CURATED SPACES Layered SPURA Spurring Conversations Through Visual Urbanism Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani A practice of “visual urbanism” is how I describe my use of engaged research, visual projects, exhibitions, and community collaborations to suggest new ways to see the layered, and contested, city. Layered SPURA is my long-term collaborative and visual urbanist project about a place that can be hard to visualize, its complex- ity and controversies even harder to understand. On New York’s Lower East Side, Essex, Delancey, Grand, and Willett Streets form the boundaries of a site of ongo- ing contestation. It is a place marked by parking lots, several high-rise apartment buildings, and many underdeveloped blocks, an anomaly for Lower Manhattan. This parcel of land is located at the potent intersection of the historically Jewish, Puerto Rican, and Chinese Lower East Sides. This is SPURA, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. When my students take their irst walk through SPURA, there is always bewilderment and a shock of recognition. There is a similar response when I take others on my guided walks through SPURA. You’ve passed by, passed through, turned away from this place many times, but not known its story. In 2008, I began the Layered SPURA project, and the accompanying SPURA City Studio class, exploring the everyday experience of housing, urban renewal, and urban change. I created a hybrid approach of pedagogy and activism, art and research, involving students and collaborating with community organizations and activists. Each year I teach the City Studio course in The New School’s Urban Pro- grams, and help students to engage in ethnographic, visual, archival, and participa- Radical History Review Issue 114 (Fall 2012) DOI 10.1215/01636545-1598078 © 2012 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 206