Detroit UnReal Estate Agency

Detroitism

2011-01-23T11:49:00.006-05:00

An excellent piece in Guernica on ruin porn, Detroitsploitation and three classic Detroit narratives: Detroit as metonym, the Detroit lament, and Detroit utopia.

Roof Work

2010-11-19T06:23:00.003-05:00

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2012's Erik Jutten is working with Design 99's Mitch and Gina on the Power House roof extension

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2012 redesigns Power House roof

2010-11-11T08:17:00.003-05:00

2012 architects redesigned in collaboration with Design 99 the roof of the Power House.

2012 has been in the first resident in the residency pilot-project, which Partizan Publik is curating in collaboration with Design 99 and is supported financially by Fund BKVB.

Currently Erik Jutten is working on behalf of 2012 on the reconstruction of the roof with Mitch Cope en Gina Reichert. Early 2011 designer Guido Marsille will take over Erik's position.

Too Much of a Good Thing

2010-05-25T10:53:00.002-04:00

OPENING THIS THURSDAY
(that's right, Thursday)
May 27th at MOCAD
Public opening 8 – 11PM, $6

FEATURING
The Neighborhood Machine
A mobile device that roams and wonders one Detroit neighborhood in search of evidence of what is believed to be a vast reservoir of spiritual, physical and emotional wealth waiting to be found in the back alleys, dark side streets, and abandoned backyards of the neighborhood.
The Machine will be capable of physically altering in major ways the landscape and built environment in order to find these resources. It will also act as a communicator and distributor of information, collecting never before seen images and video of these mysterious resources. While roaming the machine lays tracks that can be followed by others for reconstruction and reorganization in order to bring in the future neighborhood.

"Design 99’s work explores the edges of art practice, utilizing, design, architecture, found materials and utilitarian objects to propose creative solutions to complex problems. Their practice has at its core the belief that transformation can happen in a natural way, if we only take a look, think out-of-the-box and take action."

Too Much of a Good Thing is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and curated by Luis Croquer, Director and Chief Curator.
Show runs through July 25th
Museum hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 11 – 5PM, – 8PM on Thursday & Friday
MOCAD is located at 4454 Woodward Ave, 3 blocks south of Warren, in Detroit

Whose Banksy is it?

2010-05-18T21:16:00.003-04:00

I've strolled through and around the former Packard Plant for several years. Met scrap traders and trash dumpers, explorers, tourists, gangs of people, gangs of dogs, seen great painted walls and lots of semi-poetic urban scrawls ("What happened to the American Dream? is the one I see by the Grand Boulevard side.) The former plant is close to a mile long--it's easy not to see everything. But keen eyes spotted a wall painting by elusive street artist Banksy--and took it (the movers are part of Detroit gallery/collective 555.) This is either in the great Detroit scrap tradition (finders keepers even if it is on private property) or its a chapter for city lore.

Here are some questions this (re)moval is provoking for me: What is street art removed from the street? Can you move it like a painting on a wall without changing the meaning of the work or the act? Is the move its own act?

Detroit Free Press on Banksy's move

Dateline Detroit

2010-04-30T09:33:00.004-04:00

Dateline Detroit

Last week, NBC broadcast an episode of its Dateline news program on Detroit. The primary focus is familiar--the vulnerable, poor yet resilient African American residents of a crumbling city with a sprinkling of artists and celebrities.

Dateline host Chris Hansen speaks with and profiles, among others, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, Kid Rock and Raccoon Man, Glemmie Beasley, a blues musician who shoots and eats raccoon around the city for sale and nutritional value. The local and national response is that Detroit, like Baltimore and other African American inner cities is thick in media sensations like Raccoon Man and that in an hour long special, a broader view is not only possible, but a responsibility.

Some local news responses to the special:
Detroit News on Dateline

Detroit Mayor Bing's Plans to Downsize the City

2010-03-13T11:19:00.004-05:00

When the Shrinking Cities show opened at MOCAD a few years back, there was a great creative/academic series of responses to the propositions the projects posed. Last week, a larger debate was fueled by remarks made by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing that acknowledges the challenges posed by shrinking population and the costs of maintaining infrastructure and services.

"We're not going in and just taking people's property and saying you don't have any say," Bing said. "Those people that we can encourage and that they would agree to be moved, those are the ones that we are going to work with first."

