Automatic Narratives: Life on Post-Industrial Land
Southern Ontario border city Windsor has incredibly rich beginnings with the meeting of Huron, Jesuits, French, British, and passengers of the underground railroad, all making their home on the south shore of the Detroit River on land purchased for about 300 lbs worth of supplies.1 Windsor’s geography was incredibly strategic to many different groups, especially for war, and remained an important center for transport after the Industrial Revolution entered the Great Lakes. Automatic, it would seem, that in the last century Windsor has been a company town many times over. Before the amalgamation of smaller communities into one, Ford City was established in the early 1900s as a main-drag East-riverfront development synchronised to the automotive plant of the Ford Motor Company. Only a few blocks West is Walkerville, a neighbourhood incorporated in 1910 and developed around the Canadian Club Distillery owned by Hiram Walker, featuring many early works by Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Over time, additional automotive-focused manufacturing companies (such as Studebaker, Chrysler, General Motors, Cadillac, etc.) have scaled (and abandoned) the waterfront and industrial corridors, once employing many Windsor faithful and forever shaping much of its physical, economic, social, and urban character. Stubbornly blue-collar, Windsor today is organized by these very industrial remnants. Monolithic manufacturing swaths the size of Central Park are now brownfield sites as sundry manufacturing jobs become technologically obsolete. Automatic Narratives examines concepts of domesticity within the post-industrial urban landscape and documents how people live with and negotiate around these artificial landscapes as part of the daily reciprocity of home and public space.
1 Windsor Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (WACAC). Historic Sandwich Town: Walk through Ontario’s oldest, continuous European settlement: a field study. (Windsor, Ontario: University of Windsor, Faculty of Education, 1987)
