Graham Gordon, Taylor Kang, & Jason Min
HIST338 S23 – Professor Austin Mason
From the Commonplace Book:
Our project was conducted under the guidance of Mar Valdecantos from Rice County Neighbors United, also known as Vecinos Unidos/Vecinxs Unidxs. With a focus on the Viking Terrace manufactured home community on the Northwest side of Northfield, we explored different elements of geographic inequalities within the city. As Carleton students, it’s hard to get a pulse on the socioeconomic structures of Northfield, but Mar quickly showed us how the signs of it manifest in so many different ways, which is a big part of what we’re looking to show with our work.
Place does not exist as a neutral container of things happening inside. It is the product of social relations, which can in turn reproduce the social relations that once produced it. We believe that inequality is both manifested and reinforced by the layout of the physical space. The goal of our project is to demonstrate the issue of inequality in Northfield as embedded in the city’s physical landscape, and how it affects people’s daily life.
We realized that there were so many different aspects of Northfield that reflected various inequalities, so with Mar’s help, we decided to focus primarily on telling a few specific stories; Viking Terrace and its hostile takeover, additional affordable housing in the city, and the disparities between recreational resources/parks throughout Northfield. These stories are housed in one big map of the city of Northfield, and users can navigate around the map to find “clickpoints” with links to each individual focus. The goal was to show the imbalances in amenities within the city of Northfield.
Here is the link to the Rice County Neighbors United site: https://ricecountyneighborsunited.org/
