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Shaping our City: Brainstorming Session at Civic Space Tomorrow!

BCL Workshop

Friday, January 3rd, 2013 at 7pm – CIVIC Space (411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario)

As static as Windsor might seem at times, it is definitely going through some changes. Our downtown is a lot brighter because of the large screens on the Windsor Star building, the University of Windsor’s downtown campus opens next year, the aquatic centre is opening this year, we have a new bridge that may be completed in 2020, the new Penalty Box location is reviving a historical building on University Avenue West, and the old Grace Hospital has been torn down.

In the vein of our previous project, City Counseling (Session #1), we’ll be talking through new ideas and changes happening in the city, as a group. The goal of this brainstorm session is to bring people together, learn something new about Windsor, and contribute creative perspectives for shaping this city. I hope you can make it down to Civic Space tomorrow at 7 pm (January 3rd) to contribute to these conversations.

This event is a collaboration with Life In a Border Town.

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MIT’s Place Pulse

Place Pulse, a sort of rating system for locations within a city, enables pedestrians to form a database of their opinions and findings. More importantly, this project allows participants to share information with those who might have a part in future urban development. Five cities are currently available to rate through Place Pulse: Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, Boston, and New York.

“Place Pulse, by the Macro Connections group, is a website that puts the full force of science behind fuzzy things like how safe or rich or unusual a city seems, and it does it in the least likely way: by crowdsourcing people’s ratings of streets, using geotagged images, and turning those answers into hard, eminently crunchable numbers.”

This project should be a helpful tool in determining “aesthetic capital”, but the question of superficiality appears. Place Pulse could garner usable information for the remodelling of urban commercial spaces, parks, roadways, and structural facades, but can not hope to solve the pressing problems of crime and poverty. I’m aware that the purpose of the project is not to tackle these social problems, but it’s possible that Place Pulse could plug in to other social efforts for urban improvement.

Via: Fast Co. Design

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A Set of Informal Questions about London, Ontario

We want to know about London, Ontario.

We’re doing an exhibition at Forest City Gallery, opening in September, and we’re looking into the wide range of narratives that go into constructing a place — the architecture, the headlines, the people, the memories, the relationships, the rumours — and we’re hoping you can help us out.

Whether you’re a longtime resident,  someone who just moved in, or even if you’ve only ever visited London, Ontario, we want to hear about it all.

So, just fill out the form below, tell us some stories, and we’ll work with all of this for our exhibition.

Continue reading “A Set of Informal Questions about London, Ontario”

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GOOD Magazine – Vampire Energy

GOOD Magazine has been creating a number of these short videos with great animations discussing and illustrating a variety of issues. This one, in particular, talks about “Vampire Energy,” the energy that appliances and electronics use, even if they’re in standby mode. Best practice is always to have your TV, computer, etc. connected to a power bar that can be shut off when not in use, thereby cutting the power completely.

I think the video is a good example of distributing knowledge effectively. They took existing information/data (about power consumption) and created an animation that does a better job at communicating it than a bar graph and table of numbers probably ever could.