Last week I read this to a group of 12 year olds near Downtown. The first pause was that several of them did not know who Dave Bing was. The second pause came when they realized that the areas he was talking about are where their homes are.

Some excerpts from the article I read them from The Detroit News. on March 9:

The most viable neighborhoods, with the fewest vacant lots, are on the fringes, near the suburbs. The ones with the most abandoned houses and vacancies are closest to downtown.

"We have a downtown core and then we clearly have an outer ring," said Douglass Diggs, interim executive director of the recently formed Detroit Land Bank, a primary agency in the city's downsizing push. "The question is how do you link those two?

"Looking at the maps it seems like the real challenge is what to do with the middle part."

Some of the uses for the middle part, the neighborhoods like the former Paradise Valley, include farmland. "What?!!" asked the kids in my group. "First of all, we don't grow vegetables.

link to The Detroit News article

March 23 Mayor Bing makes his State of the City address--watch for updates,

Toothless and Incoherent

2010-03-12T13:49:00.004-05:00

More Detroit in the Guardian (you'd think there wasn't enough urban misery happening this side of the Atlantic). This time it's a plug for Julian Temple's new documentary Requiem for Detroit of which I saw a work-in-progress version at the IDFA end of last year. What I saw then annoyed me... for a start there was an overabundance of white men talking, and the first black face on the screen was toothless and incoherent - and this is in a city where officially over 80% of the inhabitants are African American - and the rest of the film continued to designate the job of telling the story of the city to the white minority, though Tyree Gruyton gets to say something and Grace Lee Boggs put in an eloquent appearance near the end of the film. What was also interesting was the way in which - other than the Ford manager - every single white person is filmed in their cars, a kind of cinematic white exodus of the city, whereas all the African Americans were, without exception, intransient, 'left behind' - which I thought was a rather clever device but on talking to the producer after the screening I got the impression that this wasn't a deliberate (di)vision. I also found the music in the section on the riots rather disturbing - 'Dancin' in the Streets' may well have been the anthem of the rioters and would have been fine accompaniment to a bit of burning and stone throwing, but it seemed to me inappropriate to run it whilst the bloodied bodies of protesters were being carried off - came across more like Dancin' on their Graves...
The film's showing on BBC-2 tomorrow evening at 22u (Dutch time) and I'm curious to see if anything got done with my criticism of the underlying racism in the way the population was being portrayed.

FWD: Detroit wants to save itself by Shrinking

2010-03-09T08:58:00.004-05:00

Some quotes from the AP piece, published on Yahoo News March 8 2010:

"Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile."

"Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green."

"Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month."

read more here

Jon Brumit in the Guardian

2010-03-03T03:05:00.005-05:00

Article in today's Guardian with our friend Jon Brumit - all old news, but I'm surprised to hear that only one in five houses is empty, I thought it only one in five lived in...
Click here for the article.

ReadyMade's Hands Up For Detroit

2010-02-25T01:33:00.007-05:00

ReadyMade Magazine visited Detroit and published a photo series of the works of artists Jimini Hignett, Tyree Guyton, Mitch Cope & Gina Reichert and Gregory Holm & Matthew Radune on its blog. The commentary on the trip starts with a comparison of these works and French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walk between the unfinished twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 1974.

[Image taken from ReadyMade blog]

The writer of the blog post - ReadyMade editor-in-chief Andrew Wagner - comments: 'Obviously it was an incredible physical undertaking and an adventure unlike any other. More than that though, I was taken with the fact that Petit took this amazing risk for seemingly no other reason other than to see if it could be done. To see what is possible. To see what would happen. Much like Petit’s walk atop New York, the city of Detroit sparks similar emotions in me.'

Wagners proves himself a Detroit optimist as he ends his story saying: 'I believe the next few years will see a true renewal in the city. And not in any contrived, idealistic, New Urbanist manner, but rather in a real, meaningful way that will help guide cities of all shapes and sizes in the years to come.'

ReadyMade is inspired by Detroit and its many opportunities to open up windows for different kinds of urban development, which is great. From my own perspective, that of European out-of-towner, I tend to believe that the more people write and think enthusiastic about Detroit the greater the chance that good things might happen to the city.

Yet, Wagner’s interesting comparison between the work by Petit in New York in 1974 and the four very different contemporary projects in Detroit inspired me to raise a few question concerning the role of these types of art projects in the post-industrial place as Detroit.

