The Border Bookmobile is project that will be launched in late summer 2009. It is a traveling exhibition of books, artist projects, photographs and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world. The collection will fit into a 1995 Chrysler Voyager minivan that will travel throughout the Windsor-Detroit region. These vans were pro- duced in the Chrysler Minivan Assembly Plant, the largest auto factory in Wind- sor: in this way the van will act as a symbol of the economic cycles of the re- gion and the vicissitudes of manufacturing and trade that constitute local his- tory.

The minivan has been a staple of auto manufacturing in Southwestern Ontario since the 1980s and it corresponds in a number of ways to a moment in late twentieth century urbanism when suburbanization had become the dominant model of spatial planning and land use in North America. Detroit was one of the first big cities to undergo this transition to the suburbs and the city is often said to be shrinking; however up until recently its population was moving, slowly and steadily away from the urban core to satellite cities and townships on the periphery. A similar pattern has ensued in the Windsor region on the Canadian side to the point where we are left with a loose and disjointed collec- tion of developments on both sides that form a large international suburban donut. The Detroit-Windsor region forms one of the largest international urban areas in North America and was built up on the Canadian side as a manufac- turing and export processing zone in the early part of the twentieth century.

The Border Bookmobile is a traveling exhibition of books, artist projects, photographs and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world. The collection is housed in a 1993 Chrysler Voyager minivan that travels throughout the Windsor-Detroit region. Produced in the Chrysler Minivan Assembly Plant, the largest auto factory in Windsor, the van acts as a symbol of the economic cycles of the region and the vicissitudes of manufacturing and trade that constitute local history.  The Bookmobile is in part a memory project that seeks to chart the changing relationship between Detroit and Windsor as border cities in the industrial heartland of North America. But it is also a social platform to discuss borders within and between cities, and the production of space within borderlands in more heterogeneous and contested parts of the world.

News:

The Border Bookmobile took part in Broken City Lab‘s Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation on July 5-9th.  Much of last week was spent interviewing people on the street, although the intense heat wave sent us inside by the end of the day.

Bookmobile on the shady side of Park Street

To escape the intense heat and construction activity at Pelissier and Park, we eventually retreated inside on 406 Pelissier Street to an air conditioned space.

Bookmobile bucket and bench seats as makeshift reading room

Book bins and t-shirts