A Hyperlocal Manifesto: Exploring Hyperlocal Publics Through the Little Mountain Housing Project, Social Video Advocacy and Web Documentary

I launched The Little Mountain Project as a response to the eviction and destruction of a social housing community in Vancouver, Canada. Utilizing hybrid digital media practices, my work encourages citizens to meet and participate in democratic processes. The main components of this new media exploration consist of a blog and video archive, a multi-platform signage project, and a collaborative community web history project. This paper documents the development of a methodology for an innovative documentary practice – a hyperlocal web-based strategy – to empower a counter public and to facilitate community dialogue around rapidly evolving civic processes. I situate my practice within a critique of neoliberalism, the idea of the “public sphere,” and the history of advocacy and activist filmmaking in Canada, in particular, the National Film Board of Canada’s “Challenge for Change Program,”1 a ground-breaking experiment in the use of film for the purpose of social activism. The Little Mountain Project aims to explore new forms of social, political, and cultural production within emergent practices enabled by web-based media, which propose new ways to facilitate dialogue within the public sphere.