Presented with Museum of Chinese in America

In fall 2015, we explored how a neighborhood’s borders impact its residents. Participants joined us for an afternoon exploration in which they traced the shifting boundaries and hidden stories of Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown. Accompanied by leaders in the realm of social media documentation, we collectively walked the neighborhood’s perimeters, generating an alternative cartography of Chinatown’s invisible gateways along the themes of housing, food, contemporary art, and more by posting to Instagram with the hashtag #ChinatownEdges.

Afterward, we convened for a discussion of the neighborhood’s thresholds and the role of social media in community mapping, accompanied by a projection of the afternoon’s photos as a backdrop.

Participants: Irene Chin, artist and filmmaker of The Lost Arcade, Stephen Fan, author and curator of Suburbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape; Diya Vij, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs