Multi-Generational Stories of Urban Renewal: Preliminary Interviews for Map-based Storytelling

Urban renewal was a project of the American government that aimed to reconstruct poor urban neighborhoods. Because community-level data that shows the underlying mechanisms of urban renewal has not been curated in a systematic way, due to the complexity and volume of the relevant archival collections, we aim to digitally curate property acquisition documents from the urban renewal projects that affected the Southside neighborhood of the city of Asheville, North Carolina, in the form of a map-based, interactive web application. This paper reports early findings from interviews. We analyze how Asheville citizens of different generations remember their neighborhood before and after the multiple waves of gentrifications that they have experienced, based on personal interviews. The result of this comparative analysis provides design implications for the archival system we are developing by revealing the inter-generational value structures of potential users.