What do MN Tibetans and North MPLS youth have in common?

Over the course of the semester, I have been working on designs which (separately) address two unique populations: Tibetans in Minnesota and youth in the West Broadway neighborhood of North Minneapolis. In terms of an emerging identity, it couldn't get any better than these two highly dynamic and mobile communities. Tibetans are engaged in a daily campaign to defy Chinese rule of their homeland while nearby North Minneapolis teens are trying to form their own identity while living in a world of instability and uncertainty. The challenge with both of these populations is how to separate them from immigrants and adolescents in general; while these categories lend themselves to a certain baseline understanding of the situation, they don't even begin to tell the complete story.

i + TiBET

Minneapolis is home to the second largest Tibetan population in the United States (second only to New York) and is the first place immigrants resettled in 1985. While many Tibetans have lived in exile their entire lives, they still hold out hope for a return to their homeland and focus a large amount of their energy on peaceful but powerful protest.Because of the heavy focus on their political actions, the preservation of their material culture seems to take a slight back seat; recognizing this gap and wishing to fill it, Carrie Fathman (a Masters of Landscape Architecture student at the University of Minnesota) and I have designed an interactive campaign to promote Tibetan identity and engage its members in a vital part of its preservation: artifact collection, documentation, and distribution/sharing. "i+TiBET" infers a love for Tibet as well as a connection between the individual and her homeland. It also infers a sense of contribution, as "+" is generally understood to be additive.


Ideally, this Web 2.0 site prototype (still in progress, but soon to be available at www.preservetibet.org) would engage Tibetan youth and encourage them to collect information about their culture in order to digitally record and share it, either via text, images, video, sound, or a combination of media. Carrie and I found it important to target this population, as they will be the group to carry the Tibetan culture into the future. Should Tibetans be able to return to a 'Free Tibet,' it would be beneficial to have a documentation of some of the cultural artifacts and that were lost or not actively maintained during their lengthy exile.



Because we targeted youth, we figured this campaign could logically and naturally extend itself into a variety of viral campaign materials, including T-shirts, bags, buttons, posters, etc. In addition, Facebook groups, Myspace events, and Flickr groups are also being considered for integration within the i + TiBET identity.







W. BRDWY
Focusing on the youth in the West Broadway neighborhood came as a result of an in-depth mapping project completed during the first half of the semester. During this mapping project, I adopted the lens of William Morrish and Katherine Brown, co-authors of the book, Planning to Stay: Learning to See the Physical Features of your Neighborhood. Focusing on what Morrish and Brown define as the "neighborhood niche," I created a map that juxtaposes niches with franchises through the simple abstraction of color. Also drawing inspiration from Colors of the World: A Geography of Color (by husband and wife team Jean-Philippe Lenclos and Dominique Lenclos) I began to see that color is a simple but elegant way to relate identity, be it of a space, a landscape, a building, or perhaps, a group of people. [View full mapping project]

Besides making observations and taking photographs, I accompanied my research with an investigation into the West Broadway Alive! neighborhood revitalization program set forth by the City of Minneapolis in September, 2006. I found it interesting that youth (ages 0-19) in the North Broadway neighborhood comprised a staggering 45.2% of the total population in 2005. [View source] The projected statistics (for 2010) started me thinking about what identity will start to emerge in this neighborhood, and how that might be fostered or otherwise visually quantified to create a neighborhood identity system within the space as well as in the greater Twin Cities area. Continuing to play with color, I have begun to collect images that are representative (ideally) of the ages and races present in this neighborhood. Attempting to relate some of the urban vernacular of this space, I am also considering how this data can be interactive. Stay tuned for those thoughts . . .

Enough for tonight, I'm spent!