Visualizing Narratives of Persistence in Flint: The Flash Project

Dan Trepal, Michigan Technological University

Postindustrial cities remain a challenging environment for effective community engaged scholarship. The Flint Archaeology and Spatial History (FLASH) project applies new approaches developed within the digital humanities to publicly highlight the persistence of underrepresented communities in the city of Flint, Michigan that have either been largely destroyed through urban redevelopment or suffering from decades of civic disinvestment and neglect. In spite of these processes, such neighborhoods persist in the archaeological and historical record, as well as in the memories and social networks of living community members. The core of the project is a spatial digital infrastructure that takes a big data approach to spatial reconstructions of past landscapes, blending archaeological and historical data with community memory in a dynamic digital, spatial environment. Accessible via a pubic website and several touchscreen kiosks rotating between community and heritage sites in Flint, the FLASH digital infrastructure serves as a platform for long-term collaboration between Flint communities and an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Highlighting the presence and persistence of seemingly “lost” or dramatically altered communities serves to foreground the heritage values of underrepresented postindustrial communities that remain under threat from ongoing processes of urban redevelopment reshaping the postindustrial urban landscape.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 257. Urban Historical GIS