Teaching urban politics at an urban university offers pedagogical opportunities obviously not available to specialists in comparative politics or international relations. But in 30-odd years of trying to exploit those opportunities in Baltimore, I had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the results. Guest speakers, internships, and research courses had all helped to bring fragments of the city into the classroom. But something essential was missing—the same thing that was usually overlooked in most of the readings that I assigned for urban politics courses. It was the particularity of place. As chronic generalizers, social scientists are not powerfully drawn to particularity, and yet the singular experience of place is one of the inescapable dimensions of urbanism. Urban politics is placebound; urban problems express themselves differently in different cities because they are filtered through the parochialism of place. That was what I wanted to show my students.

The sense of place is immediate and collective, but my students were seeing Baltimore in ones and twos and at second-hand—through articles, the eyes of their classmates, or the generalities offered by local politicians who tried to wing it in my classroom as they might at the meeting of a political club or neighborhood association.

The politicians, for the most part, had never lived anywhere but Baltimore. Asking them to explain the character of their city to my students was like asking fish to describe water. The students themselves returned from their urban expeditions with stories of dysfunctional neighborhoods, subcultural oddities, and amusing political adventures, but their accounts of urban exotica never added up to a coherent image of the city as a whole. That would happen, I thought, only if students could somehow bring their experiences of the city directly into the classroom and use them to piece together a collectively generated story about Baltimore. The sense of place is a social creation, a product of collective story-telling. A group effort to tell a story about Baltimore might be one way for my students to recreate it.

Beyond its boundaries, Baltimore is a place best known for its off-brand accent, quirkiness (thanks to Barry Levinson), sleaze (thanks to John Waters), violence (thanks to Homicide: Life on the Street), and heroin (thanks to The Corner and The Wire). But these are partial portrayals of the city as seen mostly from the outside. The problem was to move my students beyond these platitudes of place so that they could experience the city as its natives did.

In 1998, I participated in a teamtaught course on the city that came close to achieving what I had in mind. My section of undergraduates produced the better part of a CD-ROM about Canton, a rapidly gentrifying, waterfront neighborhood. The disk carried a succession of photographs—some taken by students, some borrowed from the family albums of Cantonites or lifted from books—accompanied by the voices of local residents talking about their lives in the neighborhood. A student-narrator provided continuity.

But the project stalled when a graduating senior absconded with the zipdisks. When I recovered them, I turned them over to a computer-adept undergraduate who agreed to complete the work. He simply disappeared. His multiple email addresses (ranging from “Gothboy” to “Area 58”) should have been warning enough, even if his workin-progress haircut was not.

Though aesthetically incomplete, the CD showed how students could arrive at a collective portrayal of place. Paradoxically, it was a portrait organized around the displacement and succession occasioned by gentrification. That was one of the paradoxes of placehood. As Robert Sack (1992) observes, one's sense of place remains largely unconscious. Place becomes an explicit presence only when you leave it,¹

I resolved to make another effort, but with a different medium—video. It required mastery of only one computer software package, while the sound and images of a CD-ROM called for two. Through videotape, my students could introduce the other members of their class to their own digitized glimpses of the people and places of Baltimore, and the process of putting the glimpses together, distinguishing the essential Baltimore from the merely peculiar, might lead them toward an appreciation of the role of place in politics and policy. The video, of course, could not be about the sense of place itself. The subject was too diffuse, and since placehood usually lies just below the horizon of conscious reflection, it tends to evaporate under direct and deliberate examination. The sense of a place develops while its inhabitants are engaged with other concerns, and my students would need other concerns too.

A colleague, Norma Kriger, suggested a vehicle that might suit my purposes. As part of a consulting job, she had interviewed an entrepreneur whose van service transported inner-city workers to their otherwise inaccessible jobs in the suburbs. The business was a symptom of spatial mismatch. In Baltimore, as elsewhere, employment was growing in the suburbs, but the people who needed the jobs were in the central city, and public transportation was not adapted to reverse commuting because suburban jobs were spatially dispersed. The job site might be miles from the end of the bus line.

Making a video documentary about metropolitan transportation policy and the mismatch hypothesis would give students reason to range across Baltimore, to see the entire city if only from the window of a bus, and to talk with its transit-riders. The transit-riders, however, were not a cross-section of the local population. They were generally people who did not own cars, and in Baltimore, that usually means African Americans of low to moderate income. Race is an essential attribute of place in a city whose population is about two-thirds black. The connection also provided the title for my new course—“Baltimore: Place and Race.” It started in the spring semester, 2001, with 21 undergraduates, two graduate students, and a $2,500 grant from the Dean's office that covered the cost of a digital video camera with its appurtenances, honoraria for guest speakers, and incidental expenses.

