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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. 

Archiving is always political

"Observers of community archives have tended to distinguish between those politically and culturally motivated endeavours acting to counter to the absences and misrepresentations relating to a particular group or community in mainstream archives and other heritage narratives and those whose the inspiration is not so directly or overtly political or cultural, but rather is a manifestation of a shared enthusiasm for the history of a place, occupation or interest. Whilst it is an important distinction, the authors would also contend that even in the most nostalgic and leisure-orientated community archive projects there is something inherently political in individuals and communities taking an active role in the re-telling of their own history." (2013, 5)

"One of the consequences and dimensions of this commitment to independence and sustaining autonomy is the resulting dependence on the significant personal sacrifice (financial, physical and mental) of key activists and a network of volunteers, arising from great emotional and political commitment to the collections and their impacts. As we have already noted this commitment is both an enormous benefit to the archive but also a potential vulnerability with regard to the long term stability, succession and sustainability." (2013, 12)

Second wave community archiving

"[D]evelopments in the web and social technology were a significant factor in what in the UK we might term the second wave of community-based archives and heritage activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s." (2013, 13)

Search for definitions and the 'institutional gaze'

"[W]hy are “we” (and here we are referring not only to academics in archival studies, but also to archival practitioners) so focused on formulating definitions of and making distinctions between mainstream and community archives and their endeavors? For the most part, “we” are not the voices of, or even representing “community archives”– although that line is becoming more blurred with increased numbers of professionally-trained archivists coming from and returning to these communities. We are the ones applying the term “community archives” to these diverse social, political and cultural initiatives and we are the ones viewing their inception and flourishing as some kind of phenomenon or movement. But are they really, or is that our projection, possibly because we recognize how these initiatives address the shortcomings of our more traditional archival constructions and practices?" (2013, 14)