"Mapping Salt Lake City" is an interactive, community-written website that will "map" SLC's many and conflicting communities and histories. It’s a project based on Rebecca Solnit’s book “Infinite City,” which maps many of the communities that have made up San Francisco. The purpose of “Mapping Salt Lake” is to create a continually evolving, community-written narrative of our city in which interest
ed community members and scholars, writers and artists can be in dialogue. We know that history is not a monolithic narrative, so “Mapping Salt Lake City” will reflect that, by showing how the valley’s various communities have overlapped and intersected. The impact of the site will be its continual evolution: over the years, as more people and writers add text, the site will change, expand and grow to accommodate the information, becoming a reflection of the community’s diverse perspectives. There are three ways that, if you are interested in being a part of this project, you can contribute to this site:
1. By inviting as many people as you can to like this page.
2. By writing an essay (or giving us a link to a particular essay you've already written) about one of the SLC neighborhoods about which you're interested. It could be a short personal meditation about place, it could be a historical overview of a particular community that once lived there or still lives there. It can use images or video interviews or even be a video essay. It can be a map that you create on Google Maps or Google Earth. By adding to a section of our website we're calling "This Was Here." "This Was Here" is a place for the community to post images of and 200-500 word anecdotes about landmarks that once were here and either no longer exist, or have changed. This is a place to post old letters, historical documents, photos or even recipes: anything that evokes this city for you. "This Was Here" is for people to create their own "mini-archive" of the city. To give you some ideas about what to write, how to submit, and what our reading periods are, please visit our site at www.mappingslc,org. Thanks for reading and sharing, and I hope you will all consider contributing to "Mapping Salt Lake City." Best,
Paisley Rekdal
Professor of Creative Writing
University of Utah