Broken, Not Beaten

Changing Windsor (Detroit’s North of the Border, equally-depressed, sister city)’s landscape for, and with, interactive public art is the Broken City Lab: A team of creative neighbourhood-changers that assemble as a non-profit think tank to come up with interesting ways to start conversations, renew a sense of community, and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures and creative practice. Their projects range from apps that help you get lost in your city, to temporary retroreflective text installations on local infrastructure, to biodegradable graffiti on the sidewalk. Explains Justin Langlois, Research Director of Broken City Lab, “If you’re looking at it just as art, it might seem dubious, if you’re looking at it as a form of social service, you’ll question the efficacy, if you’re looking at it as a design consultancy, it might look unrigorous. And so, we don’t really think of ourselves as really doing any of those things, at least not exclusively. That being said, some projects are more readily accessible than others through certain lenses, and hopefully people encountering the work can draw something away from it that at least momentarily helps them to reframe the problem or idea we’re tackling.”