Who is performing what and to which audience? What is the public? What is the community of these projects?

I could be wrong but I have the impression there are important distinctions between the works Wagner encountered during his city tour. Although they might altogether – edited in a photo series like the one on the ReadyMade blog – add to an optimistic imagery of Detroit, the differences of these projects in terms of production process or in regards of the audiences the artists intended to perform for might be a factor in determining the type of renewal that Detroit will see.

Reboot Detroit

2010-02-02T17:47:00.003-05:00

Last Monday on Dutch (VPRO) television bro "Doorstart Detroit" (reboot detroit) was broadcasted. About the shared faith of GM an Detroit, and if the crisis will lead to new insights or not. Watch it full below, (All in English, Dutch Subtitles)

How money travels in Detroit

2010-01-11T14:29:00.003-05:00

via a456

Detroit Entrpreneurs

2010-01-11T09:11:00.002-05:00

The front section of the New York Times featured two extensive articles on midtown Detroit--one on several small creative enterprises, the other on TechTown, the Wayne State sponsored incubator.

Most of the businesses in the first--Leopold's Books, Good Girls Go to Paris, The Bureau of Urban Living and the excellent Burton Theatre are all within walking (!) distance of one another. Leopold's specializes in graphic novels, Good Girls has a great, diverse bustling vibe, and The Burton shows great off beat films.

To read more on the entrepreneurs

FORTUNE: Can Farming Save Detroit?

2010-01-03T12:47:00.003-05:00

And yet Hantz is fully aware of the potentially historic scope of what he is proposing. After all, he's talking about accumulating hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of acres inside a major American city. And it's clear that he views Hantz Farms as his legacy. Already he's told his 21-year-old daughter, Lauren, his only heir, that if she wants to own the land one day, she has to promise him she'll never sell it. "This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940," Hantz says. "No one should be able to afford to do this ever again."

cap-cap-capital...

Guided by Anger and Hope

2009-12-23T10:15:00.002-05:00

Christian Ernsten talks with Charles Esche

Charles Esche is a leading intellectual in the contemporary scene of curators and museum people. His provoking work as the director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, as well as a curator of the Istanbul Biennale, addresses social concerns with a similar immediacy. His collaborations with artists focuses on enhancing some form of progressive change. Although the type of change he wishes to promote was not always obvious to me, I feel Esche is a guiding figure with an ideological agenda, a pioneer in artistic innovation. My interest in talking to him grew after reading his series of comments on Facebook and Skype, inserting his ideas in the current day ‘eculture’. We began the conversation, which took place in the Van Abbemuseum, addressing a quote from his skype account, ‘Thinking about anger and hope as the driving forces of change’.

Charles Esche: [laughs] Maybe it’s best to start with its source. The quote is from Tony Benn, a British politician, who for me was very fundamental. It’s actually taken from a video clip, and in extension says, ‘The world is changed, through anger at injustice and hope for something better’. It is through bringing together those paradoxical emotions that drive the wheel of possible progressive change. Anger drives the wheel of regressive change, and hope drives the wheel of utopian speculation – neither of which achieves anything on their own. Both are needed in order to start the motor of possibility working in the world. For me, it’s important to be angry at certain things. I think my anger extends from the micro-level– with the cynicism of many Dutch cultural people, for example – to the macro-level – towards the transparent injustices of the world that are produced by the globalisation we are meant to celebrate. The fact that we basically exported the 19th Century system of working class exploitation to other countries and we don’t connect our comfortable conditions here with that exploitation does make me angry. In the 19th Century people had to fight together against injustice and many rights were achieved, but now – due to globalization – we have to do it all over again on a global scale. Our current economic system seems to me mostly a backward step to the 19th century and I wish we could simply say: ‘Hey look! We‘ve done this before, and seen what it results in, so we know it doesn’t work!’ Lets’s just stop and think what we want.

Indeed Esche portrays himself as a man in the field of arts with a strong sense of mission. How is his work influenced by anger and hope?

