What is an American Main Street? Is it a memory or image that has been perpetuated through American writing and art? A real space within new urbanist town planning? Or is it a place where some are welcome and others are shunned? Perhaps it is all of the above.<\/p>\n
Distinguished Temple professor Miles Orvell<\/a> and photographer Sandy Sorlien<\/a> will take on these questions, and more, at an interdisciplinary conversation on American Main Streets at Paley Lecture Hall on 2\/21, 2:30 PM.<\/p>\n When asked about the importance of main streets to planning and sustainability, Sorlien, who has been advocating for walkable downtowns for the past decade, stated “the importance of the traditional Main Street is that it is the essential center\u00a0of a walkable Her photographic practice reflects her interest in these spaces, and she has been\u00a0photographing landscapes and townscapes since 1980. She has published her work in\u00a0Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Johns Hopkins 2002), and is finishing a book about Main Streets in America with the working title\u00a0The Heart of Town<\/em>.<\/p>\n Dr. Miles Orvell, professor of English and American Studies here at Temple, is equally interested in main streets, and his innovative, interdisciplinary research approaches questions of space and the built environment through a number of theoretical, visual, and historiographic methods.<\/p>\n In the last five years, Orvell has focused his research on the cultural meaning of His most recent book is\u00a0The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Join us to examine these real and imagined notions of American main streets with Miles Orvell and Sandy Sorlien. We hope to see you at Paley Library Lecture Hall on Thursday, February 21 at 2:30 PM to join in the conversation!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is an American Main Street? Is it a memory or image that has been perpetuated through American writing and art? A real space within new urbanist town planning? Or is it a place where some are welcome and others … Continue reading
\nvillage or urban neighborhood. You can’t have walkability without \u00a0useful destinations\u00a0 (shops, offices, civic functions), and without \u00a0walkability the place depends on cars, which further damage\u00a0walkability, at least the way we’ve designed cities for many decades.” She also adds that “It’s important to understand Main Streets as essential to great \u00a0cities, not just quaint little rural towns.\u00a0 Philadelphia’s mixed-use \u00a0corridors knit our many neighborhoods together, which then enables \u00a0transit. It’s all connected.”<\/p>\n
\nplace, and he has co-edited a collection of essays,Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Rodopi, 2009). He is an editor of the University of Pennsylvania Press series,\u00a0Architecture, Technology, Culture<\/em>,<\/a> and is co-editing
\na volume in the series,\u00a0Thinking Architecture, Technology, Culture<\/em>, based on a
\nconference he helped organize in Munich.<\/p>\n
\nMemory, Space, and Community<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(University of North Carolina Press, 2012), which
\nrecovers the complex and contradictory cultural meanings of the small town at the
\nsame time that it problematizes the icon of Main Street. He is presently working
\non a book on photography, ruins, and contemporary culture, called \u201cThe Course of
\nEmpire: American Photography and the Destructive Sublime.\u201d<\/p>\n