A Grad Student Walks into a Public Meeting

Wraparound cover of Boston City Hall, 8.5" x 11"

For this week’s assignment, I attended a public hearing held by the Boston Landmarks Commission. Originally, I had attended about an hour of a different meeting about civic design. I thought this could align with what we were learning in the program, but when I got there, it turns out the meeting was between developers and what seemed like city officials hashing out the details of some apartment developments underway. Luckily, I was there was there with Hassan. Otherwise, I would have felt even more awkward than I did. The meeting was in a very small room, and it felt like a private meeting that we were intruding on, as opposed to a public meeting. No one greeted or even acknowledged us. As I browsed the Boston city website for other meetings to attend, I noticed the Boston Landmarks Commission meeting was just starting, and it offered the opportunity for public testimony. So, Hassan and I rushed to this meeting to find that other students were also there.

My view of the Boston Landmarks Commission meeting

The meeting took place on Tuesday, October 8th, from 6 - 7pm, on the 9th floor, room 900, of the Boston City Hall. Typically, the Boston Landmarks Commission, who are all volunteers appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the City Council, convene twice a month to discuss matters related to the preservation of Boston’s historical landmarks. During the meeting I attended, the agenda included reviewing and ratifying the previous meeting’s minutes, reviewing and voting on whether four properties should be eligible for Community Preservation Act funding, and receiving updates on the development of an expedited process to review pending landmark submissions. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I attended this meeting by pure chance. The meeting I was intending to report on was not engaging in the slightest, and fortunately, this one was happening in the same place at just the right time. 

I chose to represent the meeting in the form of a zine because I was drawn to the idea of a very D-I-Y, anything goes approach. It seemed like a good exercise in creativity to discard everything we had been learning about technique and composition. 

First idea from the tourist-oriented zine

At first, I was going to create a zine for tourists to understand the process of how the landmarks they may have visited become landmarks to begin with, but I felt like in doing so, I strayed away from my experience of the public meeting and ended up wanting to explain the Boston Landmarks Commission in detail. Also, I realized I was creating a zine that was really similar to the one we saw in class, and I didn’t want to create one that just looked like a copy of our example in a different context. So, my approach became creating a zine that was a linear, first-person narrative about my experience as a student, completing an assignment, who has never attended a public meeting. 

Zine storyboard

With this new approach in mind, I realized I had to start with a rough storyboard to figure out how many pages I would need. For my previous idea, I just started drawing pages that came to mind, but I quickly realized that in my anything-goes approach, I at least needed some structure. Once I sketched out all of the pages I wanted to include, making sure to incorporate all of the rules for the assignment, it was much easier to tackle actually creating the zine. Overall, I ended up drawing the first idea that popped into my head about what to include on each page. It was kind of liberating to brainstorm pages on a whim while still being intentional. Because of my approach, there’s not a whole lot to elaborate on, but I will go into some detail about the more exciting parts of my zine. 

Mission to find the meeting

I knew I wanted to keep with the D-I-Y approach, but I still wanted to make the zine engaging in any way that I could. When we first got to City Hall, Hassan and I were kind of confused because the door we were instructed to go to was locked, there was no signage to direct us any which way, and so we had to find our own way down the halls to find help anywhere we could. It was a mission. That’s why I chose to create the page with flaps representing the various doors we had to go to/through in order to find our way to the public meetings. Instead of just drawing this experience or writing it out, I thought it would be fun to incorporate the interactive doors to discover the outcomes from entering those doors. I was inspired by children’s books because I remember as a kid (and as an adult with a young nephew), the most engaging books were the ones with some sort of element of interaction. This also inspired the page with popups of properties that were voted on to determine eligibility for Community Preservation Act funding.

Popups of pending properties