By Justin on March 2nd, 2010, 9:38 am 5 Comments

Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above).

A part of this project involves us going around to each and every site on these lists and officially recognizing it as either a site of apology or a site of hope. Since we have 50 sites on our lists, we were beginning to run out of daylight on Sunday afternoon. That means that we only managed to visit about half of those sites, so we’re trying to find a second day to continue with our adventure.

We’ll post all of the photos from the event and a photo of every site we visit as soon as we finish!

The next Save the City event happens on March 20th, 2010 — more details soon.

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

Tagged: BCL lists research Save the City Windsor

By Justin on February 6th, 2010, 4:00 pm 4 Comments

The details: Sunday, February 28, 2010 (1pm) at 362 California Ave, Windsor

As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, and to better understand the city and its rich and failed history, Broken City Lab researchers will host an open community event on Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 1pm to map and invent two distinct community tours—Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope.

Throughout the first part of the event, Broken City Lab will lead community participants in brainstorming the numerous sites deemed to be worthy of apology—these could include failed strip malls, roads without sidewalks, or former auto factories—along with the numerous sites that give community participants hope for the city—these could include an especially great bike trail, sites of architectural significance, or places that can be imagined as being easily improved.

Immediately following the creation of these lists, Broken City Lab will set out to demarcate and officially designate each Site of Apology and Site of Hope. At each site, a short ceremony will be held and community members are welcomed to come along to help recognize each and every site.

A map demarcating each of the designated Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope will be made available online to encourage the ongoing investigation of these sites by community members.

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

Tagged: architecture BCL event geography lists research Save the City sites Windsor

By Justin on January 13th, 2010, 12:01 am 6 Comments

Meeting twice in a week is awesome. I can’t say that enough. So much time makes us way more productive and makes it a lot easier to be OK with not having everyone there all the time.

First on the list, doing some really, really quick tests of the potential of embedding LEDs in ice or snow. We know, it’ll probably kill the battery and potentially the LEDs themselves, but we have some ideas that might make that worthwhile.

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Tagged: BCL LED lists postcards research snow travel

By Justin on January 6th, 2010, 11:10 pm 8 Comments

Read Tom Lucier’s recent blog post. He spells out nearly everything he does in this city, for free. He draws on examples of other talented people in this city who continue to try to stick it out for who knows what reasons. He makes a compelling case for having to give up some of these things he does as labours of love.

It was upsetting and it was terrifying.

That there remains any talented creative people in this city (and I suppose I’m being slightly narrow in my definition, thinking of artists, musicians, actors, writers) is kind of incredible. As much as I believe in this city, I really don’t believe we are giving enough people enough reasons to stay.

So, I have to suggest some ridiculous and likely impossible ways to get people to stay, because that’s what we do — we look at problems, invent solutions, and then sometimes we even try to act on those solutions.

We need to establish a social innovation fund. This will supply micro-grants (up to $2500) for people who want to do something creative and amazing here in Windsor.

We need to identify and make accessible studio spaces that can be shared, are safe, up to code, and very reasonably priced. This will create a place for people to work out of should we be lucky enough to entice them to stay.

We need to figure out how to convince the huge number of people who graduate and leave every year to stay just a little while longer. This will give us ample opportunity to get those talented people invested enough in this place to want to stay.

We need to figure out how to convince more people to pay more money to retain the talent we have in this city, or we probably need to figure out how to find value in what we already do. This will provide a base level of income to keep people like Tom writing and reporting instead of having to do something like take up a paper route.

We need to put Windsor on the map, the world map, as a place in which to do more than just pass through. This will enable all of the above things to happen, and happen sooner rather than later.

We needed to do this yesterday. Realistically though, it’s already too late.

Tagged: ideas imagination infographic leaving town lists population research talent Windsor

By Justin on January 4th, 2010, 12:30 am 0 Comments

Though not necessarily an exhaustive list, but definitely worth your perusal and bookmarking, Shawn Moore over at Socialart.com has created a “loose history of art collectives.”

It’s a pretty quick read and helpful to contextualize what we do here at Broken City Lab, as we locate ourselves as a part of this lineage. I’m always wanting to spend more time thinking about the context in which we place ourselves … we’ve had the opportunity to do this in small bursts on a number of occasions (one of my favourites being our trek to New York back in September), but I also think this is where the talk around generating some kind of larger text (dare I say, self-published book) keeps hanging around in the back of my mind.

Ultimately for the sake of thinking through the larger discussion that we continually have around our practice and to counter the limits that this blog format seems to present, I’d love to say that we’ll write a book this year, but don’t hold us to that.

[image of the architecture collective, Ant Farm's Media Burn from Make]

Tagged: art book collective context lists thinking

By Justin on December 15th, 2009, 7:00 am 1 Comments

Monday night at BCL HQ, going over plans for moving forward on our recently OAC funded project starting in January 2010, Broken City Lab: Save the City (details to follow), using good ol’ fashioned lists and future technologies—it was amazing, in every sense of the word.

Not sure how many more times we’ll be meeting over the break, but we’re all excited for what the new year has in store … so many projects, it will be excellent!

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Tagged: banner BCL google wave grants lists planning research

By Justin on December 1st, 2009, 12:07 am 1 Comments

We spent another Monday night at BCL HQ planning out this Windsor-Detroit hyper-local tourism idea and doing some basic research for another upcoming project.

We all have some homework to do, but things are moving along nicely on a number of projects, and with the semester winding down, things should be able to push ahead soon!

More pictures of research involving lightbulbs and lists after the jump.

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Tagged: BCL Detroit hyper-local lightbulbs lists maps research routes Windsor

By Justin on October 6th, 2009, 9:48 pm 15 Comments

As part of FAM Fest 09, we did a projection performance on the roof of Metro Cleaners accessed from Empire Lounge in downtown Windsor.

For about an hour and a half, we presented our 100 Ways to Save the City and then asked for ideas from the folks on the ground, at Phog, and on the Twitterverse.

After the jump, there’s 160-something photos from all the ideas that were projected on Saturday night.

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Tagged: 100 ways BCL brick city lists night projection research text Windsor

By Justin on October 3rd, 2009, 2:38 pm 2 Comments

Last night out a window in the county, the new projector at night.

Today, finishing our list of 100 ways to save the city.

It’s going to run as a presentation in Keynote, the easiest failsafe solution. Though, we might try to open it up on Twitter somehow later tonight.

And, speaking of tonight, the weather is looking good. No rain!!!! We’ll be projecting across from Phog, look up above Empire Lounge and you’ll see us. Tonight is marks Day 2 of FAM Fest, hope to see you out and about.

Tagged: 100 ways BCL city Keynote lists projection research tests weather Windsor

By Justin on April 15th, 2009, 3:17 pm 3 Comments

Another cold, rainy Tuesday for Office Hours, but we were inside imagining spring. We pushed ahead on doing some more research and development on the planters, started a plant list and design ideas for the community garden, and got closer to finalizing the list of submissions from Text In-Transit.

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Tagged: BCL community garden lists maps planters research submissions