Art

UforChange: Culture for a Better World

- Adam Clare

UforChange is all about using art and culture to make the world a better place! They focus on St. Jamestown in Toronto and have had great success engaging their community through participating in art projects that make the neighbourhood more welcoming and a great place to be.

UFORCHANGE: Creative Culture,Better World from Mad Ruk Entertainment on Vimeo.

At the core of the program is a unique methodology: an exploration of arts and life skills that is both participant guided and founded in experiential learning. UforChange provides a six month, structured and intensive arts, culture and life skills program for youth, followed by another 9 months of participant selected projects, fully facilitated by staff and volunteers. Our methodology has demonstrated proven results for youth by helping them to make friends, build skills, find confidence, formulate and follow through on a plan for their future, all while developing a stronger sense of community, belonging and pride.

Good Bikes on the Streets of Toronto

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

The Good Bike project is bringing colour to the streets of Toronto. Bright neon bicycles are celebrating aspects of Toronto, they really are eye-catching.

Over the past few weeks, more than 30 brightly painted bicycles, a few featuring baskets of potted plants, have popped up all over the city—orange at Queen and Dovercourt, blue at Dundas and Sackville, and pastel pink at College and Robert, among many others. On their own, the bikes may seem like isolated or even arbitrary acts of street art, but in reality, they’re part of a citywide network of bikes, their colours and locations carefully and specifically chosen to commemorate a piece of history, an urban hot spot, or a personal memory.

As with any infestation, even the nice ones, it started small—Vanessa Nicholas and Caroline Macfarlane, two OCAD U Student Gallery employees, found a creative way to deal with their distaste for a rusty, derelict bike abandoned on the street outside their place of work by painting it bright orange and planting flowers in its basket. They were met with enthusiasm from passersby but also with a big, angry ticket from the City of Toronto calling for its removal. With support from fans and friends interested in protecting public works of art, accelerated by media reaction and councilors Gary Crawford (Ward 36, Scarborough Southwest) and Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) City Hall eventually changed its mind and even Rob Ford hopped on the idea to turn the now-famous Orange Bike into a citywide project, in partnership with Macfarlane and Nicholas, known as the Good Bike Project.

Read the full article at Torontoist.

Haydn Makes You Healthy

- Dan Harrison

Well not just Haydn, or classical music for that matter – a recent study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health has shown that the greater an individual’s engagement in cultural activities, the greater the benefit to their personal health. This trend exists across many different artistic and creative pursuits, and affects both men and women. The participants in the study were asked questions concerning their health, satisfaction in life, and levels of anxiety and depression, as well as questions pertaining to their involvement in participatory (playing an instrument, painting, singing, etc.) or receptive (going to a concert or play) culture.

Both types of cultural activity were linked with good health, wellbeing, low stress and low depression even when other factors, such as social background and wealth, were taken into account. In men the effect was most pronounced in those who preferred to get their dose of culture as an observer rather than doing something more hands on.

So next time you’re feeling down or under the weather, get out there and indulge your creative side!

Read the full article at the BBC.

Out my Window Documentary

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Out my Window is NFB online documentary that is really great! It provides a 360 degree view of a person’s apartment in an urban centre from around the world. It’s really neat to see how so many people live and how similar and different a lot of things are.

Cizek says in her Director’s Statement: “To be human in this century is — more than ever before — to be urban.” There is a strong social justice message in the piece, in particular, highlighting how the peripheries where many highrises are built are too often ignored by downtown politics. Out My Window, and the larger multi-year Highrise project by the NFB that it is part of, might be one way to bridge realities between suburban and urban and raise awareness, but Cizek also insists that the periphery needs to be physically brought back into the fabric of the city. “In some places it may mean proper access to public transit (Toronto), in other places it might mean other forms of infrastructure like water, roads, electricity (Istanbul). We also need to link these realities culturally, in both directions (Amsterdam [as depicted in Out My Window] is a great example of doing this right).”

In terms of doing it right, the highrises have lessons to teach planners and politicians, if they are listening, in terms of local needs. The informal and illegal economies of the highrises are often harmless, quotidian services like barbers, and fresh vegetable delivery. Cizek says that these local entrepreneurs “…are technically illegal due to zoning and permits, but are vital to the communities: halal meat distributor on the third floor, daycare on the seventh, etc.” In Toronto, the Tower Renewal project aims to address and foster some of this entrepreneurial spirit.

Read more here and see Out my Window

Urban Camping In Tents

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A lot of people in Canada know what it’s like to go camping in the woods, but what about camping in the urban jungle? World Changing has a really neat collection of people and organizations that encourage setting up a tent in the urban fabric.

My favourite is the tent that’s shaped like a car that is meant for taking a parking space for people.

Import Export’s ‘tentscrapers’ would facilitate that exploration. To get out there and be in the elements, to enjoy the city like one can enjoy nature, is what is so appealing to me about urban camping. And introducing the inexpensive nature of camping to city travel is a wonderful democratizing practice for tourism. With the success of Tentstation in Berlin, and Import Export Architect’s compelling vision of ‘tentscrapers’ it looks like urban camping is on the rise…but perhaps all we really need are car tents?

World changing has more info and pictures.

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