Respect for LeBreton Flats

This weekend a public dialogue was held to discuss the future of LeBreton Flats. The event attracted a broad range of residents, community activists, and included professional and amateur planners, non-profit housing providers, educators, health professionals, transportation buffs, accessibility advocates, cultural sponsors, local artists and writers.

A few of the old residents of the Flats, were also there, and risked opening-up old wounds, to remind the participants of the spector of the NCC’s expropriation. The importance of remembering and respecting the history of the site was laid out at the forefront, and especially that LeBreton Flats lay within Algonquin territory, on land that was never ceded, and of the significance of the site to Algonquin heritage and culture. Participants were also reminded of the diverse ethnic groups who were affected and rejected by the expropriation including those of Italian, Jewish and French-Canadian ancestry.

Drained once or twice before by administrative enclosure and exclusion of the planning process, community actors and activists were not detered from engaging once more in a process to define the next phase of LeBreton Flats - in an inclusive from that was reminiscent of the old Flats.

These enthusiastic participants brought forward their hopes and dreams of all in an honest and vigourous discussion. Their suggestions of what should happen on the Flats integrated the diversity of the community and the past, long and short, into a full-range of options for the next phase of development.

Many of the community actors who had been involved in advocating against the NCC’s sell-off to Claridge in Phase 1 participated despite the failure of past efforts, and the NCC’s obscene power-brokerage. They were willing to overcome what was generally seen as a slight against them.

Based on a multiple small gatherings in themed break-out groups reporting back to the room as a whole, the session produced an ambitious but lively call for a diverse and equitable community. The participants were almost unanimous in their call for a small-scale, inclusionary planning process which should be launched through a community directed planning process. Their vision included real, and long-term affordable housing maintained in perpetuity, provided my multiple builders including non-profit housing providers, for multi-generational, multi-income and multi-cultural users. The participants called on the new phase to respect the past, most importantly by acknowledged the aboriginal past, and be from the start in close consultation with the Algonquins ensure that their interests in the land were addressed. The working past of the Flats was also on their minds as participants suggested that places be created for the trades artist, and workers, with innovative spaces such as tool-cooperatives and workshops, and light industrial places. Local workers would also find studios and workshops to work from, and families place to play. It was a quite different from Claridge’s stale, condominium based Phase 1 “doughnut.”

Despite invitation, no one from the NCC showed up, even to observe. If they would have bothered to show-up, the NCC property sharks would have heard a clear rejection of Phase I and its limited view, gentrified and exclusionary vision for LeBreton Flats.

The Old Aud

A view from inside the Old Aud in Buffalo, New York.



This fantastic picture is just one of many photos by an Urban Exploring Artists from Montreal-Toronto. Check out the fine visuals at Worksongs



His pictures of the residue of industry in Buffalo and Thedford Mines struck a particular cord.

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock

Cultural guerrillas' cleared of lawbreaking over secret workshop in Pantheon,

From The Guardian

It is one of Paris's most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.

But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France's capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

"When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon's officials know or not," said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. "We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.

"The Panthéon's administrator thought it was a hoax at first, but when we showed him the clock, and then took him up to our workshop, he had to take a deep breath and sit down."

The Centre of National Monuments, embarrassed by the way the group entered the building so easily, did not take to the news kindly, taking legal action and replacing the administrator.

Getting into the building was the easiest part, according to Klausmann. The squad allowed themselves to be locked into the Panthéon one night, and then identified a side entrance near some stairs leading up to their future hiding place. "Opening a lock is the easiest thing for a clockmaker," said Klausmann. From then on, they sneaked in day or night under the unsuspecting noses of the Panthéon's officials.

"I've been working here for years," said a ticket officer at the Panthéon who wished to remain anonymous. "I know every corner of the building. And I never noticed anything."

The hardest part of the scheme was carrying up the planks used to make chairs and tables to furnish the Untergunther's cosy squat cum workshop, which has sweeping views over Paris.

The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer connected to the net.

Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

But the UX, the name of Untergunther's parent organisation, is a finely tuned organisation. It has around 150 members and is divided into separate groups, which specialise in different activities ranging from getting into buildings after dark to setting up cultural events. Untergunther is the restoration cell of the network.

