Guidebooks as Community Service

Guidebooks as Community Service P a u l G r o th Department of Geography University of California, Berkeley 94720-4740 In 1953, George Stewart, an English literature professor at the Uni­ versity of California, Berkeley, crossed the United States on U.S. Highway 40. He drove the entire width of the United States, from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California. Along the way, he took snapshots of visual clues to the local cultural and so­ cial life that he observed—all this, just as U.S. 40 was about to be replaced by Interstate 70. For the 90 most intriguing sites that he photographed, Stewart then did on-site and library research. In the resulting book, U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America (Stewart 1953), each two-page spread presents one of Stewart's snap­ shots, and on the remaining page and a half, a cogent essay interpreting what he saw in the picture. The essays are grouped into regional chapters, each introduced with a longer essay discussing general historical and cultural themes and introducing the new physiographic and cultural regions. For this, and much other geo­ graphical writing, the Association of American Geographers gave Stewart an honor award. In 1980, with a field-trip guidebook modeled very directly on George Stewart's classic U.S. 40, 1began a community-service exer­ cise for a large lecture class in the history of the American cultural landscape at the University of California, Berkeley. For this selfguided introduction to Oakland, California, I wrote a 160-page, photocopied guidebook to the ordinary, everyday urban landscape elements of the city. I modeled my title, also, on Stewart's book, ending up with the excessively long name A.C. 15: Oakland as a CrossSection of America's Urban Cultural Landscapes (a Visit by Bus, Foot, and Armchair) (Groth 1980). Twenty years later, that 1980 Oakland self-guided tour, which I expected to use for only a few years, is still very much in use. It is sold at the somewhat usurious price of 14 dollars as a required, pho­ tocopied reader for the 100 students in the survey lecture course. The core of the course was invented by John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the well-known writer and environmental philosopher, and origi­ nal publisher and editor of Landscape magazine. The course historically introduces whatever the dominant Euro-American cul­ tures in the U.S. have put on the ground since the early 1600s, especially those landscape ideas and elements that have had longlasting effects and can still be seen in the present. The lectures introduce fields, farmsteads, roads, highways, and small towns, along with the urban elements of street plans, lots, ordinary houses, parks, and work places. The course strongly emphasizes visual lit­ eracy, that is, learning to see the built environment as evidence—albeit partial and complicated—of social and cultural his­ tory, and of built patterns that are very widespread in the United States. The field trip project stemmed from a low teaching budget and the need to inject some urban material into Jackson's largely rural course. Even in 1980, before the later budget cuts endemic to Cali­ fornia, the course's sponsoring department couldn't afford to offer discussion sections (and in those sections, to take a personally guided field trip with a teaching assistant). Yet, field work seemed essen­ tial. The students today, as then, are usually juniors and seniors, about one-third majoring in American studies, one-third from ge­ ography, and one-third in environmental design. Most are from suburban backgrounds, many of them from southern California. Ironically, for a university in such an urban setting, our Berkeley students are more knowledgeable and comfortable with rural things than with urban things. They seem both frightened and ignorant about cities—any city, even Los Angeles or San Francisco, except for a few night clubs and department stores. Another challenge of the course is that the students need to learn not only how to see specific individual elements but also how to see generic landscape elements in order to transfer what they see in Oakland to other parts of the United States. As is so...