Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 7PM
Galerie SAW Gallery, 67 Nicholas Street
Screening and Panel Discussion: $5 / Students and Seniors: $3 / Members: Free
Galerie SAW Gallery will launch its new speaker series, SAW City Debates, with the Ottawa premiere of the feature-length documentary Urbanized by New York City- and London-based filmmaker Gary Hustwit (director of Helvetica and Objectified), which will be followed by a no-holds-barred debate with invited speakers Andrew Cohen from the Ottawa Citizen, Deborah Margo from the University of Ottawa and Barrie McKenna from The Globe and Mail. They will discuss their ideas for the future of Ottawa's cityscape.
Note that Lansdowne Park redevelopment will be a subject of discussion with the invited speakers.
SAW City Debates is an ongoing series meant to spark dialogue around the many important cultural issues affecting the national capital region. Presented in response to recent articles in the media criticizing Ottawa's urban design, denouncing everything from the National Capital Commission's apparent inertia to the reliance on developers in shaping our city, the first debate in this series will take a look at urban design successes and failures in this city, but more importantly will help generate ideas and visions for the future.
Urbanized by Gary Hustwit is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders and thinkers. Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Yet much of the dialogue on these issues is disconnected from the public domain. Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities.
Biographies
Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. He has produced eight feature documentaries, including the award-winning I Am Trying to Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Moog, the documentary about electronic music pioneer Robert Moog; and an experimental feature film with the band Animal Collective. Hustwit worked with punk label SST Records in the late 1980s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, was Vice President of the media website Salon.com in 2000 and started the indie DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. In 2007, he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, a documentary about graphic design and typography. The film marked the beginning of a design film trilogy, with Objectified, about industrial design and product design following in 2009. Urbanized, about the design of cities, was released in late 2011. Hustwit's films have been broadcast on PBS, BBC1 and other television outlets, and have been screened in over 300 cities worldwide. Hustwit was nominated for a 2008 Independent Spirit Award for Helvetica.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University. A native of Montreal, he has an undergraduate degree in political science from McGill University and graduate degrees in journalism and international relations from Carleton University. Between 1991 and 1993, he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has recently returned from a year at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. In his career of 30 years, he has worked at home and abroad for the Ottawa Citizen, United Press International, Time, the Financial Post, Saturday Night and The Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the Editorial Board, a columnist and foreign correspondent in Washington. He has won two National Newspaper Awards, three National Magazine Awards and the Queen's Jubilee Medal. He has written and co-edited five books, among them The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are, and While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, a national bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His most recent book is Extraordinary Canadians: Lester B. Pearson.
Deborah Margo was born in Montreal in 1961 and currently lives in Ottawa. She received an undergraduate Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in Montreal (1984) and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia (1990). Her work combines different disciplines including sculpture, painting, drawing, photography and ephemeral installations persistently questioning the contextual identities of public and private spaces. In addition, she has experience as a curator, writer and, since 1999, has been teaching painting and sculpture at the University of Ottawa. For the past twenty years, Deborah Margo has exhibited in Canada, Mexico and the United States, participating in solo and group projects. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition entitled Castings at the Owens Gallery, Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, which traveled to the Ottawa Art Gallery, as well as group exhibitions such as Once Removed at Modern Fuel Gallery in Kingston, Ontario, and Moil at Cube, Ottawa.
Barrie McKenna is a correspondent and columnist in The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau. From 1997 until 2010, he covered Washington from The Globe's bureau in the U.S. capital. During his U.S. posting, he traveled widely, filing stories from more than 30 states. Mr. McKenna has also been a frequent visitor to Japan and South Korea on reporting assignments. A native Montrealer, he has degrees from McGill University (history) and Carleton University (journalism). He is also a two-time finalist for Canada's National Newspaper Award.
Funders: Canada Council for the Arts, City of Ottawa, Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Trillium Foundation
Galerie SAW Gallery
67 Nicholas Street,
Ottawa ON, Canada K1N 7B9
Information: (613) 236-6181