Crescent Heights: The Neighbourhood as Relational Stage (2015–2019)

In my practice, I approach the urban environment as a complex, durational, and relational stage. During my four-year residency in Calgary’s Crescent Heights, I functioned as an embedded mediator between residents, municipal systems, and local businesses, facilitating "open actions" designed to trigger systemic change. This work was an inquiry into how we might "act together" to transform the neighborhood from a geographic location into a site of collective production.

Central to this was the Village Hub, a storefront "community living room" that functioned as a social incubator. By populating this space with resident-led programming—from yoga and games nights to art classes—we provided a necessary site for the messy, indeterminate activities of daily life. To sustain this, I collaborated with the City to develop a Placemaking Library, a shared resource of tools and materials that empowered neighbors to activate their own public spaces without traditional institutional barriers.

I acted as a strategic liaison during the City’s Main Streets redesign, a structural shift for the central road bisecting our neighbourhood. I treated this redesign as a "set change" for our community, gathering and translating resident feedback on sidewalks, seating, bike infrastructure, and future transit plans. My role was to ensure that the physical evolution of the street—including its cultural and economic development—was grounded in the lived expertise of the people who navigate it every day.

My methodology involved shifting the power dynamics of neighbourhood decision-making. I established a Neighbourhood Creative Action Team to tackle community concerns through artistic endeavours. This extended into the civic realm through the hosting of Election Debates across all levels of government, transforming the community association into a critical forum for political engagement. Monthly Neighbourhood Network Nights served as a ritual of mutual aid, where neighbours practiced the vulnerability of asking for what they needed and the agency of giving what they could.

I utilized public spectacles as tools to bridge deep-seated socioeconomic divides and physical safety concerns:

• The East vs. West Waterfight: A playful, tactical intervention designed to dissolve the class barriers between the community’s lower/middle-class and upper-class households.
• Village Days Festival: A summer festival modeled on resident-led programming, prioritizing the idea of "bringing neighbours together" over traditional passive consumption.
• Crescent Moon Festival: A winter intervention addressing traffic safety. This culminated in a nighttime lantern parade, using light and collective procession to reclaim the streets and bring visibility to pedestrian hazards.
• Gateway Murals: We established permanent identity markers through large-scale mural projects, signaling a neighborhood that is actively authored by its residents.

Through these initiatives—from the whimsical to the strategic—my work was less about the production of art objects and more about generating new models of community agency. By treating the neighbourhood as a stage and its residents as lead "players," we rehearsed a more resilient, connected, and vocal urban future.