Routes to Roots: Searching for the Streetlife of Memory

Routes to Roots: Searching for the Streetlife of Memory looks at the challenge of creating a driving guide whose aim is to enable visitors to discover and experience the folklife of a region previously unused by visitors, a region whose folklife, while vital and significant, is now often invisible even to residents’ eyes. The driving guide’s primary purpose was to encourage community revitalization through cultural tourism, but it evolved beyond that into a way of telling the region’s industrial story though its folklife sites, events, and activities. The author explores how members of the interdisciplinary project team influenced each other as the project progressed through the stages of conception, research, and design and how the resulting travel guide both fulfilled and reinterpreted the project’s original mission.