Text

Background: This introduces a geospatial art-science method translating oral histories and embodied memories of home and neighborhood into walkable paths and hydrological gardens of healing. The approach is grounded in more than a decade of walking-based, participatory landscape research and university teaching, and extends the Mellon-funded Black HerStory Initiative, where I served as co-Principal Investigator designing city-wide interpretive trails, signage, and raingardens.

Objectives: To demonstrate a living co-dependent art and science interdisciplinary multisensory research method linking art, poetry, public health, stormwater engineering, and memory preservation; and to initiate an international interdisciplinary walking-lab network.

Methods: “Postholing method” from Stephen Sennet. Combined with the Method of Loci. Tested in collaboration with The Griot Museum of Black History, through “walkie-talkie” sessions with an elder whose life story reflects structural histories of landscape and housing inequity. The method is organized around three human “feet”:

Body Feet—biometric gait, physical health, emotional patterning

Poetic Feet—scansion, breath, rhythm, narrative meter

Architectural Feet—measurement, slope, hydrological design

Results: Participants generated speculative walking-paths water-paths—micro-watersheds, raingarden sites, and bioretention corridors—linking personal memory to local hydrological opportunity and public-health considerations. In peer revied presentation of my research, medical researchers in the geo-spatial community speculated that this method could improve public health, possibly counteract Alzheimer’s, and express desire to work together. Curators and community partners continue to link experimental interest to research support.

Conclusion: Walking becomes both preservation and prognosis: a tool for ecological repair, social connection, and community health through poetic artistic expression.