Community Design Charette, Toronto, Thurs July 10 July 10, 2008

Community Design Charette, Toronto, Thurs July 10

It's a charette! A community design charette! and you're
invited to participate.. Thursday July 10th...

(What the heck's a charette, you ask? According to wikipedia
- the word charrette may refer to any collaborative session
in which a group of designers or other folks drafts a
solution to a design problem)...

We are a group of Toronto-based activists, cultural workers
and trades-people who got this land... cheap, spur of the
moment, beaver-swampy, moose-trodden, kilometer-off-
the-road never-on-the-grid old homestead -- pretty and hung
with the thick air of a long history. Something you could
love. We called it Blackfly.

We're adjacent to 3 other landholdings of like-minded
people, in a part of the country heavily settled by our back-
to-the-land predecessors, depressed by (primary) industrial
flight, and rarely touched by the yuppies that plague our
urban lives.

We've incorporated the land as a non-profit co-operative.
We want to build on it, teach people how to build, develop
alternative technologies for self-sufficiency, garden, hunt
small game, make witchy-dykey macramé (maybe), create
a space for urban activists and organizers to unwind, gather
and do experimental political structure shit. We want to
figure out how to do all this in an anti-racist way. Maybe
we want to outrun the apocalypse in a way that doesn't
leave four fifths of the world living in our dust.

We want to open up the dialogue around this project to our
friends and to a select, smarty-pants group of people whose
opinions we very much want to hear.

More specifically, we want to hear from people from
existing intentional and rural communities, country bums,
food justice nerds, Canaduh's best and brightest in the
fields of sustainable building, architecture, public space,
community organizing, food justice, uhh permaculture, and
we really really want the people we do political work with
in the city to come and keep us honest and true.

We want you to challenge our idea. Explain to us show to
make it work for you and who you represent. We want to
watch the membership be forced to answer strange
questions about how they reconcile this commune thing
with their urban based social justice activism. How it won't
be escapist "like it was in the 70's". We have some ideas
and probably so do you...

Lots of you have heard about this little closet property
project we got going -- so now's the time - tell us what
you really think...

Thursday July 10th, 7 pm, Charette/Discussion 7:30,
Music 9:30 pm

Location: Cinecycle, Toronto

..CineCycle is in the old coach house down the lane behind
129 Spadina Ave., on the east side between Richmond St.
W. and Adelaide St. W...

PWYC door admission.
All proceeds go toward future Blackfly building projects.