the public studio

The Harvey Milk Rec Center in San Fran

San Francisco- land of white fire hydrants, Prius taxis, and officially sanctioned dog walking zones. Even with and perhaps in spite of its self-consciousness, the city somehow manages to be both elegant and gritty, often on the same street. There aren’t many places that can pull that off– San Francisco does it well.

I recently spent 24 hours* in the city on the hills and found the abundant parks and public space so refreshing. And practical. Walking is easy here and in one afternoon, on one walk, it’s possible to make it through at least three, possibly four spectacular parks.

Start at Dolores Park for some very rewarding people watching. After you’ve had your fill of flute playing and Capoeira, head over to dog filled Duboce Park where Harvey Milk’s crisp and prescient words preside over the playground. Buena Vista Park is just a short walk away but give yourself plenty of time to wander through this urban forest: the views really are good- some of the best in the city. If the sun’s still up, head to the city’s largest- Golden Gate Park-where you could easily spend an entire day, but a couple of hours will do.

Making your way from park to park you will be confronted with those notoriously (but mostly manageable) steep streets. Use this spectacular map to methodically plot the city’s steepest points. If you don’t have an entire afternoon try finding one of the city’s many privately owned public spaces. Many of them are hidden, so lucky for us SPUR has outlined the city’s best here.

*there very well may be a better, more efficient route, this is just the one that I mapped and loved

View of the Windsor Chrysler Building

Not long ago, if you had stood at the edge of Detroit and looked south– across the river to the neighboring city of Windsor, Ontario– you might have spotted an odd but fascinating, billboard-sized projection. “We’re in this together,” it beamed in thick block letters. Using a borrowed projector and Windsor’s riverside Chrysler building as canvas, Justin Langlois and his posse from Broken City Lab launched their Cross Border Communication project in the Fall of 2009 with a series of dispatches for the people of Detroit. “The message was meant to be read in a few different ways,” says Langlois. “It’s both we need to work on things together and we kind of screwed each other… so we’re in this together.”

Windsor’s co-dependent relationship with its once-booming and now-failing sibling city has been both blessing and curse. Both cities lead their countries in unemployment rates and Windsor has the highest residential rental vacancy rates in Canada. Langlois founded Broken City Lab as a way to explore the transnational intertwining of these two towns, and chart a path forward for Windsor.

Founded in 2008 as Langlois’ graduate thesis project at the University of Windsor, Broken City Lab now has six members ranging in age from 18 to 26. It’s an artist-led urban improvement group–a sort of art therapy collective for a city in need of triage.

In the same way that groups like Object Orange call attention to blighted buildings throughout Detroit, Broken City Lab uses idealistic interventions to draw attention to some of Windsor’s very real problems. For “Text in Transit,” the group partnered with Windsor Transit and other city agencies to make use of underutilized ad space to address Windsor’s reputation as a stopover city. All over town, signs readThere is a future here, You are right where you need to be, and The automobile can only take us so far. In “100 Ways to Save the City,” locals texted, tweeted, and emailed their ideas to be projected onto a building in downtown Windsor.

If Langlois is lofty in his vision, he is also pragmatic in his goals. “I hope [the lab] can continue to keep me and the people involved interested and wanting to talk about this place where we live,” he says. “I hope we can initiate that conversation for the city.”

The lab’s upcoming initiative, a five-month long dialogue with Windsor funded by the Ontario Arts Council, begins in earnest this Sunday, January 24 with a workshop aimed at collecting oral histories of Windsor. In February, Broken City Labs will launch “Sites of Apology/Sites of Hope,” and call on residents to map and mark places that deserve attention. “We have a scrap yard at the center of the city,” says Langlois. “You can see it as a big rusty spot on the Google map and it’s been there forever. I don’t want to say to my brother’s children 20 years from now, ‘my bad, sorry we didn’t take care of that.”