With DodoLab & Broken City Lab in Windsor, ON
November 24, 2010 by Giles Lane
From Windsor to Detroit (McKee Park)
I’ve just returned from a research trip to Ontario, Canada with DodoLab where we spent a week planning new projects and doing a site visit to Windsor, Ontario for a batch of projects next Autumn with local artist-led group, Broken City Lab. Windsor is on the south side of the Detroit river from Detroit itself and, whilst being one of the earliest settlements in Canada, owes much of its former prosperity to Detroit’s auto industry. Today it is a town with serious industrial decline, urban blight and heavy pollution from the surrounding heavy industry and the vast numbers of trucks rolling across the Ambassador Bridge from the US into Canada.
Over the next year we aim to participate in DodoLab’s ongoing, intermittent residency in Windsor culminating in a week-long anarchaeological exploration of the city and the history of its futures. Building on the process we are developing through our current series of events here in London, City As Material, we’ll aim to work with local people in and around Windsor to create a series of shareable publications with bookleteer that can begin not just to map out the imagined futures of the past as created by the City and corporations, but also to project new ones based on hopes and aspirations of the grassroots communities who live there now.
