Kevon Rhiney

“ The Trench Town Culture Yard was opened on February 6, 2000 (symbolic of Bob’s birthday) , as tribute to the yard where Marley grew up and was inspired to write many of his internationally renowned songs. The Yard is operated by a few members in the community and is geared at attracting visitors both locally and abroad. The entrance of the Museum is very simple and basic (Figures 6 and 7) . The only other thing that signals that a museum does in fact exist is a sign that reads “Trench Town Culture Yard: An Inner City Heritage Tourism Product.” ”

“ The museum also conjures up selective images of Bob Marley and the wider Trench Town community, though in a slightly and uniquely different way from that of the murals seen throughout the community. Similar to the murals, the Culture Yard also represents a form of landscape inscription—one that claims to be representative of Trench Town and the community’s contribution to Jamaican music and culture in particular. Yet still, the Culture Yard, like in the case of the murals, seemingly plays into popular conceptions and stereotypes of the place. ”

“ Trench Town can be regarded as one of Jamaica’s most ambitious social engineering exercises—a cluster of homes with cedar doors and windows and gable roofs built around courtyards with communal bathrooms and kitchens. The housing project came out of a necessity to provide low cost housing to Kingston’s rapidly increasing urban population and the increasing prevalence of squatter settlements. ”

“ The tour is ad hoc and the Yard, though properly kept, seems wholly lacking in amenities and the infrastructure is in a dilapidated state. The residents’ inability to attract visitors to the Culture Yard might be partly linked to peoples’ perception of the place as being a crime-ridden inner city community. ”

“ Yet still, only limited attention has been given to landscape inscriptions (e.g., graffiti, murals, signscapes, etc.) and the role these play in either reproducing stereotypes or challenging dominant images of places or group identities [8] . Landscapes are constantly “written” and inscribed with meanings. These meanings can be read or interpreted as signs or texts about the particular values, identities, beliefs, and practices evocative of a particular era, social group, landscape, place, or space [9] . ”

“ Most of this growth was accounted for rural to urban migration. An increasing number of these migrants were forced to settle in the shanty towns and squatter settlements that had emerged along the city’s outskirts and along the fringe of the tenement area of West Kingston. ”

“ Each room is arranged slightly differently from the other. The first room consists of past aerial photographs of the area, schematic plans of the housing scheme, and historical data on Trench Town including background information on the Trench family. The second room comprises some of Marley’s memorabilia, including pictures and newspaper clippings of him and other famous persons from the community. In this room lies Marley’s first guitar which is neatly placed in a glass case. ”

“ Some insiders’ books illustrate the extent of the violence of those times, starting with Phillip Baker’s “Blood Posse” [33] and Vivian Blake’s (auto) biography on the infamous Tivoli Garden’s “Shower Posse” gang [34] —both underlining the parasitic and highly violent nature of Jamaican politics. ”

“ Africa’s Ambivalent Experience, E. S. Macamo, Ed., pp. 19–43, Zed Books, London, UK, 2005. ↑ N. Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People, Dancehall Culture in Jamaica, Duke University Press, London, UK, 2000. ↑ C. G. Clarke, “Population pressure in Kingston, Jamaica: a study of unemployment and overcrowding,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 165–182, 1966. ↑ C. G. Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2006. ”

“ The once modern housing project has been reduced to a cluster of dilapidated buildings, some of which have been abandoned and left in ruins. As everywhere else in the Third World the structural adjustment programmes undertaken by the
Kevon Rhiney and Romain Cruse 2012 “Trench Town Rock”: Reggae Music, Landscape Inscription, and the Making of Place in Kingston, Jamaica Urban Studies Research (2012) Article ID 585160, 12 pages Nasr City, Cairo, Egypt: Hindawi Publishing Corporation http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/585160
Figure 2: Political borders in parts of West Kingston, 1989 elections. ”