PreFab Parks for Park(ing) Day

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBNUQsEUKlU&feature=player_embedded

Every year in New York, parking spots are taken over by people wanting to transform urban space into something more useable than concrete boxed in by painted lines under the banner of, Park(ing) Day. The even was originally imaged by San Fransisco’s Rebar, an interdisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of art, design and activism. The “small, functional, vibrant” parks that are part of Park(ing) Day each have a theme and are nearly all temporarily turfed with sod.

In the video, there’s a number of interviews highlighting people taking on the initiative for fun or for politics, but nearly all want to suggest the potential for rethinking the many, many, many parking spaces used by a single car at a time.

This certainly works given the sheer number of people in a city like New York, but if there was one parking spot in Windsor that you’d take over for a day, where would it be?

[via Worldchanging]

Visiting Detroit

Detroit, Riverside Extension fence

Danielle and I went over to Detroit yesterday to meet with Aaron Timlin (from the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit) at the LadyBug Gallery to discuss some potential collaborative projects over the summer. After getting a quick tour of the gallery and some of the other studios and workspaces in the building (which we unfortunately didn’t get any photos of, though next time), we headed out into the neighbourhood for a guided tour with Aaron to start brainstorming some future projects and project sites.

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