The course was not simply about transportation. It began with a survey of the city's history, then guest speakers and readings on race relations, crime, public education, economic development, politics—and “placehood.” In case the readings on the subject were insufficient, I tried to account for my own sense of place. A native of the city, I had left Baltimore at 20. It seemed hopelessly parochial, an insular anomaly in the Northeast Corridor, a place I was determined to leave behind. I wound up on the South Side of Chicago living on contested turf, a war zone for rival gangs, where I soon began to have persistent dreams about familiar Baltimore street intersections. The city had insinuated itself into my subconscious, and it rose to the surface only when I had reached alien territory. Six years later I was back in Baltimore and happy to be here.

But why happy? The city has been described by a local newspaper reporter as a place where people don't think they are very smart (Hunter 2001). Squatting here on the East Coast between cosmopolitan New York and stately Washington, he suggests, it's like the stupid kid who wound up by mistake in the advanced class. Almost 30 years ago, native son Russell Baker (1973) had called it a city of losers, a place where people had developed a tolerance for human failings, moral and otherwise. For my students, the problem would be to make sense the city and, perhaps even more difficult, to figure out how anybody could become attached to the place.

The first writing assignment was designed to expose the students to the shortcomings of the city's transportation system, but also to the Baltimore that most of them had never seen. I picked suburban, entry-level jobs from the Sunday want-ads, matched them with starting places in the city, divided the class into teams of two or three, and told them that they had to travel by public transportation from city starting point to suburban job site and back again, and then write a short paper about the experience. In effect, they were supposed to see if there was anything entertaining about Baltimore beyond its entertainment district. A number of the students confessed, apprehensively, that they had never used public transportation anywhere.

The results were unexpected. Having been warned to stick together, travel during daylight hours, and to give up their wallets on demand, they returned safely to report the kindness of strangers. Uncertain about where they were or how to get where they were going, they had received reassurance or directions from fellow-travelers, usually without asking, and the helpful strangers were almost always African American.

A few of the papers were extraordinary. Lionel, a child of the East Baltimore ghetto, had walked the streets that he saw from the bus window, knew them and the people who lived there, told their stories and his own. He would later become a Marshall Scholar and a panelist in the discussion that followed the first public showing of our video. Harve, from the outskirts of Albany, demonstrated a remarkable capacity for eliciting confidences from complete strangers. I would later learn that he was fluent in Spanish and Korean, and that he spent his Sunday mornings as the only white player of pick-up basketball on the public courts of black West Baltimore.

The first assignment provided the cues needed for organizing the production of the video. Lionel was clearly a scriptwriter, as were two of his fellow students. Harve was an interviewer. Arka, who had read up on the history of the neighborhoods traversed by his bus, was a researcher, and others would serve as camerapersons. Anastasia, a freshman with acting experience, would be the narrator, and subsequently a scriptwriter, because she refused to speak some of her lines, including some I had written myself, unless she could revise them. Her judgments were usually sound.

After reading about metropolitan transportation policy and hearing from a local transit policy analyst, we were ready to block out the script, which was divided by subject matter into six (later five) parts. Each of the three scriptwriters was to coordinate two production teams that were responsible for two sections of the video. The scriptwriters and I produced a draft. The class reviewed it, revised it, and identified the kinds of shots that we needed to illustrate the words. A staff member from the computer center, improbably a Near Eastern Studies graduate student and film enthusiast, delivered some basic instruction on camera technique and walked us through a software program for editing digital video. Soon I was receiving daily visits from students asking to take the camera out. Brittany and Frieda turned out to be one of the most gifted and enterprising camera crews. Sometimes they would disappear with the camcorder for so long that I would consider calling the police. I began to travel with the students to provide transportation, protection, or direction—maybe too much direction. Lionel had taken to calling me Professor Scorcese.

In class, we began to review the bits of video captured by the production teams. The students gave their favorite shots titles for future reference—Guy-Sitting-On-Cinderblock, Man-In-Wheelchair. Like the majority of our shots, we never used either one of them. Hours and hours of videotaping were reduced in the end to 13½ minutes. Video is a ruthless medium because it requires a dedication to storyline so heartless that you must be willing to sacrifice even your favorite segments to the integrity of the message. For the same reason, it is also a useful medium through which students can develop intellectual discipline to stick to the issue at hand.

