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Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope: the Map

Not exhaustive, nor complete, this map is a work-in-progress, documenting a community in-transition. For one afternoon in February 2010, we gathered together with a group of community members to create two distinct lists: Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope.

The locations identified as part of these two lists were noted as being places for which we, as a community, might need to apologize to future generations, or places for which we might hold some particular hope of their role in creating a better city for future generations.

Over the following weeks and months, we gradually visited every site on the list to (un)officially recognize it, demarcating it with a large ribbon and saying a few words about its designation. We encourage you to make your own visit to these sites.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the list and had such an incredible and engaged conversation with us that day. This map is long overdue, but we hope it was worth the wait.

You can download the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope Map (11″x17″).

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Drifting Around Downtown Windsor: Exploring the City Slowly

We’ve been lucky over the last week or so with some surprisingly agreeable weather. The had humidity lifted and with it, the temperature scaled back considerably. So, it’s been pretty much the best time all summer to do some exploring on foot (and sometimes on bicycle) at a pace that really allows for a different kind of engagement with space.

Now armed with an iPhone 4 for an upcoming project, it’s easier than ever to take pictures on a casual exploration. Something like a dérive, though admittedly a little more aimed at looking for some new potential project spaces than a completely free drift, last night was a perfect time to play with thinking about a variety of spaces, slowly.

These slow explorations really give the time to notice and attempt to unfold the curiosities all around the city. A sign like the one above, “PUBLIC STAIRWELL,” notifies passersby that this space is publicly accessible and annotates something unseen, behind the door. I wonder what else we might be able to annotate with the same authority as this sign that could be suggested as being both public and understood as normally hidden (at least in terms of its use by a public).

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Listen to the City: an Overview

Back in January, we asked nearly 40 people two questions: Why did you first come to Windsor? and Why are you still here? We asked those questions at an event called, Listen to the City, which was the first part of the five-month long project, Save the City. It was an incredible night.

The answers we got over the hour and a half we spent together at Phog Lounge in downtown Windsor presented not just answers to those two questions, but sprawling conversations about what it means to live in Windsor, how we’ve shaped this city, and how it’s shaped us.

The five-minute edit you can listen to below is just a slice of everything that was talked about that night. Initially, we thought we might be able to cut a lengthier audio documentary together, but there were pragmatic implications that kept us from doing that. Hours of audio with conversations that covered more ground than we could have ever imagined meant that it was a lot more difficult to piece something much larger together.

There were many voices that we unfortunately couldn’t include in the edit below, but only because of the amazing conversations those folks had, which in turn didn’t offer the kind of brief samples similar to those that we cut together. We added some music and tried to capture a general direction of conversation that we gathered from gradually listening to all of the conversations (Danielle took on the considerable task of doing just that and creating the assembly edit of this excerpt– hours and hours and hours of work, but we’re so excited to finally be able to share this).

So, while this excerpt in no way does justice to the range of conversations that we had that night, we hope it might be a good introduction, or a good marker in time, of what a group of 40 Windsorites thought about this city at the start of 2010.

Listen to the five-minute excerpt: (updated – thanks to Stephen Surlin for finessing our mix)

[audio:http://www.brokencitylab.org/audio/ListenToTheCity-20100826-SurlinMix.mp3]

Or you can also download the MP3 of Listen to the City.

For good measure, we can also provide the original recordings in their entirety in a zip file if you’re interested. We make no promises about the audibility/legibility of every minute of these recordings, but if you have the time, they’re worth listening to as a whole. However, the zip file is over 700mb and so not easily uploaded to our servers. However, as promised, we will be officially handing over a copy of the five-minute excerpt and the raw audio files to the Windsor Archives soon.

We need to sincerely thank everyone who came out that night and shared with us.

Broken City Lab: Save the City was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Mid-August: Maps, Writing & Cardboard

We’ve been quiet on the blog, but not because we haven’t been busy. I’ve been working away at the final touches for the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope, which while taking longer than I had anticipated, was well worth it. The map looks great, we’ll be posting it on here soon and distributing physical copies.

Meanwhile, work continues on our cardboard letters…

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Maps + Final Cut

I’ll be spending most of the week finishing up a couple lingering parts of Save the City: assembling the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope and putting the final touches on the edit from Listen to the City that Danielle assembled.

The audio documentary is going to be an overview, or maybe like a trailer — it’s about 5 or 6 minutes long and will only sample bits and pieces of conversations from the hours of recorded audio from Listen to the City. However, we’ll be posting the unedited clips for download alongside the trailer as well as submitting the trailer and unedited clips on CD to the Windsor Archives.

As well, some very preliminary test maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. These will actually be 22″ x 17″, but also made available for download. Above are just some sketches, but I showed some of these to Danielle and Cristina — they liked the red map, but I think we’ll go with something like numbered dots to demarcate the sites. Or, potentially, there will be two maps.

Work like this is fun, but a bit of a long road. I suppose I’m being overly cautious to make sure that these are moving in the right direction before committing and doing a complete version, but ultimately, patience now will make it worthwhile not having to redo it later.

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Cardboard Letters Continued

We were only about half strong this week, but Josh, Rosina and I plowed ahead on the letters, this time focusing on just the front and back faces of the letters K, A, E, T, and I. We figured that since we had the projector set up anyways, it was worth doing as many faces as we could. Filling in cardboard with extrusions later wouldn’t be so hard.

We’ll continue those adventures next week.

Meanwhile, we’re doing some visual research into new sites for projection and trying to figure out how best to turn our Imaginary Platform into something very distributable. More soon.

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An Imaginary Platform: 2010 Municipal Elections in Windsor

We’ve updated our imaginary campaign post to reflect some recent (positive) changes:

Our projects try to work around the realities that we encounter in Windsor on a daily basis. We address these realities creatively, and so the ways in which we address them don’t always translate to solutions. We usually try to suggest the change we’d like to see, albeit on a small scale. So, in continuing with this work, we offer the following:

We’re little less than 3 months away from the 2010 municipal elections here in Windsor. We’re not sure what to make of all the candidates entirely at this point, though it’s encouraging to see so many people entering the process.

It’s essentially a given that we’ll have the same mayor for a third term (or maybe not?), but we’ll likely see a number of new councillors. This is, in large part, due to the new 10 Ward system along with promises from councillors to not run again.

In hopes of imaging a greater city, we’d like to propose the following platform. It has gaps, it’s biased, it’s potentially unfundable, but it’s a list of ideas that we think could make Windsor a better place to live:

  • Have at least two open-air city council meetings at Charles Clark Square, encourage a large audience, showcase democracy in action.
  • Find a private partner and retrofit the Armouries tomorrow: get the WSO their permanent venue, renovate smaller spaces for artist studios, and keep larger rooms for small theatre performances.
  • Sort out the Capitol Theatre appropriately. Clear the way to make it easier for WIFF to do more screenings, for Artcite to stay put (if they want to), for community theatre groups to do more performances, and to give Media City a consistent and reliable venue.
  • Partner with the University to put a large multi-department Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences building in that parking lot across from the AGW and the downtown bus depot.
  • Raise the cost of keeping buildings vacant. Do this immediately.
  • Encourage small businesses to locate downtown by offering free-rent for the first 6 months they’re in business. It didn’t take long — some folks picked up on that idea. Offer rent at 50% for the following 6 months if the business hires to 2 of more employees in the first 6 months.
  • Connect Transit Windsor with Tecumseh and the county with express buses, and do a better job at integrating with Detroit, get aggressive with promoting the use of public transit for everyday commutes.
  • Commit to planting more trees on those barren stretches of sidewalks. Who wants to walk next to 4 lanes of traffic in the baking sun?
  • Get bikes lanes in that make sense, ask the everyday riders where they go and how they like to get there, cross-reference that information with new public transit plans to make it easy to bike short commutes and dead simple to connect to the transit system for longer ones.
  • Initiate an aggressive campaign to retain talent that graduates from the University and St. Clair. It’s unacceptable to sit idly by as our best and brightest move to bigger cities. Short-term subsidies to start a business fresh out of school, 6 months of free studio / rehearsal space for artists, musicians, and performers. Tell the world that we are doing this.
  • Empower and fund people at the city like Jim Yanchula to act on their ideas.
  • Give the Cultural Affairs Office the resources to do good things and help that office to understand the needs of the arts and cultural community.
  • Commit to acting on Community Improvement Plans with an actionable to-do list over the 4-year term.
  • Create an international competition to design gateways for our city (at the border and from the 401 at the least), then make sure there’s money to actually build these gateways. Advertisements should not be allowed.
  • Start an innovation prize by partnering with Essex County and appropriate Economic Development entities to solve large problems and reward real innovation happening here.
  • Convert 30% of riverfront and other key city-owned spaces to naturalized areas.
  • Make the deep and rich histories of this region a part of everyday life — provide artists, community leaders, local historians, and elders resources to demarcate small and large historical occurrences.
  • Own and embrace that we are an international city with an unbelievable wealth of multi-cultural communities.

If you’re running for council, please steal these ideas.