[“Signs for Naturalized Areas”, from Windsor, Ontario’s Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers’ strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities.  The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers’ strike; the project aimed to invert that understanding, and suggest that citizens might instead view them as “wonderful additions to [the] urban landscape”.]

“Signs for Naturalized Areas” strike me as particularly interesting in light of my post from last week on “hypothetical signs”, as, like both the Hypothetical Development Organization and Gökçeoğlu’s mayoral campaign, these are also an example of signs-as-(landscape)-architecture.  The difference here, though, is that while both the HDO and Gökçeoğlu’s photoshops used signs as a means for publishing an architectural proposal — a story about how a place might be constructed differently — Broken City Lab used signs to advertise an extant but hitherto invisible quality of the landscape. These signs reveal, rather than inventing. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that the artists working in landscape utilize this mode of operation, while the HDO and Gökçeoğlu, working with buildings, operate in the other.)