The Thousands

Let’s turn the lights down for a moment.

I’m a simple woman with simple desires. I’m imagining you are too. (Actually, I’m imagining you’re a simple boy – sorry ladies). You’re standing in front of me holding nothing but a pair of scissors and a sheet of coloured cardboard. You’re saying all the right things, telling me I can have anything I want. My heart flutters a little, as do my eyelashes, and I carefully make my decision.

‘I want a decent bike lane all the way down King William Street,’ I whisper.

‘I want an ice rink in Hindmarsh Square,’ says the guy next to me. ‘A rooftop farm on Higher Ground!’ suggests someone else. A little kid pipes up from the corner and proposes a monster enclosure in front of the Town Hall. You get to work with your scissors and cardboard. You are Applespiel, presented by Renew Adelaide at the Festival of Unpopular Culture, teasing me with your cardboard-city-urban-design request service.

There are probably only a few of us who would attribute ‘sexy’ to such a concept, but there’s definitely something warm and fuzzy about seeing your own constructive and crazy ideas come to life in front of you in a cardboard model of the city. Sexy feelings or not, a bit of cut and paste is always a lot of fun.