Wikireuse

For 13 years, Julia Christensen has been creating a body of work about how communities are reusing abandoned big box buildings — the large, free-standing, warehouse-like buildings made prominent by one-stop-shopping corporations like Wal-Mart and Kmart. Treading the fine line between art and research, she created www.bigboxreuse.com in 2004. Wikireuse both updates this website and invites users to participate in its development. Nodes on a map of the United States catalog big box reuse at geo-coded locations; users can add to the map by sending in information and/or documentation about a reused big box building near them. Articles about big box reuse are also cataloged on the website, so the user can read local accounts in local newspapers from across the country.