Walking in Place: Thinking in Footsteps and Frames

In late 2022, during a visit to Amsterdam, I began developing Walking in Place – Memorializing Everyday Places Through Extraordinary Historical Perspectives, a film and community archival project that explores the intersections of place, policy, and memory. The project is an extension of my PhD research at the Amsterdam School of Planning, which examines how urban renewal policy interventions and urban development decisions produce precarity and displacement in some neighborhoods, while providing preservation and protections in others. At its core, Walking in Place invites participants to walk in place with me as they share memories of the past, experiences of the present, and reflections for the future.

The project asks a simple but profound question: what does it mean to live in, or to be displaced from, a place that has shaped who you are? Through oral history, archival research, and collaborative filmmaking, Walking in Place seeks to honor, and at times reclaim, the stories embedded in our built environment. When people are displaced, their narratives, like the physical traces of their presence, are often erased or rebranded. This project makes visible how displacement is both deeply personal and widely shared.

Since its launch, Walking in Place has evolved through collaborations with community members and partners in my hometown of Des Moines and my adopted second home, Amsterdam. In 2023, I created the first short film in the series, Walking in Place :1434 Walker Street, in partnership with ArtForce Iowa, a Des Moines-based arts nonprofit. The film was first screened at the Polk County Housing Trust Fund’s Affordable Housing Symposium (2023), and has since been included in exhibitions and screenings, including the AAG Shorts program in Detroit (2025) and the Community Crate: Making Central Iowa Home exhibit (2025).

:1434 Walker Street centers on Don Brown, a Des Moines-based jazz musician whose family home was demolished during the construction of Interstate 235 in the 1960s. Don and I previously collaborated on my first documentary film, Margins of Error, where he created the original music soundtrack. What began as a conversation about music quickly unfolded into a collaborative filmmaking process. Don shared not only his story but also a rich archive of family photographs and home videos his parents had created. In many ways, Don had been waiting decades to make this film. His son contributed an original poem for the opening, his parents were credited as producers and directors for their archival work featured in the film, and Don himself had final say in shaping the outcome.

This collaboration transformed Walking in Place into more than a film; it became a collective act of memory and placekeeping. The lot where Don’s family home once stood is now part road and part parking lot, yet through film, poetry, and music spanning three generations, the story of :1434 Walker Street endures.

Since its completion, 1434 Walker Street has opened new creative directions for me. Documentary filmmaking and poetry have increasingly become spaces for self-expression, resistance, and the collecting of othering stories in urban landscapes, filling a gap that I could not fill using traditional research outlets alone. Through this process, I’ve learned that I think in pictures and stories, and that filmmaking allows me to bring together research, poetic narrative tendencies, personal wonderings, and my desire to expand how I show up in communities as a researcher, all in a different register.

Building on Walking in Place as both community archive and collaborative storytelling practice, I am now in post-production on four essay films:

Views from the Garage and Other Places

Set against the backdrop of Downtown Des Moines’s endless parking garages, I appear in front of the camera channel switching, meditating on enclosure and the spatial choreography of (im)possibility in everyday life.

Oddkin – Landscapes of Hope

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this film explores encounters with nature through urban and suburban spaces shaped by selective wilding, reflecting on uncontrolled suburban expansion and the loss of natural habitats. It considers how hope and connection can emerge within these altered environments.

Hooyo, Meet Me on the Corner of Here and There

“Hooyo” means mother in Somali. The film stars my 84-year-old mother and tells the story of the more than 200 households, mostly East African refugees, who were displaced from River Hills Apartments in 2018. Located in Downtown Des Moines, River Hills was a project-based Section 8 housing development bult in the 1960s that transitioned to market-rate housing after a change in ownership. Blending personal and collective histories, the film reimagines the space between staying and displacement.

Capitol Perspectives – Southeast Bottoms (Then and Now)

Inspired by a painting of the same name by Iowa-born painter, William Palmer, Southeast Bottoms2 is a film that takes the form of a poem, a love letter to the Iowa State Capitol, written without expectation of reply. Both offering and invocation, the film wonders whether the Capitol can answer with a commitment to a more just future for ALL Iowans. 

Walking in Place continues to grow as both a film and a community archival project, bridging personal histories with broader conversations about housing, urban history, urban planning, memory and placekeeping practices. By walking in place with others, I hope to contribute to preserving stories that might otherwise be lost, and to highlight how the policies of the past continue to shape our present and future landscapes.

I thank my PhD supervisors at the Amsterdam School of Planning, Prof. Tuna Tasan-Kok and Prof. Maria Kaika, and my long-time creative partners and friends at ArtForce Iowa for helping me make space to create and step out of my comfort zone. I am also deeply grateful to everyone I have and continue to encounter along the way who continue to make Walking in Place a collective practice of care and radical hope. And to my hometown of Des Moines, thank you for being the place that holds it all together. There’s a reason my mother doesn’t want to leave you. My love for you makes it impossible not to critique you and demand more, because you, if any place can and should, hold the possibility of being different and just, even when it feels like everything conspires against it. Always imagining what might be possible here, in your fields of concrete and manicured lawns.