E4 Youth confronts gentrification in East Austin with virtual, augmented reality
Source: Austin 360.com | Deborah Sengupta Stith
People can use a project created by students to digitally 'resurrect' sites historic to Black community
Carl Settles knows he can’t “ungentrify” East Austin, but he refuses to let the area’s rich history disappear.
Dramatic demographic shifts, skyrocketing property values and an influx of wealth have over the past decade rendered neighborhoods at the traditional heart of Austin’s Black and Hispanic communities unrecognizable to longtime residents.
Settles, founder and executive director of the nonprofit E4 Youth, is training young people to use future technologies so they can preserve the past. The students, whom he calls “digital docents,” have been creating immersive alternative and augmented reality experiences that transform East Austin into a virtual museum, bringing to life sites that were important to the community.
The project has two approaches. Through the Austin Digital Heritage Project, people will be able to visit the Harlem Theater, the Victory Grill and one of the city’s first pharmacies for Black people. Through the social media initiative What Once Was, people will be able to create their own shareable content about those sites.
The students working on the project take ownership of telling the history of marginalized people in Austin while developing valuable skills that will allow them to engage with the city’s booming tech sector.
“We can't change the fact that some of these places have been erased,” said Joseph Mayang, a senior at the University of Texas who has served as an E4 Youth digital docent. “But if we can at least educate the public, educate the community on the severity of this problem as well as the people it affects, then, by all means, at least it's a start."
Preserving Black heritage in Austin
Settles formed E4 Youth over a decade ago to build a bridge between creative high school and college students from underserved communities and the high-tech industries that are transforming their city. Investors like the St. David's Foundation, Austin Communities Foundation, United Way of Greater Austin and Glimmer Austin sustain the nonprofit. Through the years, Settles has built relationships with corporate partners such as Microsoft, Applied Materials and Google Fiber, as well as the advertising agency GSD&M.
An accomplished keyboard player who performed in clubs around Austin for 25 years, Settles also has worked as a teacher, as an e-learning software developer and in advertising. He saw the way jobs in the so-called "creative sector" — careers that include programming, advertising and media production — drive the city's growth, but "Austin's creative kids of color and poor creative kids are really ignored," he said. Around 2007, he decided to "put the whole music thing on the shelf" so he could focus on helping those kids reach their full potential.
E4 Youth has a music program and a "Creative Pathways" podcast that features interviews with technology professionals, but over the past few years, Settles has focused on storytelling and history.
As Austin City Council voted to use city resources to nurture the growth of an African American Cultural Heritage District in East Austin last fall, E4 Youth partnered with Six Square, the nonprofit that serves as keeper of the area’s history, to create content around sites within the district.
“With them actually saying that we're going to actually have a Black cultural arts district — we really want to be at the forefront of that,” Settles said.
He continued, “We're training and employing college-age, BIPOC youth to research different locations around the city (and) go out and do interviews to collect oral histories.” (BIPOC is an acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color.)
They use the stories collected to create immersive experiences related to those locations. For the digital heritage program, the students use a map-based storytelling platform that merges 360-degree photography, audio and video clips and historic photographs. While the content will be available via web browser, a virtual reality headset adds…