Windsor, Ontario is known as The Detroit of the North, and has been as hard hit as the Motor City by the fall of the auto industry. A group of artists and urbanists have come together to do something about it.
Planetizen's Nate Berg covered the group for Metropolis Magazine:
"Their group is called the Broken City Lab, and it meets weekly to collaboratively dream up ways of engaging the community in a conversation about Windsor's future.
To encouragement civic engagement, they've embedded temporary messages in blocks of ice, designed magnetic planters that can hang on chain-link fences, and issued a report on options for re-using empty retail space. Led by Justin Langlois, an artist and an instructor at the University of Windsor, the group's been meeting for about a year and a half, and it documents its work and ideas online."
"Windsor + Detroit = BFF?" is one of the messages the group projected on a side of a building in letters large enough for Detroit to see over the river.
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UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
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