Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

Rationale

The anchor text for our Invisible Cities seminar has been Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In it, during long conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Polo tells story upon story about cities he has encountered in his travels. Or perhaps they are in his head. Or maybe they are simply dozens of manifestations of Venice. This distinction is irrelevant. It is the cumulative effect of all those ambient impressions that caused me to think about our rich and varied relationships with our cities. I found these ideas to be connected to my unit and to some unspoken thoughts I had been harboring about it. Some of these cities are defined by their residents, some by what is there or not there. Others are identified by the perceptions of visitors or the imagination of Marco Polo. Nothing is clear or certain in the narrative except that cities are complex places, and that we have deep, emotional connections to them through experience, memories, symbols, and history. Our relationships with our cities define who we are by how they capture our imagination and how they reflect what we love, hate and fear.

There are stereotypes associated with parts of any city, but as most Tulsans rarely venture north of Peoria, stereotypes and generalizations are what they depend on when they must make a determination about North Tulsa. In Chicago, City on the Make, Nelson Algren's raw passage on the "Negro" condition in mid-century Chicago illustrates uncomfortably a truth that my students must contend with in a more modern fashion: "The Negro is not seriously confronted here with a stand-up and head-on hatred, but with something psychologically worse: a soft and protean awareness of white superiority everywhere, in everything, because it is as polite as it is impalpable." ¹ It is a painful truth that informs many of the decisions my students make as they navigate their own city every day.

These ideas led me to look into the connection between place and identity. In his article, Hauge looks into several others' theories on the connections between the two. He concludes that place is a significant contributor to our sense of identity. "People affect places, and places (and the way places are affected) influence how people see themselves." ² A symbiotic relationship exists between person and setting. The health of one depends to some extent on the health of the other. If my specific students unconsciously define themselves to a degree by their environment, they most likely do not see themselves as leaders, success stories, or agents of change. In the end, Calvino's novel proved to be a catalyst for de-familiarization for me, and hopefully the unit will do the same for my students as they investigate their geography and their role in it.