Some of the maps the students created were:
a map of a conversation during a dim sum meal, exploring the differences between food traditions and family meals between a student from China and a student from Lexington, MA
a map of two students exploring Chinatown through eye contact, specifically “uncomfortable” eye contact. Who held eye contact the longest at what sites in Chinatown? It included a stare-down with a pigeon!
maps charting where languages were heard in various parts of Chinatown, exploring the diversity and locales of cultures inhabiting that space
a map laid out as a Chinese chessboard (chess is played in an outdoor-areas near the gate of Chinatown) examining how the structure of the chess board related to social aspects of two cultures meeting in the context of immigration
We were shocked by the sophistication of the students’ maps, and how they were able to tie into personal narratives, to the spaces of Chinatown and to larger social narratives. They surpassed many of the goals we had for the course including:
To explore connectivity, how when one event happens it’s not in a vacuum, and that it is tied to the individual and their place in the world.
To encourage students to tell their own stories, to make their contribution to the world
To see the ability of a student to analyze and parse the world around them, as well as how others choose to portray the world, as relevant in the age of digital natives, the internet, and current concerns around fake news and alternative facts.
At the end of one class, a student said to us, “I will never be able to see things the same again.”
As teachers, it doesn’t get any better.
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