(amb - typing)
(amb under: office)

DAVID SCOBEY: It's 11:50, and I'm finishing up some e-mail business in my office. I'm getting ready to go over to Broadway Park to meet a team of design students from the University and a class of 1st and 2nd graders from a local elementary school. The park is by the Huron River in the old industrial area of Ann Arbor. It's cut off by the railroad tracks and underused, and we're asking the kids and the design students to redesign it, to imagine what they would like it to look like. They're part of a partnership between the University and the city schools that is studying the history and landscape of this part of the city. My hope is that they'll get a chance to actually turn Broadway Park into something new, maybe a kid's play space, maybe an outdoor classroom.

It's part of a bigger initiative I'm working on called the Arts of Citizenship, a program exploring the role of the arts and humanities in civic life.

(amb - computer boing)
(amb - grab my briefcase and hit the road)
(amb - train horn)
(amb under: Broadway Park)

It's about quarter of one, and I'm in the park at the edge of the river. I have this feeling I always get right before the guests are scheduled to come for a dinner party. Is anyone going to show up? And how will it turn out?

This kind of work is a strange thing for a historian to be doing. It's very different from the round of classes and office hours and conferences and solitary work in front of the word processor that someone like me usually does. It puts me into conversations with very different people: first graders, teachers, city officials, community activists. And it forces me to ask: What does an academic historian have to contribute to community life?

My journey to Broadway Park began 18 months ago, when I helped organize a celebration of the arts and humanities at the University. I was describing a program of speakers to a board of community leaders, and one said, "All that's well and good for you academics. You need to hear people talk. But why don't you do something practical as well? Just what is it that the arts and humanities have to contribute to the way people live?" I've been trying to answer that question ever since.

One of the speakers we brought in that year was Ken Burns, the historical filmmaker. The auditorium was full, and after his talk, a man walked down the aisle and passed a jar of jam up to Burns. He said, "I made this for you, and I want to give it to you as a gesture of thanks for everything you've given me." I have to say that what I immediately felt was envy. No one ever gave me homemade jam for a lecture about American history! Something about Burns' films had touched this man in a way that is very hard for academics to touch our students and our readers.

I started the Arts of Citizenship Program to try to create that exchange between the university and the public, to figure out a good answer to the question, What do the arts and humanities have to contribute to community life? In the past year, we've been working with schoolteachers, planning public art projects, teaching community history, creating websites. And now here I am waiting for the 1st and 2d graders.

(amb - car driving)

Its 2:15 and I'm driving back now, heading up the hill to campus.

(amb - blinker)

That was a really interesting field trip. The landscape design students and the 1st and 2nd graders tramped around the park for an hour, exploring and brainstorming. Some very interesting stuff happened. Broadway Park has always been a refuge for homeless people because much of it is hidden by trees, the railroad tracks, the bridge over the Huron. In the Great Depression its nickname was Hobo Park. And the places the kids liked best today were the same places where homeless people leave their coffee cups, mattresses, and clothes-the places they come back to at night. Those places were fascinating to the kids and a little disquieting to the grownups accompanying them.

My training as a cultural historian gives me some tools for making sense of these connections between kids and the hardcore homeless. I think about Huck Finn and children's fantasies of escaping into a world of adventure and secrecy. I think about the ways inequality and poverty get mapped across the landscape of the community we live in and how some spaces become leftover for the people who are treated as leftover in our society. I also know the way design can be used to include some and exclude others. But how can I make that knowledge useable to this community, to the whole community?

(amb - blinker)

Its 8:20 in the evening. And I keep thinking about the question of hiding places, children's play, and homelessness-about Broadway Park. This field trip raised some of the toughest issues about community life. Can our project help create an alternative for the homeless men here to sleeping in the corners of a cold riverside park? Can this park be a place that accommodates children, visiting classes, and homeless men?

I have absolutely no idea where this project will lead over the next few months, what possibilities and conflicts it will create. Not knowing makes me feel exhilarated and uncomfortable. But I'm already struck by the interchange that this sort of work makes happen. It's because I'm out there with the kids that I face these questions at all, testing abstract ideas against the friction of the real world. But it's not just about what I'm getting; I want this work to make a difference. I want to bring the tools of the classroom out for public use, helping the community ask questions, make unexpected links, imagine what could be. The wager I'm making as a public scholar is that the tools of the humanities, the tools of academia, make a difference in Broadway Park. Winning that wager would be like getting my jar of homemade jam.