What if…the ultra-traffiked and objectively, ugly road in Widsor that leads to the border between Canada and the US were completely revitalized and greened and it was transformed into a livable, harmonious space?
What if…the city of Toronto decided to build a preferred covered path for bikes so people could commute undisturbed by traffik and aggressive cars?
What if…people living in the arctic could produce their own infrastructure in their own terms and in their language using open source technologies ?
these three scenarios are explored in the exhibition Contingent Technologies curated by Michael Alstad and Camille Turner form Year01 at Interaccess.
The “corridor” Windsor-Detroit, the transportation system in Toronto and the Arctic are three environmentally contested areas in Canada today. The three projects are not mere utopias, but visions that depict viable solutions for these three areas. unfortunately, government policies and city politics have not, or have only partially, made them a reality.
The Green Corridor Project, an idea by Canadian artist Noel Harding and visual arts professor Rod Strickland has been in the making for several years and only now something positive is happening, thanks to the help of the communities that live in the area. their goal has been to raise awareness about the territory by organizing concerts on the sidewalks, by guerrilla planting and arts making and by lobbing the city. this project constitutes maybe a model, a starting point for things to happen, as the city appears to have finally approved the project.
Unfortunately, amongst political fights at the municipal level, a very unimpressive mayoral campaign thatdoes not seem to go that direction and that is unfolding right now, as well as a car culture that doesn’t appear to slow down, the bike path in Toronto is still a dream.
In the case of the Arctic project, API (Arctic Perspective Initiative), the canadian funder, Matthew Biederman, had to rely on funding from the EU, while he struggles to be acknowledged in his own country.
