About Us:

Sidewalk Assembly is a non-incorporated cartography collective in Brooklyn, NY. Our mission is to put people on their streets, to connect neighbors to neighborhoods, to build our shared spaces through public events that honor what’s already here. We are resource mappers and public interventionists.

The co-directors are Salome Asega and Andy Ollove. Our background is in visual arts and participatory design. We are students committed to social change through arts and public space.

Sidewalk Occupations are part census inquiry part impromptu street party. Our essential question: What is around us? Our essential goal: To map physically and forcibly.

Previous occupations have mapped peoples’ favorite places in the neighborhood, the age spread in their household, and the length of time they’ve lived in the neighborhood. We turn the walls and streets in our neighborhoods into into graphs, pie-charts,and maps. Our hope is to add a human and physical touch to the increasingly visible field of data visualization.

By transforming the passerby into cartographer and wall into map, in our Sidewalk Occupations we test the belief that the places around us are transformable too. We measure the success of these occupations whenever a passerby stops and adds their own interpretation to the data. In this manner we  turn streets into classrooms and sidewalks into places of human exchange.