Fall
2013
The Heart of the City: Learning about Urban Studies
Social Science Sleuths
Hessen Cassel Library
Intro to Urban
Studies
September 9
What is urban studies?
Urban studies is the attempt to understand cities and city
life. You can learn about cities by
learning about their politics, economic and social relations, physical
landscapes, and cultures. Urban studies
both focuses on cities as distinctive places and explores the meaning and
function of cities in the larger society.
Cities are constantly built and rebuilt; from the initial
settlement to the present, each layer leaves its own traces. A city has many districts—downtown, neighborhoods,
suburbs, each with its own history,
institutions, successive populations.
Houses, schools businesses, parks
and plazas, alleys to boulevards, sewers to freeways all of these give clues to
the environmental, social, and political context in which they were built and
to the people who built them.
This fall we’re going to use our city, Fort Wayne as our
laboratory to learn about urban studies.
1.
Find your neighborhood on a Fort Wayne map.
2.
Find a section of town that you like to go
to. What area is it and why do you like
to go there?
3.
What do you know about downtown Fort Wayne?
4.
What places to you visit there?
5.
Find pictures of some of these places.
6.
What ways can you get to downtown from where you
live?
7.
Figure out how to get there without using a car.
(Hint Google map is good for this!)
Now for a little
historical perspective.
History of Fort Wayne from the city’s website
Kekionga was first settled by the Miami and other Native
Americans who used the confluence of the rivers as a place to meet from across
the Great Lakes and Ohio River valley regions.
Using a modern Fort Wayne map you can find the roads that run on angles,
leading to Fort Wayne from other settled areas around the Midwest. Early American settlers used these same
roads.
1.
Find at least three roads that run into Fort
Wayne on an angle.
2.
Where do you suppose the road might lead to?
3.
Find a picture online of the Old Fort. Have you ever been there?
The current fort was recreated in the 1970s from the
original plans on file in Washington DC at the Library of Congress. It was rebuilt across from what is now
Headwaters Park. The original fort built
by the Americans was on the corner of Clay and Berry streets in downtown.
The original street corner for the new town was laid out in
what is now Freimann Square, next to the Arts United theater. To give you an idea of the size of the
town, what is now the Botanical Garden was way out in the country. Eighty years later the Nebraska neighborhood,
just west of downtown, got its name because it was so far west, it was like
“Going to the state of Nebraska .” You
can look at this 1898 map to get an idea of how big Fort Wayne had grown in
less than 100 years.
Fort Wayne map from 1898
In between those two times people had built the Wabash and
Erie Canal with Fort Wayne as its highest point. (Hence the nickname Summit
City.) The canal had brought lots of
settlers and had been used to forcibly move the remaining Miami people out of
Indiana to Kansas. The canal was
replaced by the newly invented railroad and Fort Wayne became well known as a
place where engines were built and repaired and many people changed trains
between stations. (Including Abraham Lincoln once.)
Roads went from being
mud to wooden (notice the name Lima Plank Road on that 1898 map) to
being paved with bricks. If you look
when you are downtown or some of the nearby neighborhoods you can still find
brick streets.
The reason for getting acquainted with this background is so
you can pick out a smaller section of town to claim as your own for the next
couple of months. Get your camera ready
so you can start taking pictures of the places in town you are claiming as your
own.
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