Little Cities

Participatory Little City Building: magic markers, knives and cardboard, paint and free beer

With more questions than answers we set out on our project, Little Cities. Designed as a series of parties Little Cities is a project set in place to try to investigate these complicated questions through simplistic, childlike actions. While at the same time, a process designed to create new homes, new communities, and new ways and situations for people to think about what a home is.Little Cities Build Your Own House parties are pretty simple. Guests are greeted by a room filled with cardboard and various supplies, markers, paint, glue, etc, etc...
And, for the rest of the night we make houses out of cardboard, listen to music, have some drinks. That's that. The following morning we ask that party guests return to the site of the previous night's party. We'll have some coffee, sit around and talk. Try to figure out a place that we all agree on that is a special place, a place that we, collectively, would like to homestead. Taking our homes in hand we venture out onto the streets taking the trek towards our new homeland. Placing our homes in this newly homesteaded area we are all the new stewards of this land. There to look over it, see that everything is okay, watch out for it.
As time goes on, and more and more people get together for these parties, an invisible community of Little Cities will start to grow across the country, linked by the people and ideas that came to the parties, sat down, cut up some card board, listened to some music and maybe drank a beer with someone they hadn't met before. Invisible communities of Little Cities comprised of people who spotted an outcropping of discarded cardboard, junk and trash strewn across the grass or pavement, who realized upon a closer look that it wasn't trash at all.