Virtual Brownfield Village as space, landscape, and place for more just geographies of cultural heritage
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Keywords: historical GIS, working class, dwellings, segregation, redlining, digital 3D modeling, game engines, virtual reality, place, landscape
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Dan Bonenberger, Eastern Michigan University
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Abstract
In the early 1930s, Henry Ford arranged his collection of American buildings into Greenfield Village, an idealistic cultural landscape designed as an open-air park, about a mile upstream from Ford’s massive River Rouge automotive works. Moving historic structures out of their geographic context has been taboo since the 1960s, but today there are digital alternatives. 3D modeling and GIS enable researchers to reconstruct historic buildings and examine the spaces and material culture in their historic and cultural landscape context. With recent advances in game engines and virtual reality, people can explore such spaces from the first-person perspective and thus experience them as place, loaded with objects, meanings, and intangible cultural heritage. In contrast to Greenfield Village, dominated by buildings associated with "great" Americans, Brownfield Village is a virtual collection of buildings and landscapes of the working class, African Americans, and other marginalized people. Its components were created by preservation, planning, GIS, and geography students (2018-present) in association with the Digital Heritage Preservation Lab at Eastern Michigan University. This paper examines the methodology used to produce the components of Brownfield Village, evaluates them as representations of cultural heritage, space, landscape, and place, and considers how the village may be arranged and enhanced to serve as a dynamic, accessible, and sustainable place that fosters and supports more just geographies.
Virtual Brownfield Village as space, landscape, and place for more just geographies of cultural heritage
Category
Paper Abstract