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Place-making practices refer to the ways in which people create and define physical spaces as meaningful and significant through their everyday activities and social interactions.[1] In Ethnography, the study of these practices is often referred to as ‘ethnography as place-making,’ which involves the exploration of the cultural meanings and practices that shape the physical and social environments in which people live. This can include examining how people create and maintain social boundaries, how they express their identities and values through the built environment,[2] and how they negotiate power and control over the spaces they inhabit.

This place in Gröpelingen is made a place through the interaction of the people tending to the urban gardening project. 

1. Pink 2008, 178ff. 

2. See: urbanization 

3. Pink 2008, 190. 

Assessing the PM2.5 impact of biomass combustion in megacity Dhaka, Bangladesh - PubMed (nih.gov)

This article is about crop burning in Dhaka, Bangladesh and attempts to figure out if there is more or less harmful PM2.5 particulate air pollution caused by either fossil fuels or biomass, and during which season is one or the other higher in the air pollution it produces. During monsoon season, fossil fuels lead in the most PM2.5 releases at 44.3%. When it is not monsoon season and is the winter season, the percentages are way higher for PM2.5 air particulate releases at 41.4% for the remainder of the year. Across the globe, there are now people stepping up to uncover the true and real environmental and health impacts this harmful particulate byproduct causes in different parts of the world and with differring weather conditions than what we see in North Carolina. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351209404_PM25_Emissions_from_…;

This study is set in South/Southeast Asia and uncovering that, when trying to count the percentages of PM2.5 put off during biomass, the true amount of emissions were being gravely undercalculated. Specifically rice straw burning becuase the amount burned varied so much because of different harvest and burning practices that it just wasn't taken into consideration. What this study does is go bottom up using these strategies: "subnational spatial database of rice-harvested area, region-specific fuel-loading factors, region, and burning-practice-specific emission and combustion factors, including literature-derived estimates of straw and stubble burned"(Lasko et al. 2021, 1). 

In this essay the authors have highlighted some of the stakeholders in the fight against industrial biomass operations as members of the surrounding community who live with these operations as close as their own backyards, and experience the environmental pollution directly everyday. They highlighted Belinda Joyner, a resident of Northhampton County, and an environmental activist who rose to defend her community and their lands and livelihoods due to expanding hazardous infrastructures such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Enviva power plant. Other stakeholders besides activists and organziers such as Belinda include the people of Northampton County who attend hearings with government officials and take a stance agaisnt pollution, as well as organizations such as the Dogwood Alliance. The county is predominantly Black and working class, one of several in North Carolina that bear the brunt of exploittion and pollution by powerful biomass manufacturers such as Drax and Enviva.

This timeline essay provides more examples from recent years of community responses and collective action for environmental justice.

The development of both pipelines and CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) in eastern NC have prompted action from justice organizations such as the North Carolina Environmnetal Justice Network (NCEJN). To address the ongoing problem of CAFOs, NCEJN has provided a number of resources on their site, as well as ways to take action by signing a petition to stop the use of hog waste as fertilizer. Prior to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) being canceled in 2020, NCEJN played a role in organizing protests and taking legal actions- in conjunction with many other community member and activist groups- against Dominion and Duke Energy, the companies responsible for the ACP's construction. 

Before our tour at the Weldon Springs Interpretative Center, we were asked not to take any pictures of our tour guide nor of other employees. To be recorded publically, they would have had to obtain an official media clearance. The photo points to these limits, with the metal arch obscuring the group as it listens to the guide. In consequence, there are at least two aspects that should be retained in our written record. First were the upbeat style and delivery of our male guide, that shaped our experience of the exhibition. Our group asked him about his educational background and he briefly explained the process to become a certified interpreter. Second is the fact that we were being accompanied and followed around by a group of about six representatives of the Department of Energy. Our group came to agree that this number and associated costs are significant, pointing towards the attention that our (probably usual?) international group of scholars drew. It might have been curiosity or slight hostility, it's hard to tell, also because we didn't ask them directly. The image certainly captures some lessons and dynamics what it means to visit an educational fieldsite with a larger group in contrast to the 'lone fieldworker.'

The Tribute to the Mallinckrodt Uranium Workers is perhaps the most reflexive display in the Interpretive Center at Weldon Springs. By listing the names of the Mallinckrodt employees and acknowledging their sacrifices, the tribute at least intimates how the toxic process of uranium refinement, including the secrecy and deceit that surrounded it, impacted the lives of the local community. And yet, given the juxtaposition of the exhibit next to the "Timeline of the Nuclear Age" and an encompassing display on "The Process" of refinement, the critical nuance of this quotidian, human level is muddled by both the macro events of history and the micro details of scientific practice. It is also worth noting that in the online tour of the exhibit, the purpose and the meaning of the tribute bears no mention all. An image of the arch is provided, but not a single bit of context as to what it signifies. Instead, what we are given access to is only the timeline, the process description, and a romanticized version of the Mallinckrodt story taken from a tour guide that was written in 1959.