It’s tough to know exactly what to call Somerville resident Tim Devin. Is he a street artist? A demographer? Or kind of a mix of the two? However you want to define him, Devin’s current project, BBC Broadsides, is making his neighbors in Somerville think a bit harder about the city in which they live.
Since March, Devin has been tacking up three different kinds of posters on telephone poles, walls, and bridges around Somerville: “Mappy Facts,” which depicts demographic data about poverty and crime; “Street Surveys,” which are pull-tab posters asking people if they relate to where they live; and poetry from Cambridge-based poet Paul Johns. Through the maps and surveys, he’s disassembled the standard census-style questionnaire and is instead having people consider the findings in their actual context. (As for the poetry, he says, it’s because he thought it would be “nice.”)
