BLDGBLOG came across some amazing items in the archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture…

The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.

The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”

With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.

Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.

Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:

Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities

Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance

Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model

Ending Mountaintop Removal

Creative Think Tank

Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign

And many more

Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.

If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.

In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”

As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”

Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.

DC area folks,

This month attend “Sowing Seeds Here and Now: A Chesapeake Urban Farming Summit” on June 18th.

Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) 10300 Baltimore Ave College Park, MD 20705

Click here to learn more about all of the exciting and extensive list of workshops, seminars, speakers, etc. which range from learning about the drastic links between food and health to how to plan an urban farm and the connection between food, farming, and environmental justice.

“The goal of our one-day hands-on learning and strategizing event is to catalyze and support urban farming throughout our greater metropolitan DC area.”

The purpose of this piece is to visualize the vast network of altruistic human organizations in every country, city, and community around the world, all working in parallel together. Despite their enormous diversity of size, focus, and geographic location, these organizations are all united around a core set of values in which compassion and stewardship are made highest priorities. The hundreds of millions of individuals who are creating and running these organizations bring a nourishing richness of passion, imagination, and integrity to this process. In that way I think of this piece as being like a compass, pointing toward a true source of hope and inspiration for our times.

Link.

EATLACMA is a year-long investigation into food, art, culture and politics, a project produced by Fallen Fruit for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Fusing the richness of museum’s collection with the ephemerality of food and the natural growth cycle, EATLACMA’s projects consider food as a common ground that explores the social role of art and ritual in community and human relationships.  EATLACMAunfolds seasonally, with artist’s gardens planted and harvested on the museum campus, hands-on public events, and a concurrent exhibition,Fallen Fruit Presents The Fruit of LACMA (June 27-November 7, 2010). It culminates in a day-long event (November 7, 2010) in which over fifty artists and collectives will activate, intervene, and re-imagine the entire museum’s campus and galleries.

You can participate by uploading your video to the project’s Show Us How You Eat YouTube page.

Artist/activist Mel Chin’s landmark Fundred Project, currently touring the country, will be appearing in the DC area this Friday-Monday. Schedule and locations here.  The project promotes awareness and positive action toward eliminating the effects of lead-contaminated soil that place children at risk for severe learning disabilities and behavioral problems.

Fundred is touring the country gathering hand-drawn Fundred dollar bills from schools and art centers which will be presented to Congress in exchange for funding to implement a new method of lead abatement for the city of New Orleans.

Download a Fundred dollar template and make your own contribution!

Here’s a way to get perspective on the current size of the BP oil spill.  You may need to download Google Earth to make it work.

Here’s is a thought-provoking TED talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  It’s a great backdrop for a new design competition seeking remedies for “first” world problems exclusively from designers in the “developing” world.  The organizers raise some interesting questions about reversing paternalistic attitudes at the core of much well-intentioned international development.  Too often the ‘developing world’ is assumed to be inferior and need of enlightenment, historically embedded in Western economic and religious colonialism.  Obviously, this is not a simple landscape to navigate, but the project will bring some sustained insights into Western “problems” which can often be more severe than those in the “developing” world.

Dx1W has proclaimed 2010 International Year of the First World in Need

One of the major aims will be to demonstrate the beneficial effects of cultural diversity. We want to recognize the importance of transfers and exchanges between cultures through implicit or explicit dialogue that underlines how cultures and civilizations are interlinked and contribute to the progress of humankind.

The strategy of the International Year consists in mainstreaming the above-mentioned principles in all policy-making at local, national, regional and international levels through the involvement of the greatest number of relevant stakeholders. The activi­ties carried out under the International Year focus on:

• Reducing obesity
• Addressing aging population and low birth rate
• Reducing consumption rate of mass produced goods.
• Integrating the immigrant populations

The Dx1W competition is addressed to the developing countries of the world: All cre­ative solutions depend on having a powerful idea. Whether it’s great resources, mili­tary, politics or government, power and size are not enough with out having a powerful vision. The First World needs ideas to solve their problems. First World problems demand Simple Third World solutions. From today on The Third World will bring ideas to redesign the future of the First World.

Individual and team submissions are welcomed.

Plan before you plant. Check out this City Farmer post; they have been digging up some vintage videos from the victory garden era. See some of them here. Scroll through City Farmer News to read about urban gardening movements all around the world.

In Los Angeles on any given Friday, you could venture over to Farmlab’s Salon, tuck in a full-on organic lunch and listen to an amazing line-up of art/ecology innovators and activists. Last week I heard Wes Jackson of the Land Institute describe his 50-year plan to restore the depleated soils of America’s heartland.  Next Friday historian Robert Bichard presents over 100 images exploring the first movie studios in L.A. starting 100 years ago.

Farmlab, formerly Not a Corn Field, is the invention of artist/urbanist/philanthropist Lauren Bon.  It began as a multi-year project to restore a 35-acre industrial brownfield near downtown through the cultivation of corn- not only corn, but a social sculpture and nexus for community action and education.

Recently Bon has been working with a veteran’s hospital to create the Strawberry Flag project.

More images: (more…)