Farmer's Market–Visual Ethnography Project

I am starting a project over at Rachel’s Tavern that is a visual enthography of the local Farmer’s Market in my town. I am going to put the posts here at Alas as well, but I won’t be including the pictures here, as I always manage to jacked up Amp’s formatting. Although the ethnography starts with the Farmer’s market, what becomes clear is how the market has come to symbolize the changes in this community in particular a phenomenon I call suburban gentrification. You can come over to my blog to look at the pictures, most of which have very detailed captions and you can also look through a even more of the photos that I have posted on a Flickr stream (the link is below).

Ethnography refers to a method of studying and writing about people. Enthographers observe people in their normal settings, take notes and use thick description to explain what is going on in the environment they are observing. Ethnography is considered a qualitative method of analysis, which is just another way to say it focuses more on words than numbers or statistics. For this project, will being using pictures with detailed descriptions to show what is going on in my neighborhood. Thus, this will be a visual ethnography because of the pictures.

Here’s a little background information on the neighborhood. I think the best description of this town would be an urban suburb. I know many people think of cities and suburbs as sort of opposite neighborhoods, but this neighborhood is an older suburb, and it is big enough to have a large downtown and several neighborhoods. Unlike, many other suburbs this town was once it’s own city, and as New York City rapidly expanded it became more of a suburb. The feeling of the downtown is like that of a small city (I lived near Toledo, OH and Hartford, CT this town is a little smaller, but has a somewhat similar feeling.) The town experienced a real downturn in the 1980s, and many people abandoned the downtown, for outlying neighborhoods. The Macy’s department store, which was the anchor of the downtown went out of business, and the downtown was left in ruin. About 5-10 years ago the city decided that it would make a concerted effort to “rebuild” the downtown. Some of the small shops were moved to create an massive entertainment complex, including a movie theater, go cart track, indoor mini-golf, bowling alley, arcade, billiards room, a few restaurants, shops, and a gym. This was the beginning of the gentrification/redevelopment of the town. What many people do not realize is that a lot of these older inner ring suburbs are in similar shape to many cities. Their downtowns are suffering and the infrastructure needs upgrading. However, there may be a cost to this sort of “development.” The character of the town is definitely changing, and this is reflected in the pictures I will show you.

Let me give you a little background on the neighborhood. The median incomes for families and households were just above the average in the US in 2000 ($42,290 for this zip code and $41,994 for the US), and about 25% have a bachelor’s degree or higher and 14% live in poverty, which are also very similar to the US. Economically the neighborhood seems unremarkable, but the extremely high cost of living makes even a typical income seem low.

However, on most other demographic characteristics the town is a bit exceptional. The cost of housing is more than double the US. The area is relatively ethnically diverse. There are also many immigrants, 32% are foreign born (triple that of US average), and 39% speak a language other than English at home (double the US average). The town is also racially diverse. 56% are White, 28% are Black, 3% Asian, 8.7% are some other race, and 4% marked more than one race. Keep in mind that the Census does not consider Latinos a race, so the “Spanish origin” question is separate. About 28% of the people identified as Hispanic/Latino; based on what I know about previous data, most Latinos are identifying as White on the race question and many of the people marking some other race are Latinos.

As promised, I have uploaded pictures of the market and the neighborhood. The pictures have very long captions that help explain the significance of each picture. I’m new to Flickr, so you’ll have to excuse any oddities, including the fact that I haven’t figured out how to edit the captions, which means that have a bunch of typos. Sorry in advance. You can also go over to my site and see the captions under many of the pictures..