URBAN PASTORALS

URBAN PASTORALSURBAN PASTORALSURBAN PASTORALS

URBAN PASTORALS

URBAN PASTORALSURBAN PASTORALSURBAN PASTORALS
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Submit Work

Urban Pastorals

Urban PastoralsUrban PastoralsUrban Pastorals

Facilitating conversations among Somerville-area communities and individuals by building awareness of our shared environments

ABOUT URBAN PASTORALS

A participatory project, Urban Pastorals brings together Somerville-area residents, workers, volunteers, and visitors in small acts of attending to, and tending, our shared ecosystems.

Urban Pastorals aims to facilitate conversations about the past, present, and future of the city of Somerville by building awareness, reengaging the commons as a vehicle for inclusion, and contributing responses—reflections, poetry, photography, drawings, sound, and other media—to an interactive online map of the city.

What new ways of mapping the city can we imagine together? A map not of boundaries but of relationships.

By giving form to our experiences of shared space, might we collectively discover the city's potentialities, its possible futures, our relation to the city's history, and our capacity for building dialogue across our various perspectives?

Urban Pastorals asks:

  • How can practices of attention and care help us imagine and build justice, inclusion, and belonging in Somerville, among the diverse humans and heritages of our city, and between human and nonhuman life forms? 


  • What future relations to our built and natural environments can we imagine and then begin building together? 


  • How can we use the arts and creativity to facilitate this process of imagining together?



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“Urban Pastorals” is co-sponsored by the Racial Justice Collaborative (Diane Wong, founder and leader) and the Somerville Community Growing Center. 

This project is supported in part by a Public Humanities/Community Engagement Grant from the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.


Copyright © 2025 Urban Pastorals - All Rights Reserved.


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