Here is some good news: Amidst the biased newspaper articles and the rumoured reputations, Drouillard Road is actually in an okay place. A year or two ago, I was irked by a few things I had read in a familiar news source, depicting residents as downtrodden and troublesome, crimes and drug deals treated as the …
This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts as we temporarily install these letters across the city to generate some conversation and creative thinking around how we can indeed make this (place) better. You can check out the process of making these letters in this archive of posts. Ripper’s Valley is visible …
Last night Hiba, Danielle and I met to do some more prep work on the letters for the Letter Library launch on June 21st. We painted another test letter E a different shade of grey and started to populate a wall with some more of the tests. It was excellent to see more than a …
Continue reading “Nothing like being thorough: how we make decisions, slowly”
We’ve been doing this for the last week or so on a fairly irregular basis (mostly because I never seem to get into the school before noon). Pictured above is Danielle’s 9/11 video. This TV was originally installed (as legend has it) to screen advertising from Xerox, as they had offered free photocopying to the …
Lucy stopped by this morning to keep cutting. Hiba and I painted the letters. White it is. We had a lot of leftover wall paint, which means we not only have more than enough paint, but the letter faces will gain a bit of rigidity and protection since it’s epoxy paint. Hiba paints. After trying …
Continue reading “Tuesday Afternoon: Work continues, now with Postcards and the Library Cards”
We were a few people short of a full crew (Michelle was sick, Danielle was away, Rosina was on the line, and it was Cristina’s birthday), but Josh, Kevin, Hiba, Karlyn and I still made the most of our Friday night studio collaboration spectacular by putting some focus on our large-scale letters project for CAFKA. …
A few weeks ago I met with Andréanne Baribeau of Windsor’s local French CBC radio AM 540 on the Y a pas deux matins pareils show to speak about Broken City Lab’s ongoing projects Make This Better and How To Forget The Border Completely. The Episode aired the morning of Monday, January 31st. Check it …
A Friday with everyone around the table usually translates into a lot of excellent new ideas, and yesterday was no exception! We spent the evening reviewing the progress we’ve made on some initial research and may have sparked an entirely new direction for the project. All of the excitement is after the jump!
As I think about where I live, in a subdivision off of dominion road near the Holy Name of Mary Highschool, I immediately think of the current hollowing and cutting into the forest and brush that’s going on to make room for more houses, and more roads. The illumination of this by me is quite …
Continue reading “Neighbourhood Deterioration and Suburbanism”
While researching different spaces for our Make This Better project, I’ve become more and more drawn to the Windsor Airport. This space has been so neglected that major talk for shutting it down is now on the table. As of 2007, Serco Aviation Services Inc. terminated its contract regarding airport management from the City of Windsor …