What happens when one has access to a home? What is a home worth?
For my neighbors in Chicago, like many across America, one of their top concerns is affordable housing. Reflecting on the value of a home beyond a place of shelter, I spent sixteen weeks researching 218 GroveStreet in Bluffton, Ohio. This house was my mother’s childhood home and the place where my grandparents lived. My aim was to better understand where the value I place on the concept of home comes from and to use this lens to explore how culture, material knowledge and identity is passed down from generation to generation.
_____topia
Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene
Chicago Community Gardens
Publication Edited by: Sarah Kuether, Anya Mitchell, and Grace Spee
The suffix -topia is derived from the Ancient Greek word for place. The French philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote of gardens being a “happy, universalizing heterotopia” a place which challenges and contradicts. Because of COVID-19, the three of us are limited to working remotely. These unusual circumstances, however, have not prevented us from gathering and cultivating in a digital environment. Informed by the experiences of Chicago gardeners, we’ve sought to create a place as real as any, confined only by the limits of the spread. Together, we have taken turns to establish a unifying grid and a set of typographic rules to follow and to break as we see fit.
Introduction by: Sarah Kuether