By Eric Kramak
At long last, we have finished! (Though the opportunity for others is just beginning.)
Begun in the bygone days of December 2009, the University of Washington Geography Honors Seminar entered into a six month collaborative project with 4Culture and King County Metro. Our mission: establish a repository of cultural geographies that could be used to inform the creation of public art and more in areas soon to be serviced by Metro’s new RapidRide bus lines.
Over the period of our collaboration, my fellow Geography students and I have toiled over keyboards, endured arduous trips to remote and obscure locations on Seattle’s provincial fringes such as Bellevue and Redmond, Highway 99 between Federal Way and Tukwila, and the lonely peninsula of West Seattle. We’ve hiked and biked and driven and bused through these areas, scouring them for culture and conflict, seeking to understand what we see and how it’s situated within the greater history and culture of the Seattle region.
I am pleased to announce the public unveiling of our work, a website collectively known as The Selected Cultural and Historical Geographies of the Greater Seattle Area. If you think the title is a mouthful, get a load of the url: http://sites.google.com/site/alinehistoryprojectsite/. (We’re working to make the URL a bit more manageable, but the title will remain.)
This website has been created as an accessible accompaniment to our academic research. We have used maps and photographs, both archival and of our own creation, as well as theory we have adapted from existing sources or developed anew, to illustrate the conditions we have found in these areas. Ultimately, we have created cultural and historical geographies of the areas as they have yet to be told, we’ve developed new lenses through which to view these areas and new frameworks within which they can be understood.
My role in this project involved consideration of the role Highway 99 – Pacific Highway South to those in the know – has played in economic and cultural development of the area between Tukwila and Federal Way.
For me to truly engage with this unappealing landscape, it was necessary to scrape away the detritus of 60 years of suburbanization though extensive archival research. Understanding the highway and the built environment of the area in general as it existed between roughly 1900 and 1950 constituted half of my work. The other half was focused on situating that consideration of the physical landscape within the greater cultural and ideological landscapes of the nation during this time. When theorizing this cultural framework, I used the idea of manifest destiny as the foundation. I then showed America’s love affair with the automobile (and all things related) as the natural evolutionary descendent of manifest destiny. Through this process, I was ultimately able to consider the creation of Pacific Highway South as a localized physical manifestation of a larger national culture.
Intrigued? Confused? The entirety of this research, as well as that of my classmates, can be found on the website in all its ragin’ glory.
A further part of the process, coming at the time we were wrapping up our research, editing and creating the website, was a series of four presentations on our findings. With an ever changing and diverse audience including peers, professors, various Chair’s and Deans from the UW, 4Culture’s Public Arts Advisory Committee and representatives from Metro, these presentations afforded an unusual opportunity to offer our work, as well as our delivery of it, up for a critique that extend beyond our classmates and our instructor. In retrospect, this may have been the most valuable part of the exercise – learning how to tailor and adapt the presentation of a product to a diverse and changing audience.
Image courtesy of the Des Moines Historical Society