Esche: I think on one level, it profoundly influences the choice of artists and subjects I am interested in. The artists I work with are often engaged with the paradoxes of the contemporary world. They have stories to tell that relate the way the media presents this globalized condition we experience on an everyday level. They attempt to take some aspects of the constant array of information that bombards us and which is incredibly difficult to filter, and they magnify it, slow it or capture it so we can reflect on it for a moment longer. I think we are overwhelmed by information at some quite deep level, our psychology isn’t prepared for it. Particularly my generation – but also the younger generation – still struggles to understand how to filter things out and art is one of the filtration systems that could be very important. In that sense, I have hope that we can learn new ways of seeing through art.

My personal anger and hope can be seen in exhibition projects like Forms of Resistance or Becoming Dutch, but it also focuses in the way that, for instance, the condition of post-1989 Western Europe is not addressed in terms of history and how we want to develop – it evokes a sense of complacency about our rights. You get this idea that our condition is about survival, simply carrying on, and maintaining the system around us. The hope is that we’ll get through to our pension, and the next generation will take over and solve the intractable problems. But we see that climate change and historical economic change– which I’m sure that my son who is 5 will be dealing with – are happening now, and, if we really live in a democracy, then we should be able to act to mitigate that. That failure has to lead you to question the system, I think.

But it’s not supposed to make you depressed. Anger should make you want to do something and that is where the hope arises. On a small level – the micro-political level – certain artistic projects do raise consciousness, and do change a state of complacency to a state of readiness and action. I think it’s a psychological change. I find it hard to be in agreement with people who think everything is ok in the world. I’m quite shocked when I come across people like that. I think the Netherlands has a higher percentage of people who think everything is fine, basically because things around look newer and cleaner than in most other places. But that’s quite a superficial analysis

Is this ‘big’ political story perhaps somewhat naïve? Are we really capable of distinguishing our desires and the emotions that drive us? What about fear as a force of change?

Esche: I think fear is almost always negative. I tend to talk in terms of progressive change and regressive change. Change brought about through fear or war is generally negative. Fortunately, if that happens, you still have anger and hope to try and look for future possibilities.

We are at war, declared by the West to the ‘rest’ in 2001, a war that was declared as being endless. We are at war now. Yet presently, how conscious are we of being at war? As a culture we are also said to be at war, in the so-called clash of civilisations, and I think the gaping hole where the demand for progressive change should be is very apparent. To me progressive change brings back notions of enlightenment, Marxist thinking to do with justice, with equality, with collectivity and global solidarity. I also refer to an idea of liberty, not personal liberty, but social liberty. These remain progressive values although they need to be reinterpreted, and translated according to economic and political conditions today. Nevertheless, I think these values have something to offer everybody.

On Facebook I read Esche quoting Boris Groys asking the question, ‘What would be the conditions for a new form of the avant-garde to emerge?’ His answer was, ‘I think for an avant-garde to begin, we need a collective sense of direction.’ Esche then asks, ‘How then can we express our common sense of direction? What formats? What forms of ethics and aesthetics? What ‘mass’ movements?’ From this I asked him, ‘Can you explain why it is important that we have a new avant-garde? And what according to you this collective sense of direction entails?’

Esche: They remain questions for me, that’s why I didn’t answer them [laughs]. I’m not sure that avant-garde is the right mode, the right language, and I’m not sure if I would use it myself. An important point is that the old avant-garde had a horizon which we have lost in the process of seeing real communism fail. Let’s imagine the avant-garde as a leading group followed by a mass that follows behind. According to Groys, the only way anyone knows that the avant garde is in the lead is because there is an imagined destination. If you take the destination away, which is what symbolically happened in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then suddenly avant-garde becomes disorientated, eventually become just a minority amongst others. I think that’s a good explanation for why populist politicians have been so successful, or why the attack against the elites (which is continued by Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science Ronald Plasterk now) has been picked up by so many conservatives as well. The criticism of the so-called elite has a profound effect on our social mechanisms and how society might be inspired in a progressive direction because it replaces the call to intellectual inspiration with a battle between celebrities.

Do you think we need those avant-gardist platforms and horizons?

Esche: We need to wonder what makes us ask the more profound question about our social life and values. I think we cannot live anymore according to the ideas of the avant-garde’s grand narratives of an inevitable direction for the world – as laid out in Hegelian historical progression, which is at the heart of Marxism and the communist idea of revolution. I think from avant-gardists, we have become – or need to become – gardists. I think that means that you are working in and amongst the everyday mass of events and people, a kind of a blind mass that’s always moving, always changing, but not really with the sense of what the next step might be.

