Posted on

Wonderful Windsor Ringtone (updated!!!)

Windsor and Detroit from above circa 1960

You love Windsor, don’t you? Well, show your Windsor Pride by putting this ringtone on your phone! The zip file has an iPhone-ready m4r file along with a standard mp3 file AND NOW a MIDI version for any other phone not mp3-enabled. Preview the 25 second ringtone below:

[audio:wonderfulwindsorRingtone.mp3]

If we could get someone to re-compose this melody in MIDI (thank you to Derek Harrison for transcribing the tune to MIDI), I’d challenge the entire city to use this ringtone for a week. Credit goes to Steven for originally coming across this song some time ago. From what I was able to find out about this, it was a 1960s radio jingle that used to be played on CKWW. Maybe you could also use this aerial photo from Windsor / Detroit made sometime in the 1960s.

Posted on

Urban Mediations

urban mediations

Thursday, May 14 going to be an incredible day: Urban Mediations, a one-day symposium on urban media studies is taking place in Windsor. Co-organized by the University of Windsor’s own, Dr. Michael Darroch, the symposium will involve a collection of researchers, artists, designers, and activists talking about what it means to research the urban.

I’ll be speaking on Broken City Lab, and Danielle will be talking about architecture of urban refugees, among many other fine thinkers, doers, and writers.

Posted on

Shrink the City (Solutions for Flint)

in Flint, Michigan Photo from New York Times

An article on Flint, Michigan in the New York Times earlier this week discussed the proposal for the intensifying and speeding up of the city’s decline—and it might be genius. Don’t wait for houses to become abandoned before they get demolished, instead pull down entire neighbourhoods and move the population. Concentrate everyone remaining in the city to a few key areas, and build that density.

In short, planned shrinkage.

I don’t think Windsor is quite this bad; though this could very well be coming down the pipes sooner than we expect. The fallout of the current economic realities is slowly being realized across the city, but if you really want to imagine Windsor in 10 years if we don’t make some radical change, just go for a drive down Indian Road (or anywhere in the West end, really).

So, if you were offered a similar place to where you live now, but in a denser area, would you take it?

Posted on

Windsor Ward Boundary Reviews

Ward Review

I can’t say it much better than Chris over at Scaledown, so I’ll just reblog it here:

The time has come for the City of Windsor to investigate adjusting its ward boundaries to better reflect the redistribution of our population we’ve realized over the past thirty years. Yes, the last time this has been analyzed was 1978.

There has been a significant move to the ‘burbs over the course of the last three decades, and the boundaries of our ward representation has yet to catch up with this trend. Wards one and five have noticed the greatest amount of land use homogeneity with the vast majority of their residential poulation living in raised ranch housing. Wards two and three have been continuously bleeding residents to these new subdivisions, while our other urban ward, ward four, has only grown due to the recently annexed land by the airport.

There will be 3 ward boundary review meetings:

Wednesday, April 15, 7-9pm (Forest Glade Community Centre)
Thursday, April 16, 4-6pm (Windsor Water World)
Thursday, April 16, 7-9pm (South Windsor Recreation Complex)

This could dramatically impact the next election and the future of city council representation in Windsor, so if you have time, and especially if these review locations are in your neighbourhood, it’s definitely worth going.

Posted on

Exhibition Opening at AGW

Broken City Lab at the Art Gallery of Windsor

There’s an opening for two shows in which I’m participating on Friday, April 17, 2009, 7pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

On the first floor is the University of Windsor MFA Graduate Exhibition, Without, featuring documentation from various Broken City Lab projects alongside work by Steven Leyden Cochrane, and Henrjeta Mece, and on the second floor is the 2009 Windsor Biennial, with a large-scale graph outlining ideas and activities for re-imagining cross-border relations alongside too many other great area artists to name. As part of the Biennial, Broken City Lab will be working in Windsor and Detroit towards the realization of some of these activities throughout May and June (more details to follow).

The shows run from April 10 – June 5 and April 17 – July 5 respectively.

Posted on

Scavenge the City Recap

the algorithm

A week ago, on an incredibly cold, rainy, snowy evening, we headed out on an exploration of Windsor’s downtown guided by a randomly assembled algorithm for Scavenge The City. We only made it through the first 20 steps (we stopped checking them off though), plus a couple others we skipped to by the end, but for the two or three hours we were out, it was great to experience the city with new people in new ways.

To see the algorithm, you can view it randomly assembled, refresh it to see a new order.

Continue reading “Scavenge the City Recap”

Posted on

First 5 Text In-Transit Panels Installed

Everything is Possible - on the tunnel bus

Last night Danielle and I went to the downtown Transit Windsor terminal to install the first five test panels we had printed for Text In-Transit. The panels read: everything is possible, YOU MADE MY DAY, YOU ARE THE CITY, YOU CHANGED EVERYTHING, and changing the world starts by changing this city. We had to install these panels while the buses momentarily stopped at the terminal, so it was pretty quick. When we install the rest of the panels later this month, we’ll do it at the garage.

Continue reading “First 5 Text In-Transit Panels Installed”

Posted on

Text In-Transit Test Panel

You Made My Day

I picked up five test panels on Friday from the printers and got a test shot of them installed on the buses. These first five panels were made up internally at BCL (we still haven’t had the chance to start going through all the submissions yet). I’ll be going back to the downtown terminal this evening to actually install the five test panels on a couple of buses, so keep an eye out for them over the next week.

I’ll post some more photos of the panels installed tomorrow.

Posted on

Work Worth Doing

Now House

Work Worth Doing is an interdisciplinary design studio working to understand the intersection of design, society, and the environment. They’ve been working on retrofitting wartime homes with sustainable design and technologies, getting them down to zero energy use through affordable practices. This model would be a no-brainer for any city, but particular Windsor, which has a huge number of neighbourhoods scattered with wartime bungalows. It’s also similar to the Green Corridor’s Ecohouse initiative, which is still underway.

Oh, and by the way, this is happening in Windsor.

The Windsor Essex Community Housing Corporation has 125 wartime homes in their portfolio of social housing. The Now House Project team is working with Windsor Essex CHC to design the retrofit of five houses in their portfolio to net zero energy use and greatly reduced operating costs. The houses would serve as demonstrations for the possible retrofit of the other wartime homes in the portfolio. Work Worth Doing is the head consultant on this project in Windsor, which will also involve St. Clair College students, and maybe also University of Windsor students.