Current Charrette:

In order to actually keep this thing moving along the fine folks at LAUNCH Cleveland have joined w/ |re|decle to celebrate the community based idea of taking back the streets. With this in mind a whole new series of charrettes is being offered at LAUNCH based upon the premise of studying existing street conditions and questioning what would make them better. Now that LAUNCH (with its much smoother running web presence) is offering hosting space this site will begin to dwindle towards nothingness as the new location takes over. Do not fret, the events here are being archived and saved for posterities sake. In the mean time jump on over to the new website and take a look at the new charrettes.

Updates:

Updates appear below in chronological order. You may organize posts by specific charrettes (to the right) or browse through them in order of posting.

What this is

Conversations with others around the great town of Cleveland have shown us one thing. There is too much bad architecture, bad design, and bad development caused by bad politics. Not one single person is really to blame, just a collection that allows this mess to go on unchallenged.

It isn't like it would be hard to fix. There is a vast collection of great artists, designers and generally smart, honest folks around here that are either too meek or too busy to scream loud enough to be heard.

And isn't that what we really need? A place to scream from?

We offer this to you then, a beginning of a platform. This isn't for your politics to shine or your affiliations, what we want is your ideas. Over the next couple of weeks we hope to create an anonymous home for your vision of what the city of Cleveland should be. Free from repercussions (we will allow comments but not arguments) this is nothing more then an open place for you to let your dreams rest a moment and develop.

The format is to be simple. Send a picture of what the site, wall, whatever looks like currently and then send in an image, sketch, photoshop, whatever, of what you think should be there and of course the location so that we can put it on our map. Ideas can range from pure capitalist development to socially conscious projects, from traffic re-organization to bike rack locations and shapes. You can even include descriptions if you want to further your idea.

These images and ideas will be posted anonymously by the administrators. You can send your info with your idea and if you want us to, we will post it right alongside so that you can get the credit you want.

We will also do our best to listen if you think the format needs some tweaking so please don't be shy.

Our goal is to create a dialogue with the city through design, to allow a place to communicate ideas of what the image of Cleveland should be. We expect some really good, scary and ridiculous stuff from you people and we will do our best to contribute our own.

We love this city. We want to show it how much we love it.