You remember playing with building blocks right? Well, Jean and Andrew are going to make cardboard blocks and cardboard girders of various sizes, then on Sunday September 21st 2008, 11am to 5pm, on Park Avenue in Worcester, MA, USA, at the Start on the Street arts festival, it will be a free for all of street scale construction- everyone can build!

“Block Party” is an offshoot of “Magic City Repairs” (a cardboard-and-paper city building project carried out in Providence and in Worcester in 2007), which is a relation of “New Your City” (a cardboard-and-trash city building project carried out twice in Providence in 2006 and 2007).  It is about taking ‘useless’ things and building them into awesome things, together with our friends, family, and neighbors.  Depending on how you look at it, it is a giant inappropriate mess and dangerous fire hazard, or it is a radical art project that taps into everyone’s latent creativity and innate ability to change the world around them.

After the Magic City Repairs project happened at Clark University in Worcester last year, we were asked to organize a participatory city-building project for Worcester’s annual street arts fest.  How to respond to having a huge space to build in?  Our initial thought is to build something huge… but the shape and idea of the final block city can only be determined by YOU.

more informations for the curious:

our photos on Flickr where you can see some past magic cities

cooperativenotcollective.org exists as some kind of home on the internets

magic city repairs and new your city, the past generations of this project

secret door projects is where you can look at jean’s other work

new urban arts kind of got us started doing all this stuff…