This idea came to me when I was working with City Lore’s (New York) Place Matters project. Can we re-imagine our cities through interactive and shared stories? And how could “ways of seeing” and “ways of employment” of these stories contribute to new ways of reading, understanding and valuing our built environment?

Recounting stories of everyday places where we live and work can spur active engagement with others who share these spaces with us, revive interest in our built environment and encourage stewardship of our patrimony. The need for collaborative storytelling to create a public culture takes on a sense of urgency when established traditions and ways of life disappear and new ones emerge. This is true for many US cities where old demographics and culture have given way to new inhabitants, economic practices and cultural life. Merely telling stories is not enough in these cases – rather citizens should be inspired to participate and contribute in a collective retelling of stories thereby producing a public discourse that is invested and engaged.

Such a project is truly interdisciplinary and collaborative because it allows us to expand horizontally using a website as a portal to experiment with multiple forms of place-storytelling. It involves multiple modalities of dissemination – local residents uploading their stories, scholarly searches, stories curated by specialists, media and multimedia stories.

I will bring in multiple examples of similar projects done is different cities. It seems like scholars have already WRITTEN such place stories. I am more interested in discussing alternative (to brochures, monographs and book) visual and digital forms of dissemination that may actually be more democratic and may reach more diverse audiences than the traditional University Press scholarly books.