As an artist, I think you can make micro-suggestions or micro-projects, which affect your immediate environment and neighbours. You can have a kind of micro-avant-garde or micro-politics that focuses on the specifics of an issue, a group, an institution. That could be kind of avant-garde policy, except there isn’t an overarching ideology that connects it all together. You can only say, ‘I’m going to do or say what I believe is important here.’ You’re trying to give direction to a very particular local phenomenon.

Perhaps it’s that I’m of an age and upbringing that finds it difficult to think outside an ideological framework. A framework is very simple, it’s very comforting; I miss Marxism, I mourn for it. Yet, I also know it cannot be brought back in the form that it was.

Wired magazine announced in June this year ‘The New Socialism’ and posed that online social media, which originated from an open source standard – for example Wikipedia, Flickr and Twitter – is the vanguard of a cultural movement. From it a global collectivist society was to come. I asked Esche for a response.

Esche: Traditionally, in order for technology to function, you need to know what to do with it. Technology is just technique, and technique is the ‘how’, its not the ‘why’. I think from the Iranian revolution to our Facebook posts, social media is simply a mechanism to spread something that already exists. The Iranian’s attempt to overthrow a despotic clerical regime would hopefully be followed by thinking about what to replace it with. I find it difficult to believe that technology itself answers the ‘why’ question. What do you do once your connected? But connecting is itself a part of the way there, for sure

But then there’s the example of the Detroit artist-architect couple Design 99, who built their energy neutral Powerhouse, and before they could finish, it was picked up by media channels like CNN and The New York Times. The impact of the building, as a symbol or story for dealing with the crisis, has potentially become much bigger than it’s practical local usage. As far as I know, Design 99 didn’t aim for that.

Esche: But that’s a classic operation of an ideology, rather than a produce of technology. Ideology means you try to impose your view of reality onto a reality that’s already there. Ideology is a way or lens through which you see the phenomena in the world, and this is then how you interpret what happens. I see this building as ideological and that’s why it is so important and successful, I read it as a statement of a group of artists to want their city to be more than it is, or more than it is perceived. The difference is that ideology is traditionally related to big scales. I would argue that Design 99 work on a micro-ideological level thinking through the consequences of their life in Detroit and, in doing so they impose a certain idea on the reality around.

How does this effect their local environment? What kind of change is Design 99 enhancing?

Esche: It has an effect on the micro level on which they’re working. If you look at the transformation that is going on in Hamtramck, and if you look also at the art world, there’s an extraordinary sense of exuberance in the city – which works right down at the roots of community. Design 99 operates in the midst of a dramatic decline – which they can do nothing about. They will not solve GM’s collapse, but that was never their intention. To them it is about finding a way to live in the existing condition of their communities, with its existing problems. You can sit and be fearful, or you can sit and dream about moving to New York; or you can build a ‘Powerhouse’, which is a combination of anger and hope. Anger because this house is empty, the neighbourhood is insecure, kids lives are wasted but by building it and occupying their own house, or by inviting their friends to taking the one next door, they create the conditions of hope - and they change actual life omn the ground at the same time. Without Design 99 that neighbourhood would be a lot less interesting.

As published in Volume 22; The Guide (2009)62-65.

The back alley of Klinger - Lawley - Moran - Davidson Str

2009-12-20T18:57:00.016-05:00

A place for a neighborhood exhibition?

Design 99's Neighborhood Project

2009-12-19T11:05:00.009-05:00

Starting yesterday, Design 99 took up residence in the Gibbs Gallery at the Detroit Institute of Arts developing The Neighborhood Project.

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It's a work-in-progress workshop where until 20 March the Power House neighborhood will interact with the museum visitors.

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Power House Close-Up

2009-12-16T12:41:00.017-05:00

The Power House is off the grid. Since the summer a wind mill on its roof and two solar panels are keeping the battery filled up. After their show in the Detroit Art Institute Design 99's Mitch and Gina plan to continue with the transformation of the house.

