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Justin Langlois

Creative Placemaking Downtown Walk

by tomlucier on November 19, 2010

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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.

As an added bonus, here’s a link to the details of the big workshops to follow on Dec. 1st –

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On Tuesday, September 22nd we held an event at Phog.
It was organized by Stephen Pender of the University of Windsor Humanities Research Group. The event, Philosophy And The City, was designed to bring people together to discuss the way the city works, doesn’t work, and how we envision our future together.

Jeff Noonan (Philosophy, The University of Windsor), Justin Langlois (Broken City Lab), Melinda Munro (City of Windsor), and myself were “panelists” in the very open forum discussion taking place. In fact, I was holding my post behind the bar, tending to the needs of the customer, and hopefully adding an answer here and there to help move the discussion.

Of course, I live streamed the event.
And I also archived it online.
For you.
So if you want to take the time to listen to the discussion (the parts that are audible), please do so below.

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Urban Mediation Symposium

by tomlucier on May 14, 2009

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Currently sitting in the event I heard about on Monday night.
It’s Thursday now.
Urban Mediation.
What the hell does that mean?

It’s complicated.
If you saw some of the people/discussion titles, you may balk and think, “I don’t know any of that stuff. I don’t think I need to (should) be there.”
You’d be wrong.
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This is what will happen before lunch –

Urban Mediations Symposium
University of Windsor — York University
14 May 2009 Windsor, Ontario
Location: ArtCite Inc., 109 University Avenue
Opening Remarks
Michael Darroch (Communication, Media and Film, UofW)
Janine Marchessault (CRC for Art, Digital Media & Globalisation, York)
Places & Mappings
Michael Darroch
Ian Robinson (PhD Candidate, Culture & Communications, York)
Mapping Locality Through Visual Media
Michele Tarailo (Education/Visual Arts, UofW)
She is the (Urban) Landscape
Veronika Mogyorody (Assistant Provost, Academic Architectural Advisor, UofW)
Reconceptualizing Place: The Struggle in Revisioning Downtown
Danielle Sabelli (MA Candidate, Communication Studies, UofW)
Where the Urban Refugee Hangs His Hat—An Examination of the Architecture of
the Displaced
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Discussion
Projects & Curations
Rob Nelson
Justin Langlois (Visual Arts, UofW)
Broken City Lab
Rod Strickland (Visual Arts, UofW)
Green Corridor Project
Noel Harding (Independent Artist / Visual Arts, UofW)
Green Corridor: Extensions
Janine Marchessault (CRC for Art, Digital Media & Globalisation, York)
Leona Drive Project
Discussion
Edges & Borders
Janine Marchessault
Sandra Gabriele (Communication, Media and Film, UofW)
Borders, Trains, and God: Controlling the Pernicious Sunday Newspaper
Steven Logan (PhD Candidate, Communication & Culture, York)
Auto-Mobile in the Suburbs
Lee Rodney (Visual Arts, UofW)
Detroit-Windsor Bookmobile
Discussion
LUNCH

*sigh*

This set of discussions and presentations are based loosely on this:
Making cities better.
Understanding cities.
How and why we live in urban space.
And a HELL of a lot more.

The issue here is the same one I face when I realize the PILES of incredible online and offline content I consume (podcasts, blogs, magazines, art shows, radio shows, etc.)…
I ache to get more eyes, ears, minds and hearts involved in the larger scale of things happening.

A funny anecdote to end on, is this:
A girl who has been hanging around downtown, sulking mostly, said something outrageous to a group of Broken City Lab fans who were on a Scavenge Walk earlier this year.
She came out to the street and said, “Windsor sucks. There’s nothing to do here.”

I find myself in this gallery, doubling as a symposium space, struggling to find time to do laundry.
Readers of this post STILL won’t understand how much richness Widnsorites have access to…
I suppose that is the reason I do this blog, in many ways, and I hope this is yet another exhibition of amazing experiences you can engage yourself in while living in this fine city of ours.
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If you read this in time, and you want to listen to some of these talks and meet some of these brilliant (urban) minds, come to Artcite (next door to the Capitol Theatre. The event ENDS at 5pm. Come get what you can get.
This is fascinating.

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One of the best culture columns yet, if I do say so myself.
Broken City Lab’s new Text In-Transit idea blows me away. This was my way of bringing it to light to an audience who may not find out about it otherwise.

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