IN STORE: DEAR INDIAN ROAD
Dear Indian Road is near the very top of my list of favourites from Daragh Sankey‘s nearly complete documentary series on our Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation project. It’s kind of unreal to think about the things that have changed (and haven’t) around Indian Road, the border crossing, and the fallout from this ongoing political [...]
In Store: OVER THE BRIDGE
Another week, another instalment of In Store by Daragh Sankey. Having these weekly videos is so great and it’s amazing to look back on all of this. So, here’s the story this week: This week, we follow Thea Jones over the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit. Thea had recently done a research paper about Detroit. I’m pretty sure she was [...]
TACET by Ulla Rauter
So we didn’t get a Rhizome Commission, but it doesn’t mean we’re not still planning a way around making Cross-Border Communication happen. In the meantime, we’ll keep collecting images and reference points about ways of imagining the project happening. Above is TACET by Ulla Rauter, which refers to acoustic pauses by drawing on the urban [...]
Writing Under the Bridge
Thinking mostly about the Ambassador Bridge, but generally about any overhead infrastructure, and wondering if limiting our larger hopes for roof-based painted messages is potentially ignoring a great opportunity for other messages. Maybe we should consider pedestrian traffic more often. [via Pasta & Vinegar]
![Broken City Lab is heading up to Peterborough, Ontario for all of next week (October 12 – 17, 2009) for an extended field trip to collaborate with Artspace for a series of community and inter-city research initiatives, workshops, and interventions to understand the city of Peterborough, its infrastructures, and its communities. We’ll be blogging extensively [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/peterboroughmap3-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip #001: Artspace in Peterborough")
![On Day 3 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, it rained, and so we planned. We planned and discussed and reviewed some of the answers we had received from our activities on Day 2 — glimpses of the state of Calgary, from a ground-level perspective. For Day 4, we had to condense our planned events into [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/IMG_38951-150x150.jpg "ATTC Calgary Day 3 & 4: the Tales & Timelines of a City")
![While we’re still moving along on our Save the City project in the background, we’re also continuing to look ahead to other projects and deadlines coming up. Tuesday mornings are always a really good productive time, and this week was no exception. While we wait for our ribbons and postcards to arrive for the upcoming Sites of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_7135-150x150.jpg "Sometimes Planning Means Drawing")
![Kevin and Josh ventured out with a single-use camera to test what the temporary installations would look like, as we continue to prep for Thursday’s launch of the Letter Library here at CIVIC SPACE. Also, film is fun. The letters look great and the photos aren’t too bad either. They definitely have a colder tone [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/43390001-150x150.jpg "Single-Use Camera Tests: Captioning the City")
![Tonight, we are going to perform the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication. Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we have the equipment we need to realize this project. Cross-Border Communication was initially imagined through a collaborative effort between Broken City Lab [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_4416-150x150.jpg "Tonight, the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication")
![Our recipe from the other night produced a much stronger planter, though I think there’s still room to add a coat of wheat paste to the outside. The rare earth magnets do well if there’s two, but I think the best solution will be to adhere them to the outside of the planter, or embed [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_4208-150x150.jpg "Rare Earth Magnets + New Pulp Recipe")
![Last night, Hiba, Sara, and Justin tackled some initial planning for the installation of the CIVIC SPACE / Letter Library sign. The Letter Library idea came out of trying to think through how we might make our own sign for the space, so it’s really great to finally see the letters going up. Hiba got on the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9982-150x150.jpg "Installing the sign for CIVIC SPACE, take 1")
![Our first Friday back was great. Unfortunately, Rosina couldn’t make it, but everyone else was around the table for the first time in almost a month. We’ve learned some things about how we work together over the last two and a half years, and we’re set to make more things happen this year than ever [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/IMG_2176-150x150.jpg "First Friday of 2011: Back in Action!!!")
![Lee Rodney teaches one of the best courses at the University of Windsor, Border Culture. I took the course in the fall of 2010 and wrote a book: The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor. The book serves as documentation and comparative analysis of three specific forgotten spaces in downtown Windsor, Ontario, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cuts-150x150.jpg "The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro")
![We played catch up on How to Forget the Border Completely on Friday night. We invented new consultancies, planned interviews and events, and came up with new tactics for forgetting a border completely. It was much needed and so much fun!!! While Danielle hides behind her hand… She was also busy inventing these crazy contraptions [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BORDERCONSULTANCY-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 1, 2011 (Forgetting the Border)")
![The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor. For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/BCL-STC-MAY-5x7-french-outlines-520-150x150.jpg "How to Save a City")
![It was a quick week, but such an excellent start to our Artist-in-Residence program at CIVIC SPACE. Sam Lefort, bee lover, excellent designer, and most generous workshop host spent the week teaching members of the Windsor-Essex (and beyond) community about a range of sustainably minded practices and interventions, hopefully many of which will be carried [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/wpid19544-IMG_0979-150x150.jpg "Exploring Urban Ecology with Sam Lefort (a look back at our week of workshops)")
![We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices. Back [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_9710-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)")
![Danielle painted this today with some bronze spray paint. It’s that horse head from our living room. I was thinking that if we picked up on that plaque / time capsule project we’ve been talking about with a rubber mould and some plaster, we might be able to move it forward? Let’s talk more about [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_6603-150x150.jpg "Bronze (this will all make sense next week)")
![Tuesday was all about research. We looked up some more details on ribbons and talked more about how we would move forward with the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event. We’re also getting ready for Sunday’s event, Listen to the City (remember, 8pm at Phog), and for Thursday night’s projection performance at Propeller in Toronto. We were [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6776-150x150.jpg "Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events")