Community based urban laboratories 

Dr Thomas Strickland, Shauna Janssen, Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard

Public space, the second urban laboratory, will focus on the theme of accessibility and the city's plans for the creation of a new cultural venue and public space located next to the Wellington tower in Griffintown. Activities for the public space workshop are facilitated by the Points de vue team and will occur in three parts. These include: a long table, where participants will be invited to dialogue and share their points of view and experiences of accessibility in the built environment; a guided tour and assessment of the accessibility of the Wellington tower and future public space; and participation in the creation of a final installation at the Wellington tower.

Points de vue activities are free to the public. Please register ahead of time by sending an email to pointsdevuemtl@gmail.com, and include the name(s) of the participants attending.

Points de vue

Points de vue is a community-based art platform that brings together three socially engaged art collectives : pouf! art + architecture, Collectif 636 and Urban Occupations Urbaines (UOU).

Four urban laboratories engaging a variety of publics and diverse communities with the question of the future of the Wellington tower, one of Montreal’s iconic postindustrial buildings, occur between June and September 2014.

The tower stands literally at the crossroads between four vastly different neighbourhoods: Vieux-Montréal, Ville Marie, Petite-Bourgogne, and Point-St-Charles. All four districts have seen rapid gentrification and transformation of their built environments, primarily through increased residential space. New residents live side by side with longstanding residents, and these groups often have different perspectives on the industrial past of the region. In 2014-2015 the Wellington tower, abandoned for over a decade, will be repurposed as a venue for community and cultural activities.

As a form of public consultation, the goals of our community engaged urban laboratories are to identify which cultural landscapes need to be foregrounded in order for this repurposing to be meaningful to the broader community of Montreal.  Points de vue is a collaborative, creative undertaking on behalf of the past, present, and future communities for whom the Wellington tower matters. Our aim will be to document «points de vue» about the building’s industrial past and its postindustrial life as a cultural centre.

Urban Occupations Urbaines  is a mobile organization conceived to facilitate creative responses to unresolved architectural and urban conditions. Projects are conceived as temporary occupations and spatial appropriations for re-imagining open, public, culturally diverse, inclusive, and playful urban spaces.

Pouf!  Art + architecture is a Montreal firm of art and design dedicated to social justice and its spatial issues.