Mellon Forum // Practicing Palimpsestry: Archives, Counter-mapping, and Spatial Storytelling

We examine the spatial-socio-ecological processes that have shaped the Seattle urban landscape, the ways that people have used and interpreted this landscape, and how these spatial narratives can further contextualize understandings of our relationship between history, place, and contemporary urban development and environmental decision making. This has been carried out through various interventions that provide windows into landscape and urban history, different ways of knowing and seeing, and various ways of presenting intersecting narratives of place. These exercises of “storytelling with the shapes of time” integrate several streams of research and disciplinary methods bringing together ethnographic and archival sources, cultural history, and environmental science with geospatial methodologies, public interpretation, artistic design practices, and informed imaginings.