City Repair Project – Slideshow Presentation

Oct. 1, 2003

For your interest:

Mark Lakeman and Jennifer Leis are coming to Ottawa to give a slideshow presentation about their innovative community architecture work with the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon.

The event will take place on Tues. Nov. 4th, from 7:30 to 10pm, at 231 Unicentre, Carleton University, admission $5-$10 or pay what you can.  

Mark Lakeman is a founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, a multi-disciplinary, non-profit organization which works with neighbours, homeless youth, architects, artists, ecologists, city workers and others, to recreate the infrastructure of the public commons. Whether converting street intersections into public squares or organising other forms of permanent or ephemeral place interventions, City Repair is effectively engaging citizens in the reinvention of a sustainable, creative, localized public landscape. All of these projects are artistic and ecological in focus, use re-cycled and re-used materials, as well as natural building and permaculture techniques.

Jennifer Leis has worked with City Repair, facilitating individuals and communities to creatively and ecologically transform the places in which they live. She has also worked with businesses and residents of a small town to create a twenty-year vision for their downtown redevelopment. She graduated from Cornell University in 2000, where she designed her own major in "Environmental Science and Sustainable Living".

The evening's events will consist of a slide show presentation, hands-on activities and an informal question and answer period. The 1.5 hour slide presentation compares the space-time relationships of Village cultures to the inversion of those relationships in unsustainable culture. Reasserting the Village as the context for sustainable culture, a series of creative, collaborative projects in Portland are presented as one, huge, expanding process in which each project becomes the staging momentum for what follows. The presentation is chronological, proceeding from the most elementary and accessible scale to enormous visionary collaborations involving hundreds and thousands of people.

Jennifer Leis and Mark Lakeman will be on their first ever East Coast Tour.  We are very excited that they have agreed to come to Ottawa to give a presentation, and hope that it will be attended by as large and diverse an audience as possible. 

Thank-you for your time and interest,

Sarah Walker and Leonore Evans

For more info. about the slideshow, contact samalewa@hotmail.com or phone Sarah or Leo at 237-6074. Go to www.cityrepair.org for more information on the City Repair Project.