Welcome back! This is the first episode of Here There Be Dragons season 2. This season we're listening to Parisians tell their stories of fear and identity in the city of lights.

You might remember the horrifying news we’ve heard from Paris as terrorist attacks rocked the city. Three attacks in the past two years. The one on November 13th 2015 left 130 people dead and 413 injured. These attacks lead to increased media attention and speculation about whether France’s capital was safe, what to do from there and who to blame.

In this episode we'll hear Parisians talking about how the attacks affected them and how they see their safety in the city in their wake.

The title of the project comes from the medieval mapping technique of drawing dragons and sea monsters over unexplored or dangerous territories. Although we now find these maps to be historic figments of a medieval imagination, many of us carry these same maps around in our heads. We negotiate our identities through space, pre-emptively planning escapes and defenses should the city square off against us. But as the stories from each episode show us, monsters can also disappear as we unlearn fear and access new spaces. Or, the monsters remain and we navigate these spaces anyway.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Despite being the most diverse borough in the city, in terms of race and income, for the New Yorkers I spoke with, the Bronx stood out as the most dangerous part of the city. But as we’ve seen in previous episodes, danger is a complicated emotion, ranging from fear of violence to feeling unwelcome. In this episode, the Bronx natives I spoke with work to navigate their own identities through their borough’s reputation. Their feelings towards the Bronx reflect some of the many ways that navigating our cities force us to confront who we are.

Harlem is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the city and one of the most talked about. For some New Yorkers it represents a Mecca of black American culture and history while for others it is a dangerous neighborhood with a reputation for violence. Harlem’s powerful history makes it an icon for blackness and black culture. Our feelings towards the neighborhood, inherited or learned, are also mixed with our feelings towards blackness.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Public housing, the projects, have a reputation in New York, even to people who’ve never been to the city. They are at once a low-income family’s best housing resource and places feared for crime and violence. Rumors of crime and incidents of violence make us forget that they are also homes, that they also have history that is deeply tied to city. This side of the projects is unfamiliar to even native New Yorker who often see the buildings for their broken windows and not the histories that live within them.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Neighborhoods that see a rapid increase of wealthy tenants can become foreign to those who know its history. Displacement of long term residents and erasure of cultural landmarks can make these changes feel like a loss or even a theft. Just as violence in the first episode steals our feelings of familiarity, gentrification can do the same thing, making once familiar neighborhoods and our place in them seem strange to us.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio

Violence, the experience of it, the threat of it, the rumor of it has a tendency to make even the most familiar places foreign to us. It complicates our relationship with the city and allows fear to lurk in the back of our minds. In the episode below we’ll hear stories of New Yorkers confronting and anticipating the violence they've experienced in their city.

Originally posted on CoLab Radio