Page:“Trench Town Rock”： Reggae Music, Landscape Inscription, and the Making of Place in Kingston, Jamaica.pdf/5

Urban Studies Research Jamaica still originates from the inner-city communities of Downtown Kingston.

3. Exploring Trench Town’s Landscape Inscriptions

More and more writers are starting to view “place” as a product of sociocultural processes   rather than simply a bounded geographic space. The latter accords primacy to the spatial economy of cities and places attention on the logistics of urban policy, planning, and administration. The former, views cities and their associated landscapes, as spaces of representation or narratives that are equally mediated and shaped by a combination of cultural, political and economic forces.

Increasingly, place is being seen as both constitutive of, and constituted by social relations. Massey argues that places are constantly being materially and imaginatively constructed by diﬀerent human agents and actors and therefore do not have single, unique identities. Instead, places are full of internal conflicts and are highly contested. If this is true, then more attention should therefore be given to individuals’ attachment to and perception of particular places. Places are therefore viewed as sites of intersecting social relations, identities, meanings, and collective memory.

Landscape inscriptions, like any other spatial strategy and form, allow us to elicit, if even partially, the importance of place to people’s sense of identity. This paper thus seeks to build on this growing body of literature on placing-making and place politics, by looking at the various inscriptions seen throughout Trench Town’s landscape and examining their role in conjuring up positive images of the community’s rich heritage as the birthplace of reggae music as opposed to run-down violent-riddled inner-city community. The paper is informed by substantial qualitative and ethnographic research extending between November 2008 and July 2010. Numerous trips were made to the community over the time period wherein mostly informal interviews were carried out with residents of the community. Interviews were also conducted with representatives at the Trench Town Culture Yard Museum and a number of other community-based and faith-based organisations. Voluntary work was also done at the Trench Town Comprehensive High School by the two researchers in Fall 2009. This provided the researchers an opportunity to engage with staﬀ and students (most of whom resided outside Trench Town in neighbouring innercity communities), to get their impression of the community particularly in terms of its association with crime and violence.

Using Trench Town as a case in point, the remainder of this paper explore the role of landscape incriptions in the social construction of place, power, and identity. These inscriptions (whether murals, monuments, graffiti, or signscapes) are conceived here as texts and are seen as innately communicative and encoded with meanings. These meanings can be “read” or interpreted as signs about the particular values, identity, beliefs, and practices evocative of the place and its associated past. However, texts are replete in so far as they are grounded in a locally defined social context. In order to understand a text, the reader has to understand the particular context that gave rise to such text. If read properly, landscape inscriptions can uncover the cultural politics of place, as well as the various uneven geographies of power and identity. Landscape inscriptions are therefore innately political and are mediated spatially through social codes and hegemonic practices  to produce particular senses of place and meanings.



Trench Town. Source: Cruse, 2008.
 * Mural of Bob Marley seen along the Spanish Town Road,

3.1. Murals as Landscape Inscriptions. Murals are a dominant feature of Trench Town’s current landscape. We observed more than 15 diﬀerent murals while in the study area which were all evocative of the community’s association with reggae music and past reggae icons. These murals were strategically placed at the entrance of the community and along the major thoroughfare of Collie Smith Drive. Along Spanish Town Road (which is the major corridor leading from Downtown Kingston to Spanish Town, Jamaica’s second largest city) is a mural bearing the figure of Bob Marley with the caption “Welcome to Trench Town: Home of the Legendaries” (Figure 3). In the background Marley is seen smiling and playing his guitar. Below, in smaller sized captions is an incomplete listing of some famous individuals who came from the community.

This mural can simply be interpreted as a conscious eﬀort by residents of the community to distinguish themselves from neighbouring communities. Anyone driving along Spanish Town Road without prior knowledge of the area would easily pass the community without even noticing it. Unlike their more well-oﬀ counterparts in upper St. Andrew, most of these communities do not have proper street signs or clearly defined (formal) boundaries and are generally labelled as “downtown,” “ghetto,” or “West Kingston”. However, a deeper reading of the text sees a landscape filled with inscriptions reminiscent of the community’s heritage, a past that distinguishes Trench Town and its residents from other communities in Downtown Kingston. The painting of