Downtown Windsor, Ontario

Broken City Lab, to the uninitiated, is a multidisciplinary group of concerned citizens in Windsor. They get together weekly (at least) to discuss the goods and the bads of our fine city. Then they think of ways to emphasize these parts of Windsor through artistic expression, interaction, collaboration, and more.

Recently, Broken City Lab launched an initiative called Save The City. It’s a five-month series of interactions between Broken City Lab, Windsor citizens, and the city itself. The meet-ups and activities are designed to get more than just the conversation going about the kind of city we actually live in, and the kind of city we hope to live in.

Last month was the first such event which was focused on storytelling. It was titled “Listen To The City“. According to Broken City Lab, it was “a community workshop to brainstorm, uncover, and share personal histories of Windsor, inviting a range of community members to participate in the process. The workshop will begin with a discussion about the importance in personal histories alongside official histories of a city, and then lead to the opportunity for community participants to share their own stories about Windsor.”

Portable recorders were spread throughout the meeting space, and people were encouraged to share their perspectives. Over twelve hours of content was collected! A nice start.

February’s intervention with Windsor was described by Broken City Lab as:

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.

The results were hopeful for the downtown. Making it onto the list of Sites of Hope were the St. Clair College Mediaplex, City Hall, Capitol Theatre, the new Downtown Bus Depot, the old Downtown Bus Depot, The Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market, Windsor Workers Action Centre, Windsor’s Community Museum, The Windsor Armories, Artcite Gallery, and more…

Of course, there were sites that straddled both the positive and negative. An important stance on results like these is to acknowledge the positives, and investigate the negatives. If there are Sites of Apology in downtown Windsor, how can we fix them? How can residents and businesses alike contribute to making these spots more revered and honoured?

For more about this meeting, and future interventions with the city, visit this post on Windsorite.ca for photos of the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope play-by-play.

What other places do you feel could have been mentioned as Sites of Apology or Sites of Hope in the downtown and why? Leave your comments below.

Thanks to Justin Langlois for use of photos from BrokenCityLab.org!