Canadian Curators Present 99 Ways To Better a City

The Canadian Center for Architecture is exhibiting Tools for Action: What You Can Do With the City through April 19, 2009. The exhibit presents 99 recent events from around the world in which simple acts of walking, recycling, painting, playing or gardening has transformed some aspect of urban negativity into a place for positive change. International contemporary architectural projects, design concepts, research studies, and other ideas are conveyed through a range of materials including architectural drawings, photographs, videos, publications, artifacts, and websites. Rather than using traditional tools associated with urban planning and design, the instigators of these actions offer an intensely focused personal engagement. The exhibit’s website provides not only photos of the installation, but also lists all 99 actions, such as #4: Reclaim Vacant Lot with What City’s Got (see photo) in Seville, Spain, and #79: Paint Grows Soccer Field in United Arab Emirates.

CCA Director Mirko Zardini, writes in the exhibit catalog’s introduction, “A New Urban Takeover”:

A true and proper cultural revolution is necessary to replace traditional development with the alternative hypothesis of calm degrowth, voluntary simplicity, a livable—indeed, a lively—society. The deterioration of contemporary society reveals a crisis of meaning accompanied by a “decline of the individual-personal ability to do or to make.” What is needed is a shift from the passivity in which we comply with what is offered up every day, to an active posture, not so much of resistance, but of a quest. If we observe the contemporary urban world attentively, we see new forms emerge, “microbe-like, singular and plural practices” that develop outside the rules and regulations that inform our current urban system.

Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920 Baile Street, Montreal, Quebec, H3H 2S6

[via Social Design Notes]