Members know Paris intimately. Many of them were students in the Latin Quarter in the 80s and 90s, when it was popular to have secret parties in Paris's network of tunnels. They have now grown up and become nurses or lawyers, but still have a taste for the capital's underworld, and they now have more than just partying on their mind.

"We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent," said Klausmann. "But our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There's so much to do in Paris that we won't manage in our lifetime."

The Untergunther are already busy working on another restoration mission Paris. The location is top secret, of course. But the Panthéon clock remains one of its proudest feats.

"The Latin Quarter is where the concept of human rights came from, it's the centre of everything. The Panthéon clock is in the middle of it. So it's a bit like the clock at the centre of the world."
Emilie Boyer King in Paris

A Reverse Modest Proposal

Despite continued evidence of rapidly rising income disparity (the rich are getting richer, the rest of us poorer), yesterday the Finance Minister floated the idea that we tax the rich too much (I can't believe it either!). Lower taxes for the richest 1% of Canadians, Flaherty claims, are needed to keep them in Canada. Canada's scions of wealth, the Bankers quickly supported the idea. All this while the price of basic goods and necessities is increasing, and the provision of public services such as transit, day care, and infrastructure is ignored by the Harper government.

Really how much more do top income earners need? If times are really so tough for them despite their rapidly rising income and wealth, I say let them leave. Let them chase opportunity. Let's start by giving Jim "give-the-rich-a-break" Flaherty and his corporate welfare buddies a one way-ticket to "fight the Pretenders in Spain," or "sell themselves to the Barbadoes" (see Swift below), or some other tax-free zone. If they can't stand Canada's attempt to kept some kind of income equity amongst Canadians, I say have a nice trip!

Alternatively, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, may I make A (Reverse) Modest Proposal. Instead of eating the poor, as Swift's satire has suggested, we should eat the rich, and relieve the rest. Though as Swift noted, "I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country." Still, by eating the rich, we could do them all a favour, by stemming their inifnite greed, and save the country from their insatiable need for more money.

After all fat cats are the best eats, "a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout." Umm, roasted bankers....

The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”


The recovery of the fragments of history, as WB, has told us can shed light on the dialectical promise and failure of the modern project. The Angel of History launches into the maelstrom of the past, relieves a object and in so removing it from its context gives it a new meaning. The recovered, like pearls or coral to be discovered, unveil an object in crystalized and fragmentary form. All this to highlight how one can "wrest thought fragments from the past... to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and corals in the depths and carry them to the surface" (HA, 1968: 51-52). Benjamin methodology gives us the form to see how decay is crystallization, and how fragments of history survive to be reformed.

The historians-turned-video-artists known as L’Atelier national du Manitoba attempted such a recovery with forgotten fragments of Winnipeg's collective loss. Upon hearing that video footage of the now-vanished Winnipeg Jets hockey team had been left in the CKY-TV dumpster and was destined for the scrap heap, these Angels of History went into action. The artistes–cum-dumpster divers rescued the debris from certain destruction and fashioned a 60-minute “video-collage-opera,” Death by Popcorn, thus recovering video footage to look back on the false promise.

The movie sold out every night at Winnipeg art-house theater, Cinémathèque, to glowing reviews. Yet, it’s own death was looming; its own success ephemeral. The makers of the film boasted of their dumpster-diving recovery and were soon pursued by the hounds of copyright infringement. They were asked to return the material, and to destroy their film. “It’s appropriate,” Rankin noted in 2005 “Our whole movie was about how corporate interests removed the Jets from Winnipeg. Now, corporate imperatives may remove our movie.” An appropriate recovery, only to be lost again, the moment of meeting its promise was once again fleeting.

The Old Imperial

The Imperial Theatre in Ottawa was built in 1914, and featured both a balcony seating over 200, and loges, or box seats, for over 100 patrons.

In 1938 the venue was popular enough to be fined twenty dollars for overcrowding and people standing in the aisles.


Ten years later, however, the theatre had to reduce the seating capacity to meet the requirements for a one-man projection booth, as they could no longer afford to employ two men. The theatre closed in 1955, and eventually became a concert hall, Barrymore’s.

