Telling Place! Marks, Signs, and Echoes to Share Our Stories
Community Engagement in Grixdale Farms, Detroit
This project builds on an ongoing community-academic collaboration and seeks to build local capacity and mutual learning opportunities. Through
storytelling and co-design sessions, participants will share and collect stories, co-creating signs that capture the multicultural composition of the Grixdale Farms neighborhood and tell their [hi]stories, thereby enhancing residents’ sense of place and collective ownership.
Collaborators: Grixdale Farms Residents Association, María Arquero de Alarcón,
Paul Draus, Lisa DuRussel, Dominic Gomez,
Francesca Badalamenti,
Kathryn Arnold, Koby Buford
Duration: May 2025-present
Location: Grixdale Farms, Detroit
Project: Community Engagement
Sponsors: UM Engage Detroit Workshop,
UM-Dearborn Office of Community Engaged Learning Grants
Grixdale Farms is a Detroit community in flux. Situated immediately east of Palmer Park, crossing Woodward, north of Highland Park, and between 6 Mile, 7 Mile, and John R, this neighborhood features architecture commensurate with some of Detroit’s most renowned neighborhoods and decline rivaling some of the most challenged.
Through ongoing work led by its neighborhood association, this project seeks support to collaboratively and
collectively:
(1) collect community visual stories and create a living archive;
(2) codesign
a network of markers, signs, and echoes across the neighborhood that
incorporates the community’s memories and existing needs;
(3) co-produce a
community research process committed to community capacity building, mutual
learning, and sustaining collaborations to improve the quality of life for all residents.
Co-designing
Signs design vignettes
Interviews
StoryMap