New Friends Across the Border: Visiting 555

Yesterday, Lee Rodney (Research Director of the Border Bookmobile) and I headed on a short 4km journey.

We visited the fine folks at 555, a volunteer artist-run arts organization providing affordable studios and workspace, gallery space, exhibition programs, arts education programs, and an artist in residency program. We met at their temporary location, while they await the renovations of their new space down the road (the former 3rd police precinct). Those A and B markers in the map above — that’s how close their new building is to the School of Visual Arts.

We met with Monte, Erin, Elizabeth, and Carl, discussing possible collaborations in the not-so-distant future, as well as spending a good amount of time understanding why they do what they do. The scale and type of efforts are perhaps different than those of say, the Powerhouse Project, or the Imagination Station, but their decisions are based on some of the same ideals (and certainly with the same enthusiasm as our own), how do you build a climate of social, aesthetic and community-based investment here and now?

Their programming and artist residencies offer incredibly engaging opportunities for the community and visiting artists, and perhaps most compellingly, they focus on ensuring that “data” created in Detroit can also give back to Detroit.

We’ll be inviting them over soon, you’ll get to meet them and get inspired too, don’t worry.

This Probably Isn’t Helping: When Gateways Fail

Physical civic improvements are an important step for Windsor. Our gateways, if you’re unfamiliar with the city, are a bit lack-luster at present. Where gateways do exist, the markers are underdeveloped, poorly executed, and are the kind of “this could literally be anywhere” design strategy.

Why do gateways matter? Physically and visually defining space is crucial to understanding where you are, and if gateways are to be the entrance to a city, they need to clearly enunciate where you are, and one might argue that this should denote a certain specificity. Failing at gateways means failing to define a space appropriately and in turn continuing to fail at getting over the “non-place” hump.

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Anxious to Explore the Border Bookmobile’s Winter Reading Room

I stopped by the Ecohouse today (where our collective studio is housed) to check out one of our new neighbours — The Border Bookmobile Winter Reading Room. Collected and curated by Border Bookmobile founder, Lee Rodney, the books assembled as part of the winter reading room are going to be incredible helpful for our upcoming How to Forget the Border Completely research project.

I did a quick tour of the collection, though I anticipate that we’ll all be getting a lot better acquainted in the coming weeks.

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Detroit bus services…

A note from Stephen Hargreaves after our conversation last night about the bus system in Detroit and possibilities for cross-border transportation… the image above is of a different Detroit map just to give some reference. On the map Stephen mentions, the routes go far beyond Detroit’s city limits.

Check out the “System Map”, where the stylized “s” appears is the Rosa Parks
Terminal. The Transit Windsor bus delivers you to that terminal and from
there… Detroit is your oyster.

http://www.smartbus.org/Smart/Ride+SMART/System+Map/

Make This Better: Ripper’s Valley

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 from the Riverfront bike path, which happens to be how I first became interested in it. As an avid cyclist, I very frequently ride down this section of the Riverfront path and quite often see a bustling community of families, a diverse range of cultures, a balanced number of mothers and fathers, grandparents, babysitters and children using the play equipment and nearby benches during the day.

However, within feet of this area is a dead-zone. The entrance to the railway cut is dark, looming, and segregated from the Riverfront Park. In my experience, children venturing toward the entrance are most often called back by their parents and reprimanded to stay within the direct area of the play equipment.

Continue reading “Make This Better: Ripper’s Valley”

How Walking Around Your City Can Lead to Something Great

By some estimates (including the CBC), there were 100 people on the walk we took on Tuesday night, in the rain, throughout downtown Windsor.

The attendance alone was inspiring, but what really made the experience so incredible for me was the energy that everyone brought. When we stopped and took a moment to briefly talk about the potential of the Downtown Transit terminal, or the Canderel Building’s huge space, or the properties for lease on Ouellette, the old bingo hall, the House, the city’s storefronts on Pelissier, we got excited together. Things started to feel remotely possible.

It’s that sense of possibility that’s so important right now for our city.

At today’s Artscape Placemaking Workshop at the AGW, we heard some really amazing stories about the work at Artscape has done, the work of Bert and crew at AS220 in Providence, things that started as truly small ideas and have since become cultural movements. It’s all possible, we just need to find the time to walk around a bit more often together.

Then, we need to start getting into some space. And, we should be in a space next to one another, or at least down the block from one another, so we can see one another more often, and we can go for walks and imagine more new things. And then, one day, we’ll look back and say, “remember that walk we took with 90-something other people on that really cold and rainy night…”

Sound good?

P.S. If anyone has any photos or video from the walk, I’d love to see them!

OPENED/UP: a Walk on November 30th

OPENED UP: A walk through lost, forgotten, vacant, and underused spaces.

For an hour and a half after work on Tuesday, November 30, we’ll be walking around downtown Windsor and getting access to a variety of closed / vacant / underused spaces. Justin Langlois will be guiding it with Tom Lucier and we’re hoping to have a lot of ambitious and excited people out with us. City-owned buildings, privately held storefronts, and cavernous bingo halls are all a part of our route, and you’re invited to join us in imagining a different downtown for our city — one with ample, affordable, and exciting spaces for artists, performers, musicians, and other creative-minded folks. We want to start a real conversation about what it would take to get these spaces filled with people who need them. We want to help give people a reason to be excited about being a practicing artist in this city again. We know that finding space needs to be at the top of that list, and we want to help.

This walk has been organized as part of the Artscape Creative Placemaking workshop being held on December 1st. Artscape, if you’re not already familiar with their work, has brought together and led numerous partners and stakeholders to realize massive studio and live/work retrofits of a variety of underused spaces in Toronto and figured out ways to make spaces for artists not only affordable, but integral to the surrounding neighbourhoods and economies. This walk has been something on our to-do list for a while and Artscape’s workshop just gave us the perfect excuse to do it.

Meet us at Phog Lounge at 5pm sharp. We’ll wind our way through the downtown core and head back to Phog for some food, drinks, and lots of conversation. We really want you to be there, let us know if you have any questions.