On a pretty regular basis, I have to cross our infamous Huron Church Road intersection at College Avenue in order to get to LeBel. If I’m lucky, I’m coming from the West, and only have to cross College. However, there are many times that I have to cross Huron Church itself, fighting the timer (what is it, about 15 seconds?) and drivers making left-hand turns.
In Toronto, they unveiled a new set of pedestrian crossing signals, setup to create a crossing time of 57 seconds and an opportunity to cross in any direction (including diagonally). This change is happening at Yonge and Dundas and is being billed as one of Toronto’s initiatives to make the city more pedestrian-focused. While there are likely problems with this (traffic rerouting itself, many idling cars), I would welcome a change like this in Windsor.
That our city is clearly built around cars is one huge example of just how broken it is. Public transit here is rough (1/2 hour waits for buses after 6pm?), and I give anyone who bicycles on any major street a lot of credit, but how do we begin to look at a problem like the layout of a city on our terms and at our scale?
Image and details [via].
What To Do With Malls When They Die?
WorldChanging recently wrote about some malls in the US that died (or are in the process of dying) and what was being done with the space afterwards. It seems that some malls are being redesigned as mixed-use developments, with arts/community centres and housing. Reusing existing spaces for this type of redevelopment and activity is surely positive, but it seems that some of these projects are being billed as new downtowns. As most malls are built away from other other development, and many are designed around (or rather within) fields of parking lots, should these spaces really be considered a new “downtown”?
If this happened in Windsor, what might be the results? Devonshire Mall is over 1,000,000 square feet. That’s a lot of space for apartments, studios, galleries, shopping, markets, even a school. However, would this type of development just take the focus away from fixing our downtown (or is it already a lost cause?) Also, more questions would certainly be raised about a private space functioning as public space, as even the sidewalks of a “street” would suddenly be under private ownership. Other spaces in the city like old factories, the Home Depot right beside the mall, and even shutdown churches all seem like they could foster a good type of growth by converting those spaces into (hopefully) accessible places for artists, community groups, and housing. How do we start?
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DC-based artist, D. Billy, has been creating these limited-term street interventions, using balloons to animate/highlight/illustrate/notate the city. Very fun!
I found a little blurb that the Nashville Tennessee government put on their website about storm drain stencils…
Interesting idea using UV Spray Paint (sunblock) to draw in migrating monarch butterflies to eat some milkweed nectar on their way over major cities. The image above is a screenshot from one of the videos, the flower is the graffiti that becomes coated in sunblock and acts as a “fast-food sign on a highway” for monarchs.
I think it’s interesting to use existing materials and conditions, but to draw special attention to them. I’m not sure that this is the most effective realization of this idea, then again it’s just a prototype…
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Broken City Lab is an interdisciplinary creative research group, engaging in projects that reimagine and disrupt existing conditions at a variety of levels, in an effort to fix a broken city.
Events
Office Hours (starting on Jan 6, 2009)
Tetris Tournament & Wheat Paste Demo
Night of the Living Broken City
“Broken City For Rent” Open Forum
Comments
- darren: i’ll bring some of those round form pans to the cookie bake on sunday. i forget what they call those...
- darren: hi joshua, i just used to use it to send video from one vcr to another tv. but sometimes we would attach it...
- Justin: No problem Josh! Sometimes to fix that stuff you have to switch over to the code view and delete it from...
- Joshua: P.S. Thanks Justin for deleting the unneeded table in my post (if you did). I had a hard time getting rid of...
- Joshua: That little device sounds and looks interesting. What kind of things did you broadcast, Darren? I agree with...
- darren: I’d love to help in any way too with the CJAM thing.
- Justin: I think we need to work out some more audio projects… maybe the CJAM thing could be reworked (or we at...
- darren: you can see a photo of the device i had here:
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