The Shock Doctrine at City Hall

Ottawa’s recent draft budget report suggests closing 23 community centres, nine libraries, wading pools, reducing bus service, doubling the cost of ice arena rentals, eliminating web-casting of council meetings, cutting public health nurses etc, etc.

Larry o noted that his zero-for-zero campaign "is a war." Indeed, Larry O'Brien has hit it right on the head. His scorch earth policy is an emulation of the “Shock Doctrine:” a clean slate razing of the city and the services it provides. It goes like this. Render the citizens helpless into a state of shock through distortions, and flip-flops; use any tactic necessary to disorient them, unbalance them; bring them child-like state, and then, slowly, on that clean slate, rebuild the state, in your image, into a empty shell which has been completely gutted and outsourced (à la Calian). This tactic so wonderfully exposed in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has become the new mantra of right-wing ideologues. Larry 0’s brainless blunder has brought the Doctrine to City Hall. O’Brien’s constant flip-flops and distortions, amount to tactics of psychological warfare used against Ottawa’s citizens to bypass and overcome the democratic process.

There is a second dimension to this. The Shock Doctrine is a democracy avoidance strategy premised on violence. Now, in the urb, violence does not necessarily equate troops with guns in the city. But violence can be more subtle: it can enacted through a disempowerment of rights. The health of cities is entirely dependant on quality services such as libraries, health clinics, housing, recreation. Without these basic services the city is an empty shell, and the marginalized get pushed further into the fringes of society. Meanwhile, the cities enforcers are getting a 9% increase in their already massive budget – no questions asked. You get the idea.

Any voices of reason in this insane debate? "In a real economic business sense, the cost of providing the services is cheaper than not providing the services," Rev. Brian Cornelius, the minister at First United Church said. "It's pay a little bit more now or a lot more later, and taxpayers should realize this."

Gutting the city for 52 cents a day? I say we need to overcome this shock by recovering our narrative. Thankfully the people at People for a Better Ottawa have started the reclamation.

The Archaic

For WB, too often photography failed to record “the essence” of everyday life, such as factories, even as they ceased being the motor of the city. What remained of this past existence, was rapidly disappearing. The expressway was quickly became the new gateway into the city, replacing the railway station.


The speed of modernity increased, the present-day became more fluid, and the “circle of what can be photographed” narrower. Yet, even as photography lost optical command on the city to film, the snapshot could still confront the modern impulse with a memory of the archaic and provide photography’s uncanny ability to capture the new wish images and to confront the forgotten:


"For the closer we come to its present-day, fluid, functional existence, the narrower draws the circle of what can be photographed; it has to be rightly observed that photography records practically nothing of the essence of, for example, a modern factory. Such pictures can perhaps be compared to railway stations, which, in this age when railways are beginning to be out of date, are no longer generally speaking, the “true gateways” through which the city unrolls its outskirts as it does along the approach roads for motorists. A station gives the order, as it were, for a surprise attack, but it is an outdated maneuver that confronts us with the archaic, and the same is true of photography, even the snapshot. Only film commands optical approaches to the essence of the city such as conducting the motorist into the new center”
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle

Le maudit parking de Hull

"Le projet Hypothèses d’insertions consiste principalement à explorer et occuper temporairement le paysage urbain de Hull avec un élément ludique mobile : une table de ping-pong..."

Garbage-Eve

Having succumbed to an inadvertent bike ride, I found solace in the lost objects of garbage-eve. Found: cross-country skis (left downhill behind); a hockey stick (mint!); a phonograph (still to determine working condition); an unknown alley tucked behind a major commuting artery (silent on a Sunday night, though less silent than it would have been had it not escaped the purge of urban renewal); a hidden court (built alongside an old streetcar garage). Recovered fragments always bring so much more gratification - perhaps because the chain of reification is dented.

As AH has noted in reference to WB....

The mind can be nourished by an open-field of vision: capitalism is never a seemless entity. There are “always holes, always inconspicuous cracks” there is “a porosity in culture, in urbanism and architecture, in everyday life, that makes the economy leaky, subject to subversion, full of “unseen constellations.”