The Guidebooks from Memory book series transforms neighbourhoods into living archives, inviting residents to map their cities through memory rather than geography. Instead of relying on official archives or tourist brochures, the project highlights the places that live most vividly in local imagination — the corner store where you bought popsicles, the front porch where you had your first kiss, the building that isn’t there anymore but still shapes how you move through the neighbourhood.
Each Guidebook is co-created with local participants through workshops, interviews, and anonymous online submissions — gathering fragments of personal geography and overlooked histories. These memories are then assembled into illustrated booklets which invite its reader to navigate their city in a new light— following a route not of streets and monuments, but of memory and recollection.
The project aims to capture the ephemeral: the stories that risk being lost as neighbourhoods change, buildings are demolished, and residents are displaced. In a time when cities face rapid development and homogenization, Guidebooks from Memory insists on the value of the local, the personal, and the specific.
Past iterations have taken place in Hamilton, Kingston, and Kitchener-Waterloo, with each city generating a unique portrait of itself through the memories of its people. Future guidebooks will continue to expand this growing archive of lived experience, encouraging anyone — longtime resident or first-time visitor — to slow down, wander, and see the city through someone else’s eyes.
