Ground
Works

The ARTery is a proposed cultural corridor spanning historic neighborhood squares and commercial areas in the heart of Black Boston. Running from Jazz Square in the South End through Nubian Square down Dudley Street and along Blue Hill Avenue to Grove Hall, the planned 3-mile route connects clusters of small businesses, numerous vacant lots, and underutilized public spaces with arts and culture initiatives across Boston’s City Council District 7. The initiative aims to hire local artists, activists, and entrepreneurs to reface and beautify small businesses, paint public murals, activate green, open spaces, and improve street safety in ways that express the cultural identities of local communities on city streets. This article presents a case of interdisciplinary research and creative inquiry collaboratively undertaken by community and university partners to develop the vision and concept plan for the ARTery and gain institutional funding and implementation support from the City of Boston. After providing the background and context, we present the participatory planning and design research for the ARTery, corresponding pedagogical approach and teaching methods, initial results, and concluding reflections. Notwithstanding the project’s early stage, it carries implications for aligning university-based teaching and research with municipal governance and repurposing academic and government machinery to advance arts-based and artist-inclusive spatial planning and investments in racialized, low-income neighborhoods.

In the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, Indigenous communities have been living in river floodplains for millennia and have developed unique cultural connections with the living waters and their rich biodiversity. To escape hardship (e.g. over extraction of resources, slavery, climate change impacts etc.), or seek opportunities (e.g. health, education, economic etc.), hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people have migrated from the jungle to Amazonian cities such as Iquitos over the past hundred years. Referencing traditional lifestyles, many of these migrants created floating and stilted communities in the city’s floodplain edges. Their multi-generational knowledge of floodplain agriculture, amphibious housing, and deeply-rooted community structures provides cultural, economic, and ecosystem services to the whole city. However, this mass migration also created challenges in housing, infrastructure and public services for the whole city. The Iquitos regional government has responded by enacting mandatory relocation for these residents to new highland developments far from the river, threatening their unique riverine cultures and deforesting a rare white sand rainforest ecosystem. In this visual narrative, we describe a blended arts and sciences project, Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Life Within Peru’s Urban Amazonian Floodplains, in which a highly collaborative team of 24 Peruvian and U.S. researchers and artists worked closely with 136 residents across three communities to showcase their life, health, and environmental connections, promoting traditional cultures and better-informed city planning that includes Indigenous Amazonian voices. We describe our interdisciplinary arts and sciences mixed-methods approach which included a public health survey, documentary photography, community drawings, and biodiversity/environmental measures that incorporated a community training program and local/traditional-scientific knowledge exchange workshop. Lastly, we discuss the value we found in pairing data with artistic storytelling, engaging diverse disciplines and academic-community partnerships, and uplifting underserved communities via an art and data exhibition.