ABSTRACT
How can the city become a creative platform for the urban knowledge of older citizens? Older individuals are a powerful and largely untapped repository of collective memory. This chapter details a one-year project in Montreal, Canada, in which our team collaborated with a small group of older citizens on the creation of public artwork. This group of people – their memories, stories, artistic decisions, and their bodies – were at the forefront of this process and the resulting artwork, which took the form of two “talking walks” in 2018–2019. Here, we foreground the intergenerational methodology that underpinned our process, and how our weekly dialogues with our collaborators reshaped the second half of the project. We present Promenade Parlante as an example of intergenerational “co-creation” that challenged our research team to find strategies that would empower our collaborators to see themselves as the urban experts that they are.
