Vision, voice, and the community landscape: The Missouri Place Stories pilot project

Authorized discourses of landscape value omit key qualities that make places valuable to the people who inhabit them. Here we present a community-based research initiative in which residents of two urban St Louis neighborhoods identified meaningful sites and sights in their locale. Using photographs and narration, they traced the contours of a “community landscape” characterized by heterogeneity, social relationships, creative practice, and a communalist model of human-nature relations. Inventoried, archived, and located on a digital mapping tool, their vision serves as a resource for neighborhood identity and collective decision-making. The insights produced by this type of project could productively inform urban planning and land management, and empower residents to decide what merits protection, reproduction, or alteration in the places where they live.