Q&A with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

 

 

 

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is the author of the new book The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places. A photographer and visual urbanist, she also has written the book Contested City. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Cities We Need?

 

A: Twenty-three years ago, I started asking my neighbors in Brooklyn for tours of whatever they considered to be their neighborhood, and instantly I began to see an incredibly layered, complex, painful, funny, beautiful tapestry of the place.

 

When I moved to Oakland several years later, and asked my neighbors there the same thing, I found no less incredible stories in the most banal of places.

 

While the work that I started in Brooklyn had built on work I’d been doing for years with people about their neighborhoods, it got into gear in the aftermath of 9/11, when I wanted to focus on work that was caring for my city and was paying attention to the small but crucial spaces of people’s lives, in opposition to the huge rhetoric and violent actions - of that day, and of the subsequent war - that would hurt so many people and solve nothing. 

 

The work took many forms before becoming a book, including a public art and dialogue project in which I brought the oral histories —the tours — and the photographs from Brooklyn back to the neighborhood 10 years after they were first made.

 

This was a way to help people talk with each other, and to figure out how to hold on to the changes that were happening in their neighborhoods, how stories of lived experience from the not-too-distant past could help people navigate the bewildering world of gentrification  and displacement. 

 

I realized how, and why, to turn this work into a book — The Cities We Need — in 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown in New York City. I’d been wanting to find a way to write a book about this work for a long while, but wasn’t sure of how to convey the depth of what was at stake in our everyday spaces.

 

In the midst of lockdown, kept away from family, friends, and strangers, I realized that the stories my tour guides in Brooklyn and Oakland had told me so many years ago could help me understand why what was happening was so hard, and what, in addition to so many lives, we had the potential to lose. 

 

Q: Can you say more about your focus on Brooklyn and Oakland?

 

A: I started working in these places because I lived in them, and I cared for them. The stories people told me about their places forever shifted the way that I saw my own places.

 

There are, of course, similarities between Oakland and Brooklyn writ large - as cities that have sometimes been overshadowed by more famous cities across the water, that were the sites of war industries, that were marked by redlining, and on and on.

 

As I dug into the particular histories of the two neighborhoods that I focused on, I also saw that the histories and stories of one neighborhood could help me understand, in contrast or similarity, the other neighborhood across the country. 

 

I was also interested in working in these places that physically look quite different, where one is pedestrian-focused and the other more car-centric, yet where everyday places function in importantly similar ways for residents.

 

Q: The author Mindy Thompson Fullilove said of the book, “There's a tenderness about this book that leaps off the page. Reading it, we can't help but feel that we are becoming better human beings.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: It’s a wonderful thing to say, of course, and hugely gratifying to me.

 

And what’s most gratifying about it to me is that I always wanted to find public forms for this work that would help people have the kinds of transformative experiences of a neighborhood, and of place more broadly, that I was so lucky to have through being told my tour guides’ stories.

 

In hearing Mindy say that “we are becoming better human beings,” I feel that the book is succeeding in sharing with others what I gained through doing this work — by listening to my tour guides, by walking with them, driving with them in their cars, thinking about their stories, learning from them, valuing them, allowing those stories to shape my adult life, I became a better human being.   

 

Q: What do you see as the relationship between the text and the photos in the book?

 

A: I’ve spent a long time working on how photographs and texts can work together, without photographs illustrating the text, or text captioning the photographs.

 

The structure of this book is meant to allow multiple kinds of readings — you can read just the text chapters, you can “read” just the photo essays, or you can read the chapters and the photo essays in the syncopated back-and-forth order in which they appear.

 

One of the books that most inspired me for the form of the book and the way that the texts and photographs relate is Victor Burgin’s excellent Some Cities. There are many ways of understanding cities, and I wanted to offer that variety to the reader as they walk through this book. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: In my practice, Buscada (www.buscada.com), I and my partner Kaushik Panchal continue to work with small mission-driven organizations to help them work deeply in community, and to help them have productive dialogues within their own organizations.

 

My next art / research / book project stems from a return to work I started even before the projects that The Cities We Need grew from. I’ll be returning to the East End of London, where, in the late 1990s, I worked in community centers and photographed and interviewed neighborhood residents from teenagers to elderly people.

 

The neighborhood has undergone huge transformation from development in the intervening time, and I’m working on how my archive, and my new work in response to this archive, can be part of sparking and supporting the kinds of conversations that need to be had in the neighborhood and beyond. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: While I hope this book helps us understand Brooklyn and Oakland and their everyday places, I hope that it will help us all understand the important everyday places in our own neighborhoods and cities, and will help us think about what we value so much about them, and what we can do to protect them. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb