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Two Tales of a City: Interview with Ariane from le Centre Français

Below is the transcription of the interview Rosina and I had this fall with Ariane from the Centre Français in Hamilton. While going through what was discussed around the topics of francophonie in Hamilton, I came across a good amount of ideas and phrases that could be interestingly interpreted when paired in context to the steel industry. It became clear to me that the Steel industry versus other minor industries important to Hamilton’s development, such as the textile industry, tells an interesting story when paired with the Anglophone culture in Hamilton versus a variety of other language-based cultures forming in the city over the past 40 years.

At the end of the interview we asked about words in either language that cannot be translated. I think this would be a good question to ask on an online form in the near future.

Below is the interview (in french), and as a comment to this post is the  compilation of the phrases picked out of the conversation to be used as further research. Please read the interview (you can translate it roughly using google if you need to) and add your comments and suggestions for potential interviewees, as well as further interview questions for a steel industry representative, an anglophone, and a textile industry representative.

Thanks again to Ariane at the Centre Français in Hamilton for providing some insights into francophone culture and identity in Hamilton.

Continue reading “Two Tales of a City: Interview with Ariane from le Centre Français”

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Toronto renames laneways after residents: maybe there’s an idea in there?

Photo from the December 26, 2011 edition of the Globe & Mail

I saw this and it made me think of our discussion last week on a new project somehow (un)officially demarcating important people in Windsor.

From the article, discussing one particular laneway named after a local family who own a nearby bakery:

The laneway is one of three in the Harbord Village that recently got a name memorializing community members. The local residents association has been working on a project for the past two years to name all 26 laneways in its neighbourhood, nestled between the Annex and Kensington Market. Currently, the names are being reviewed by city staff (to avoid any duplication) and will likely come before council in February or March.

You can read the article in full on the Globe’s website.

It made me think about how we might consider scaling up or scaling out the project we had discussed — maybe we should try to name all the alleyways in the city?

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A Visual Reference for a New Year Project

a mason jar of spare nails and screws from my grandpa's shed

Based on a conversation at our last meeting on Thursday morning, I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to start on some new projects in January focused back on Windsor. Seeing at this mason jar was at the core of our conversation, it seemed like a good idea to post it on here, maybe as a starting point.

Also, Happy Holidays.

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198 Methods of Nonviolent Action

an example of some of the 198 methods

Over the last month, I’ve become rather interested in the work of Gene Sharp. He has published numerous books and journals that discuss, analyze and present realistic alternatives to violent action.

One of the most fascinating documents in his work is a list of 198 methods of non-violent action. The document breaks down the methods into three categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention.

In the last 30 year span of protest and revolution, many of these tactics have been proven worthy and effective by people putting them to practice.

In terms of our practice, I can’t help but reflect on how many of these tactics we’ve used in the past and even more interestingly, which ones we can use in future.

Check out the methods here.

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from an interview on @thisbigcity

“…we know that politics is absolutely the heart and soul of what might seem like design projects because it’s about who makes decisions, who has more power and influence than others to shape cities. Designers typically either run away from or ignore politics and political structures, and that’s impossible if you want to have any impact. You need to understand it, and you need to, A), understand the political structures, why decisions are made in certain ways and not others, B), embrace it, not be afraid of it, and C), probably most importantly, challenge it.”

—emphasis mine, from an interview with Aseem Inam, Director of the MA Theories of Urban Practice, and Miguel Robles-Duran, Director of the MS Design and Urban Ecologies, from Parsons The New School for Design on This Big City

I suppose I find this most useful in framing the way that I approach thinking about our practice. I often try to discuss all supporting aspects of our collective activity as important as any projects we pull off, because I think that it’s in all the peripheral parts of actually getting things done that we rigourously invest in playing with the structures that prop up all of those peripheral parts, and maybe, eventually, slowly begin to change them to begin creating the types of structures that we want to see.

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Collaboration in Caribou

I saw this in a newsletter from Ableton. Being a fan and user of the software, I watched this video on how Caribou uses the program live, and it struck me as an interesting view on collaboration.

While there’s a given song structure, at any time, anyone on stage can trigger loops, restructure the song, and introduce new elements, all while moving in a common direction, but without knowing exactly when they’ve arrived at their destination.

Maybe a good model for thinking about collaboration.

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Grades for public infrastructure

20111219-230533.jpg

Has this already been done somewhere? The idea of creating grade sheets for things in the city and then a space for comments or something? Might we take it on too?

This photo is of a page in the book Waking Up from the Nightmare of Participation, I think it’s a template of an evaluation form for an academic paper, by Melanie O’Brian of Meissen’s thesis, The Nightmare of Participation.

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Pg 113 Waking Up from the Nightmare of Participation

“…the specific openness or porosity of contemporary art for instance has functioned as a weird kind of hosting system: as a kind of asylum for various cultural forms and encounters apparently impossible elsewhere.”

— from Michael Hirsch’s Professional Amateurs, Outsiders, Intruders – On the Utopia of Transdisciplinary Work in the Cultural Field in “Waking up from the Nightmare of Participation”.

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Useful Art by Kathy Noble from Frieze Magazine

KN: One of the things you hope to explore in this project is what ‘use’ might be. But why should art be useful? Arguably, an important point of art is not to have a ‘use’, in a literal sense, but to be something else in our lives.
TB: All art is useful. But the Spanish word for useful, útil, also means ‘tool’. So we are talking about art as a social tool, as well, which has a long tradition that I want to re-evaluate.

–from “Useful Art” by Kathy Noble from Frieze Magazine, issue 144, emphasis mine