Construction Zone

 Nothing goes better together than pizza and model cities.

As promised in my last post, I now have an entry at the Winnipeg Art Gallery blog about my first attempt at a week-long city-building camp with kids. You can read about it here. Unfortunatley, part of my post was changed by the WAG Communications department (because they don't like Punnett squares?) so it does not reflect our actual process. To set the record straight: before we made our own city, we made some observations about Winnipeg. Then we slotted them into 4 categories (not 2, as implied by my entry on the Winnipeg Art Gallery site.) The categories and results were as follows:

The kids never were able to figure out what we might replace schools with. When I asked them why they did not want a school in their city, they responded "School is boring!" When I asked what they would do instead of going to school, they unanimously responded "Play video games." Then I presented the dillema: Who would make the video games if nobody went to school? An uncomfortable silence ensued.

Building cities with children (part 2)

In a previous post, I discussed an experiment that I did while working for the Planning Property and Development at the City of Winnipeg. In this experiment, I asked children to design cities and neighbourhoods in which they would like to live. Although this experiment was a success, it seemed to me that half-an-hour was not long enough to generate really thorough designs of cities. Well, I'm back at it again, and this time the kids have an entire week.

As the director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery Art Camps, I will be running a camp called Construction Zone (pdf), in which the children will get a chance to explore our city inside and out, watch people as they interact with public space, construct their own buildings, and fit them together into an entire neighbourhood. Once the camp starts, I will be posting the results on this blog, or on the WAG blog if they will let me!