TOWN & GOWN: IN & AROUND TEMPLE

Reading these posts on environment, I'm glad to see so many of you have related our studies of environments to the built environments of Temple's campus and the surrounding communities. I think that any person is going to feel some sense of culture shock as they move from one environment to another, and it doesn't require a radical change in one's environment to feel that shock, so long as we're mindful of how space and place influence everything about our lives. And I think it's fine to feel uncomfortable in certain environments, so long as we're always asking ourselves why we are feeling what we're feeling, and what it says not only about our environment but about ourselves.

Something that many of the writers we read this semester emphasize is that all environments, including built environments like North Philadelphia, are in a state of constant change. Like the "built environments" of the essays you've written, neighborhoods can be thought of as organisms that grow and change and die and become other things in the process. For a writer like Elijah Anderson, this dynamic manifests as "pockets of resistance," where neighbors come together to rewrite, as it were, the vision of what a neighborhood can be. For a writer like Ray Oldenburg, we create "third spaces" between the private sphere and the public sphere in order to revitalize our sense of self in the social sphere. And then of course for others, like Timothy Treadwell, so-called civil spaces are anathema to what it means to be alive and human. And so he retreated into the Alaskan wilderness. But even deep in the wilderness, Treadwell created a space to feel at home: a "made" or "made-up" wilderness. And even the Times Square sinkhole of Tom Wolfe's "Rotten Gotham" is very different now, 40 years later.

So . . . some questions to ask yourself as you finish the course: "What does Temple's environment mean to me?" "What do the communities around Temple mean to me?" "How do I define myself as a student and a citizen living in North Philadelphia?" "How am I part of the many communities in and around Temple?" "How do these environments interact?" "How do they perceive each other?" "How do I perceive them?" "Years from now, how will I see my years at Temple--not only as a student, but more broadly as a human being?"

Like all these spaces and places, "natural" and "civil," your writings are also built environments. They are put together: composing, decomposing, and recomposing visions and revisions of what is possible. This idea of writing as a cultural artifact and a natural process informs much of the thinking about ecocomposition and the relationships among readers, writers, and environments.

For those of you who want to pursue some of the ideas that we've explored in class this semester, especially relationships between Temple and its local communities, check out the Faculty Herald article and interview with Eli Goldblatt on a new community-based learning project at Temple, the Community Learning Network.

Click here to read.