But the single-mindedness of the enterprise did not rule out serendipity. We made a lucky find in Ralph Moore, a local activist and associate director of an anti-poverty advocacy group. He was one of our guest speakers, and the organizer of a rally for public transportation outside the Statehouse in Annapolis. The Governor's transportation budget happened to come before the General Assembly shortly after we had begun taping. The nighttime rally was not much visually (the lighting was terrible), but Moore's impassioned oratory provided a spine for the beginning and the end of our story.

In between, there was Antoinette Shelton, the entrepreneur who owned the van service. She was happy to be interviewed and to allow us to take up space in her vans while we interviewed her customers. More important, she personified the solution to the problem set out in the video. Laid off by a local manufacturer in 1995 after 21 years of service, she had started the van service to provide herself with a job and to put jobs within reach of dozens of innercity residents who might otherwise have been unemployed.

Finally, there were the hackers. In other cities, their counterparts are often called jitney drivers. In Baltimore, where legal cabs are sometimes reluctant to pick up black males, these illegal operators provide cheap door-to-door transportation, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Our two graduate students, Jean (sociology) and Blake (political science) managed to track down and interview some of the elusive hackers and their customers. In Baltimore, you hail hackers with a distinctive hand gesture. Extending your arm roughly parallel to the ground, you point your index finger downward toward the street and move your hand rapidly up and down. For a legal cab, your finger points skyward and remains motionless.

The semester ended before the video. Less than half had been edited, and only one piece of background music had been dubbed in—Nina Simone singing Randy Newman's “Oh Baltimore.” Frieda and Brittany had discovered a splendid, but gritty, graffito of the city's name on a railroad overpass that matched the mood of the music perfectly.

Though I still had control of all the videotapes, the video, like the CDROM that preceded it, seemed to end without being finished. But the video had taken on a life of its own, which it owed in large part to the efforts of Jeff, who had emerged as the class technical adviser. Though he was double-majoring in physics and computer science, his ambition was to go to film school, and he was hard at work on a video of his own entitled, with scientific straightforwardness, Jeff Makes a Movie. It would later be accepted for a New York film festival. In his apartment, he had the computer equivalent of an 18-wheeler with all the software needed to edit and produce a video. He and I met there once or twice a week through the summer and into the fall semester to match Anastasia's narration with the pictures and words collected by the class, and then add background music where appropriate. We also did some “second-unit” filming to fill the gaps in our video archive. By summer's end, Jeff was wearing hard plastic sleeves on both forearms, treatment for repetitive stress injury brought on by too much mouse-clicking. But we would finish Sick Transit in time for Thanksgiving.

It has not appeared in any New York film festivals, yet it served its purposes reasonably well. The students got to know a Baltimore that most had never seen before, and maybe they managed to capture something of the city's placehood in the video. As it turned out, the project was as much about race as about transit. One of the lessons of placehood was that race colors almost everything about Baltimore, but in this border city, race does not bring out the raw animosities and hard alignments that form elsewhere. Baltimoreans—black and white—tend to sidestep stereotypes. All but one of the people who speak on the tape are African American, but they are striking for their heterogeneity. Though some are exasperated, nobody seems angry, and a few are funny, which may be Baltimore's way of expressing anger. They convey the impression that they do not take themselves quite so seriously as the residents of Washington, say. Baltimore, after all, is not a global city. It does not belong to the world. It belongs to the Baltimoreans, and they seem inclined to keep it that way. They accept the place for the provincial city that it is, and they live here with the unstudied grace of people making the best of a mediocre situation.

For the students, the important lessons of the course were not about urban transportation or the technical business of shooting and editing video. The project created a temporary learning community whose purpose was to achieve the clarity of thought and expression necessary to construct and convey a compelling and comprehensible message. Though the students wrote their own individual research papers about Baltimore, some of which were quite good, the making of the video required more intellectual discipline than any term paper. Students not only had to think and write clearly, they had to be sufficiently self-concious about their story telling to explain to their classmates why their version was better than any of the proposed alternatives. That may have been the course's chief pedagogical achievement. The students managed to pare a semester of work down to 13 and a half minutes of video. Whether or not the class succeeded in understanding Baltimore's placehood, its members certainly achieved their own collective sense of place. I receive regular email messages from former students reminiscing about Sick Transit, and inquiring about the public reception of the video. In this afternoon's mail there is a long letter from one of the scriptwriters, Judd, who has abandoned culinary school in New York for a graduate program in anthropology, and wants advice about doing field work—in Baltimore.