It's New! It's Yours!
by Jean Cozzens
During the month of March 2006, at the Fox Point Branch of the Providence Public Library, we built a giant cardboard city as a collaboration between a whole bunch of people, ranging in age from two through grandmother age. The outcome of the experiment was entirely unknown: introduce a bunch of scrap cardboard, hot glue, “conventional” glue, scissors and X-acto knives and duct tape, and boxes and boxes of fabric, junk, and random materials from the Recycling Center into a branch library that regularly serves as the vital after school hangout spot for kids from the Vartan Gregorian Elementary School down the street—with one local artist/designer as mediator, and three willing librarians as facilitators and cheering squad.
Starting from a nervous beginning, when we had no idea what would happen, we ended up with a city that had pretty much everything anybody could ask for. It has its own name: “New Your City”, a beach and a river, bridges, parks, a bike path with bikes and riders, factories, schools, clubs for kids, many vehicles including planes, boats, cars, trailer trucks, army tanks, rocket ships, and space satellites, toll booths, a parking garage, a bus station and buses, an FBI base, a liquor store, a movie theater/church, a cave, a planetarium and an observatory, a double-level highway with signage and many on- and off-ramps including a triple-deck off-ramp drawbridge, a defense robot, a tunnel, a house of terror, a court of law, a public restroom, an ice obelisk, a junk food/candy store, a half-pipe for skateboarding, trees, murals, a beautiful library, and much much much more. There are three neighborhoods: Happy Town, West Side, and Falldown Community: “where everything falls down.” Every single thing in the city was initiated and made by people, mostly between ages two and thirteen, who came into the library. Ann Schattle, the librarian in charge of children’s programming, who worked closely on the city during its progress, made an octopus, and I, the artist/mediator, made a sign denoting free parking in the parking garage—other than that we just helped people build the things they wanted to see happen.
We also ended up with a notebook as a record of the progress of the city: a looseleaf binder, in which everybody who worked on the city wrote or drew something about what they had made for the city. On the cover it says, in careful handwriting: “New Your City: Fox Point Library” and below, in slightly less regular writing “Bye today—Come tomorrow build city.” For four weeks, we were here three afternoons a week, working from around three to around five or six o’clock, building the city.
The most important thing we ended up with was the engagement and unleashing of the creative and constructive powers of all the kids, parents, and other city builders who came into the library during the project. The multitude of weird and evocative building materials, and the immediacy of the construction methods—mostly hot glue and tape —made jumping in and adding something to the city readily accessible for anybody, whether or not they thought they had any “artistic” ability. The abstract nature of what we were doing reinforced the openness of the project: you could use tape to wrap a bunch of junk together, and say, “this is a chocolate car!” or, “This is a tall factory!” or, “This is a bird’s nest!”: in the context of our city, any object, once identified, is believable. The notebook allowed these self-determined identities to be recorded, legitimized, and communicated.
The city was open ground for debates about private property, graffiti, air rights, the role of the police and the army, laws and control, what the purpose and function of various buildings is—and much more crucial discussion. We witnessed spontaneous collaborations, negotiations over how to work together on the same thing, compromises being forged, new friends being made, parents working with other people’s children, and children bringing in their parents to see what they had done.
As suggested by The Agenda’s editors, you could build your own city using the handy cut-out buildings on this page. We highly recommend, however, that you start your own city building project, and invite your friends, young and old, to participate in it. It is really easy: it requires only some space that can get taken over for a couple of days or weeks, a fair amount of energy, the patience to speak with and listen to every kid or adult as their own real person, and the ability to step back from the role of controlling creator and help other people realize their visions.
