We Speak Your Language: Fieldwalking in Queens
- Yeon-Joo Kang
- 6 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Figure 1. Queens Public Library card. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025.
“We speak your language,” the slogan of the Queens Public Library, captures Queens as a meeting point of countless cultures, histories, and ways of keeping time. Walking along Roosevelt Avenue, I began to see how multiethnic commercial streets reveal the borough’s dense linguistic and spatial complexity. In Jackson Heights, every corner, passageway, and basement façade becomes a site where immigrant-run small businesses carve out micro-spaces, intensify limited floor area, and layer multiple functions. These practices embody “folded space,” the continual reshaping of already small environments to make more with less.
As we moved from Jackson Heights toward Elmhurst, I recognized echoes of traditional markets in Seoul, where narrow alleys and leftover corners become lively commercial zones. Improvised sidewalk commerce, subleased storefronts, and indoor malls form a porous urban infrastructure that evolves through everyday interactions.
Fieldwalking makes visible how communities adapt, claim, and reinterpret their surroundings. Queens emerged not simply as a political geography (although it is certainly that), but as a network of cultures and daily movements, with its dozens of neighborhoods shaping their varied ways of being within this shared landscape. In the end, the slogan points to a broader truth: Queens speaks many languages, and spatial adaptability is one of its most fluent.
Figure 2. Clothing store nested inside a cleaners with a temporary wall structure between the two enterprises. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025.
Many communities, cultures, and histories coexist here. It is a borough shaped by people who arrived from every corner of the world, bringing different traditions, identities, ways of relating and keeping time. Because of this, I sometimes describe Queens as a “massive airport,” not only because it contains two major airports, but because it functions like an intersection of global movement, where diverse groups and rhythms overlap.
On October 18, I took a long walk along Roosevelt Avenue with two colleagues, Noah Allison and Joseph Heathcott. We are in the early stages of a project on the spatial complexity of multiethnic commercial streets of Queens. How do immigrant-run small businesses make the most out of the small, crowded spaces they occupy? In what ways do all of these decisions and strategies accumulate in the urban landscape?
We began our exploration in front of the Jackson Heights station. For people who study cities, everything we see, walk through, and physically experience becomes a potential research site. The more we know, the more we begin to truly see, and to understand layers that are not immediately visible, we need to walk, observe, and linger. We need to sense the rhythms and encounter the people who inhabit the spaces beyond what we see. That was the spirit with which we approached our field visit.
Our goal that day was to brainstorm as we walked, and many of our conversations focused on sidewalk spillover, ethnic enclaves and their indoor “malls,” the subleasing of storefronts, and the redistribution of space. Although I had worked in this area before, our walk felt strangely like seeing everything for the first time. With a new lens, the familiar became unfamiliar, and details I had previously ignored suddenly stood out.
Figure 3. Layered signage and the use of a basement facade to maximize advertising space. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025.
The concept of “folded space,” which we considered early in our project, felt increasingly accurate. By this, we mean the intensification of uses of already small spaces by dividing up floor area, stacking functions, diversifying wares, and other ways of making more with less. As we walked, we encountered spaces that made us say, “I didn’t know space could be divided like that,” or “I can’t believe they’re using that corner as well.” The density of activity and the creativity with which people carve out micro-spaces for business or cultural expression reveals the highly adaptive character of Jackson Heights. This echoes what Miyares (2010) describes as ethnic hyperdiversity, where immigrant communities continually reshape the urban landscape through flexible, layered uses of space.
Figure 4. Commercial complexity along Roosevelt Avenue at 88th Street beneath the elevated 7-train. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025.
Moving along Roosevelt Avenue with Jackson Heights on the north side and Elmhurst on the south side, we observed how space folds, overlaps, spills, and transforms depending on who occupies it and how it is used. As we continued walking, I found myself thinking about traditional markets in Seoul. There was something familiar in the way space in Jackson Heights was sliced, folded, and used to its fullest capacity - a pattern I often see in Korea, where markets transform narrow alleys and leftover corners into lively commercial and social spaces. The clustering of small businesses and the interactions spilling onto the sidewalks reminded me of the markets back home, where the boundary between public and private space is constantly negotiated.
Figure 5. Roosevelt Shopping Center. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025.
These parallels made the neighborhood feel both foreign and familiar. Along Roosevelt Avenue, many informal uses of sidewalks for commerce have evolved below the radar, eventually to be tolerated by the city and gaining semi-permanent status . What began as improvised setups have gradually been incorporated into the streetscape as part of the urban infrastructure. This reflects the idea that a mixed-use street is not only a physical environment but a social process shaped by everyday interactions (Kim, 2015). These adaptive strategies also resonate with examples elsewhere: Somali malls in Cape Town similarly transform commercial buildings into porous, multilayered infrastructures shaped by migrant networks (Tayob, 2022). Such cases show how immigrant communities - in Queens or Cape Town - reshape space through flexible, culturally informed practices.
Returning to “We speak your language,” I realized that the slogan does not refer only to spoken languages. It reflects how people in Queens communicate across differences through a wide variety of visual means. The borough’s cultural layers, shared experiences, and overlapping customs create a kind of common language. It is not always verbal; it is built from coexistence and from small similarities that bridge deeper differences. In this sense, Queens “speaks” many languages while enabling diverse communities to understand one another.
Walking along Roosevelt Avenue made it easier to see how these layers converge in everyday space. I could watch in real time as communities adapt to their surroundings, make them their own, and continually reinterpret them. The experience helped me understand Queens not only as a geographic area but as a network of cultures, relationships, and daily movements. Continuing our work in Flushing, Elmhurst, and other neighborhoods, we hope to gain a clearer sense of the many ways people adapt space to make a living—and how each neighborhood develops its own way of being, shaped by the lives unfolding within it.
