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Actions in Review: Re-Humanizing the City

John Rooney and PK514 Walls Turned into Ground, Olympic Stadium, Montréal 2007 © Rachel Granofsky

Deviating from its conventional mandate, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is currently hosting “Actions: 99 projects that investigate What You Can Do With the City.” While some of the projects relate to traditional “architectural” concerns, most constitute instances of how communities can evolve from imagination and thoughtful co-operation.

All 99 projects approach a common goal of re-humanizing the places where we live and how we live there, simultaneously rendering both more sustainable. This provides a reigning thematic coherence, despite the fact that the architects’ “actions” arose independently of each other and of the exhibition.

Physical remnants and documentary evidence of the projects are organized into four general categories: “walking,” “playing,” “recycling,” and “gardening.” Among the “walking” projects, one of the more audacious is the Gehzeug (“walkmobile”) designed by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer and vociferous car critic who aims to contest the automobile’s domination of the city. For his project, Knoflacher created a wooden walking frame that gives the participant who dons it the same dimensions as an automobile, and first-hand recognition of the inefficiencies of the greedy car and its usurpation of public space.

Jean-Yves Blondeau’s Roller Suit, which positions dozens of wheels along the wearer’s major joints and planes, is presented under the category “playing.” The aptly named “Buggy Rollin’” allows participants to careen along roads, across squares and down metros at terrific speed. Such a cheeky approach to the dreaded commute suggests how the urban centre might be rendered a playground. The graceful Parkour movement, brainchild of stuntman David Belle, also encourages us to revisit our artificial environment. Its practitioners, called traceurs, aim to move from one point to another with maximum efficiency, coincidentally exhibiting extraordinary grace and transforming otherwise static city terrain into a mobile gymnasium.

Established in Brussels by the artists’ organization City Mine(d), PRECARE is an ambitious “recycling” project which negotiates the donation of empty office spaces on fixed-term leases to non-profit organizations. Having thus recycled more than 100 workspaces, the initiative has spawned programs in London, Barcelona and Milan.

Perhaps the most interesting among the “gardening” initiatives were the ones that broke the habit of linking cultivator to patch of land. When so few urban dwellers have access to such, community gardens that germinate in discarded packaging are a revelation, reminding us that with some inventiveness we can reclaim intimacy with what we eat. Such projects include The Vacant Lot, which utilizes plastic bags containing soil to produce vegetables in otherwise barren concrete lots in London and Cornwall, and Public Farm One, which grows lettuces in discarded concrete tubes in Queens.

The human scale of the exhibition’s “actions” is an exploration of how ordinary people, using ordinary means, can reclaim their communities. These are not architects who lack ambition for doing major building projects. Instead, they work to encourage us to organize against environmental collapse and the destruction of a much-abused, neglected planet. It is in this respect that the CCA, which has posted an open online invitation to contribute other projects, promotes a revolutionary cause. (1920 rue Baile, Montreal QC)

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