Open City is an interdisciplinary neighborhood blogging project coordinated by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) that aims to take a fresh look at the ever-shifting cultures of Manhattan’s Chinatown/Lower East Side (LES); Flushing, Queens; and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. AAWW has commissioned five writers — a group of individuals whose prior work includes everything from performance poetry to community organizing to landscape architecture — to work with local organizations and citizens to dig deep, to document neighborhood change through interviews, oral histories and close observation in a cluster of communities where complex issues of race, class, immigration and land use intersect. And then they take these findings and blog. Mercifully, the sum of these blog posts amounts to far more than a nostalgic prose portrait of ethnic enclaves undergoing poorly understood processes of gentrification. On the contrary, these five “organizing fellows” are going beyond reductive readings of neighborhood dynamics to uncover hidden narratives of places and practices: in parades, kabab shops, factories, karaoke bars, hotels and community-based organizations.

Writers (of both the fiction and non-fiction varieties) have engaged with the urban landscape for as long as we’ve had cities, and Urban Omnibus has enjoyed sharing writerly perspectives, including those of Richard Sennett, Dalton Conley, Andrew Blum and Suketu Mehta, each of whose books and articles rigorously examine some complexities of the urban condition. But what happens when you ask writers to engage with a medium, like blogging, not known for its sustained attention to detail or its ability to render nuance? What happens when you try to turn blogging into a new mode of creative urban investigation? With that in mind, Urban Omnibus asked each of the Open City organizing fellows to respond to a series of questions. We were interested to know how each of them personally defines urban change, goes about investigating it, finds blogging a useful medium of investigation and communication for this topic, and, finally, what each of them has found most surprising or notable in his or her explorations. Read selections from their answers below.

Or, read each blogger’s individual Q&A and check out some of the blogposts they’ve contributed to this collaborative project. Click here for Deanna Fei, a novelist who grew up in Flushing; click here for Jerome Chou, an urbanist with diverse experiences in community organizing, landscape architecture and public space advocacy; click here for Cristiana Baik, a writer with a background in affordable housing and architecture; click here for Peggy Lee, a poet, performer and youth worker who lives in Sunset Park; and click here for Sahar Muradi, an Afghan-American writer who has worked in both international development and youth development in Afghanistan and the United States. -C.S.

Everything Frosted | photo: Tom Giebel

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Deanna Fei

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been exploring my own hometown of Flushing, Queens, through various personal lenses: the Tai Chi scene that includes my dad, photo essays of Main Street by my sister, my own emotional associations to place names in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and pretty much anything else that moves me.

How do you define urban change?
When my parents first moved to the house where I grew up, my sister and I used to get taunted for being the only “Chinks” on the block, which was traditionally Italian. By the time I was in high school, the line for my bus, the Q26, was almost entirely composed of Asian Americans, and one day, I heard the (Caucasian) bus driver mutter, “Another handful of macaroni.” That line took me some time to parse (especially given the originality of the racial slur, not to mention its Italian roots), but I think these episodes, taken together, encapsulate so much of urban change: how rapidly it happens, how an entire population can go from alien to dominant, the dance between what is gained and what is lost… (To read more from Deanna Fei, click here).

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Jerome Chou

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I wanted to be in the area as much as possible, so last November I subletted my Brooklyn apartment and took a short-term room in the heart of Fujianese Chinatown. Living in the neighborhood makes it easier to talk to people. I’ve met Tai-chi students, Chinese opera singers, and soccer players in Columbus Park; restaurant workers and owners; heads of Business Improvement Districts and community design centers; a teacher with a Chinese American youth drum, fife, and bugle corps; A young woman who sketched on a napkin for me how her family fit eight people in two bunkbeds when she was growing up. The Chinatown Progressive Association is working with a group of local high-school and college students in a program called Shared Stories; I’m working with them to develop their own narratives about being a recent immigrant in Chinatown.

Whenever possible, I tie these personal stories to all of the forces that shape neighborhoods that are not immediately visible or accessible to most people: zoning, subsidies for new residential development, rent control laws and affordable housing guidelines, demographic shifts and real estate values. I think people often feel overwhelmed by neighborhood change because it happens quickly and seems outside of anyone’s control. But in fact there are many specific decisions and policies and campaigns that have an enormous influence on neighborhood change. That means there are tools people can use to guide change. And there’s a huge opportunity for urbanists from many disciplines (architects, landscape architects, planners, graduate students, graphic designers, photographers, etc.) to research and synthesize all of these complex and often controversial issues, to create visually engaging materials that make these issues more accessible to people who are most affected by neighborhood change, and to shape ongoing debates.

For instance, Community Board 3 just approved development guidelines for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, including several large parcels along Delancey Street that have been empty for 43 years. The guidelines propose a range of market-rate, moderate-income, and low-income units. Manuel Miranda and I produced an infographic juxtaposing this proposed mix against the incomes of Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. On a separate topic, Yeju Choi and I created a map of all of the bank branches in Chinatown, and I wrote about what the concentration of banks in the neighborhood means and where all of that money is going.

So this is an open call disguised as an answer to your question! I would love to hear from Urban Omnibus readers who want to get involved (opencityjc[at]gmail.com)… (To read more from Jerome Chou, click here).

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

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Cristiana Baik

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I think talking to people — local residents — is pretty much the heart of the blog, and probably the best way for us to think about the way urban changes have affected local communities. The process of interviewing has also been the most difficult aspect of the project for me — finding a non-invasive way to access people’s stories without feeling like you’re objectifying them. The role of a privileged writer coming in to tell someone’s story just really doesn’t jive with me, hence I am always a bit tentative/paranoid about how I go about conducting interviews or writing about interviewees, etc. On one hand, and for various reasons, I haven’t found it very plausible to get “life histories” of individuals. I don’t think the project necessarily asks or lends itself to this kind of process — it’s a daily blog, which, more often than not, calls for interviews that are tongue-in-cheek. As a writer, I think this degree of freedom/”openness” is one of the most interesting aspects of the project… (To read more from Cristiana Baik, click here).

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Peggy Lee

What have you particularly enjoyed writing about?
As one example, karaoke — a weekend passion of mine —  is one of my starting points. I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Open City has given me the opportunity to be more intimate and critical with my daily life, with its dailiness. I learn something new everyday walking in Sunset Park, my neighborhood. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying thinking about how karaoke sound and music night life in Chinatown connect to larger circuits of diaspora, immigration, in-translation, class, race, and, of course, urban change… (To read more from Peggy Lee, click here).

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Sahar Muradi

What have you noticed in particular?
What I’ve noticed and what I’ve enjoyed so much about this project is that people generally want to talk and tell you their stories. When I told my landlord about the project, she started slipping newspaper clippings under my door. This is her dad’s building, constructed in 1900 and the only one on the block with its original door and wallpaper. Ms. Fedorko is very proud of it and very interested in the history of the LES. A few weeks later, she eagerly brought me old city plans and guidebooks, with ominous “DEMOLISHED” stamps across the pages. It was the same with my friend Naomi, who relished giving me a tour of her neighborhood in Chinatown and its hidden art galleries, or Mr. Leung, who talked about the history of his shoe cobbling stand on Forsyth St. I’ve enjoyed meeting people and reflecting on the fact of our two lives intersecting in this city… (To read more from Sahar Muradi, click here)

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To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.