Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

Bike Touring ‘Forest for the Trees’ with the Portland Street Art Alliance

As part of the 2014 ‘Forest for the Trees‘ mural-making festival, the Portland Street Art Alliance hosted a casual bike tour of works in progress.

Thanks to legal hurdles blocking most public murals imposed by corporate advertisers Clear Channel, Portland has been a seriously blank city for sanctioned street art. PSAA and the artists of FFTT are now rapidly changing this dull status quo.

Founded in 2013, Forest for the Trees has brought together dozens of local and international artists to share their gifts on a large public scale in Portland, a city widely hyped for its creative output.

This weekend’s tour convened at the corner of SW 11th and Washington where introductions and instructions were shared. A map of the route was passed around. The tour would hit 9 of the 20 some murals going up around town – some finished, some in progress.

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Coloring Outside the Lines: a Photo Collection

Last week, my cycling comrade Meg Brennan and I sat down to record our second drunken bike pod cast. The conversation tended to ramble into territory concerning cultures of community resistance to things like capital-driven gentrification. We also discussed how different forms of sanctioned and unsanctioned street art can play a roll in building strong communities, empowering them in the process.

While many make clear definition between legal murals and illegal art, and their respective roles, personally I see the value of both, as they often communicate vastly different concepts and can convey radically diverse sets of values.

As I wrote in a guest post for the Portland Street Art Alliance last year, graffiti’s true power lies in its ability to take control away from the homeowners associations, the city halls, the developers, the capitalists – and return it where where power rightly belongs, in the hands of the people. The mainstream media narrative will likely always be hostile to street art of a rebellions nature, and rightly so.

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An Evening of Better Blocks and Futurescapes at RECESS

Last Friday at RECESS in Southeast Portland saw some 100 purveyors of urbanity gather for a collaborative event showcasing intersections of art and science as the technological fabric of cities. Organized by the Futurescapes City Tours and RECESS curator Tori Abernathy, attendees were treated to a number of different installations, presentations, and speakers. The focus of the event was exploring the role that technology plays in shaping the city – and how that technology changes us as users of the city.

From FCT’s event page: We live in a world mediated by technology. We rarely, if ever, get a chance to think about how technologies both old and new affect our lives, our communities, and our cities – and how we might shape technologies in new and different ways so that they better represent the things we care about.

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