1. The Power House, view from Moran Street - you can see the windmill on the roof

2. The veranda

3. The backyard

4. The backyard, view from the back alley

5. View from the veranda into the former living room, future gallery room

6. The former kitchen

7. The former kitchen from the opposite angle

8. View up from the Basement

9. Room next to the gallery space

10. Back room, behind the former kitchen

11. The attic

12. The electricity system connecting the wind mill and solar panels to the battery

13. Looking into the second room from above

14. Floor detail

The back alley behind the Power House

Speaking for Detroit

2009-12-15T17:03:00.010-05:00

It has been quiet on the Unreal Estate front lately. After a tumultuous first year we have been focusing the last months on gathering funds for an artist –in – residency and making a publication, ‘The Atlas of Love and Hate’. This will be published as part of Volume magazine on 23 December. The relative calmness of the editorial work gave us time to reflect on all the discussions we had, on what the effects of our endeavor has been until now and on the criticism and positive feedback that we got.

1. Back in Mitch & Gina's homey kitchen, December 2009

One year of Unreal Estate
After the launch of the agency, studios were taught on Detroit’s Unreal Estate at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Architectural Department of the University of Michigan. Artists Mitch Cope and Marjectica Portc as well as architects Mireille Roddier and Michael Stanton came to the DAI to give lectures on American cities and on Detroit especially.

A two-week collaborative art project in Hamtramck took place in April. 12 artists, writers, architects and photographers lived for two weeks in the neighborhood. A final presentation at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Detroit (MOCAD) showed the work and discussions after two weeks. Artist Diederick Kraaijeveld started his beneficiary ‘Icons of Hope’ project and the curators of the Unreal Estate project initiated the research, which lead to the artist – in – residency and coop plan.

Before the studios started, Andrew Herscher and Mireille Roddier published on unreal estate in Volume # 18 ‘ After Zero’. On the side, I was engaged with ‘From Crisis to Project’ the Archis RSVP event in Warren, which had the ‘Warren Special Report’ published with Volume #20 as a first result. And the Netherlands Architecture Institute organized a roundtable discussion on the same topic with a contribution by Warren’s County Commissioner Toni Moceri. The City of Warren is initiating a discussion about its Master plan in January 2010.

2. The meadow in the winter, December 2009

Media spectacle
During the start up period of the Unreal Estate project Toby Barlow’s op-ed piece ‘For Sale: $100 Houses’ was published in The New York Times – more or less in the period of the crisis of GM and Chrysler. As a result there was significant media attention given to Detroit, its alternative real estate practices and the autonomous forms of living being developed there. Detroit was declared the ‘new’ Berlin. For example, Design 99 – Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope – and their Power House project received an amazing amount of public attention, artists from all over the US showed interest in moving to Detroit, and lots of people emailed us for information. In response to the near bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler, several Dutch broadcasting channels and newspapers as well as photographers visited the city to portray ‘new’ forms of urban pioneering in the context of the decline of the automotive industry.

3. A to be started house project by the University of Michigan, December 2009

Criticism
While Detroit was becoming a media spectacle, the artists and architects we worked with in Hamtramck tried to figure out in the short time frame of two weeks how to relate to and engage with this place. The media attention greatly complicated this very personal exploration. The artists felt pressure. Tensions rose during these two weeks between us, as curators, and the artists. Artist Jimini Hignett articulated her frustrations and dilemmas in an interesting way in her diary, which will be published in the ‘Love and Hate Atlas’. Here is a fragment:

'Do I want to be part of a setup where art-bytes seem to be more important than actual art? Where clearly the temporary façade is more important than any actual improvement – to be seen to be doing something more important than actually doing anything. This is a world I am usually at pains to avoid. No longer able to feel comfortable with a work ironic or cynical, or a sharp one-liner, I remain guiltily silent about my humorous word game – Destroit.' (Jimini Hignett, Volume 22 (Archis; Amsterdam 2009))

Additionally, artists Raymond Huizinga and Sasha Miljevic addressed their uneasiness working as artists in the city, and commented critically in public on the Detroit Unreal Estate project and its ambitions.

Questions were raised about a whole range of issues: our ideological agenda, our responsibilities as curators of the project, our organizational capacities and our group management skills. In hindsight, I can say we did underestimate the impact of bringing a group of individuals to a city as vast and strange as Detroit in the context of a project which was still in a research phase. Due to the fact that we’re social scientists by training and not artists our ways of engaging with the city differed as well. Moreover, living for a two week period in a neighborhood in despair was more overwhelming for most participants then we expected.

Later, I heard also comments from people outside of our group questioning our knowledge of the everyday life of the city as foreigners, or concerning our colleagues as in Ann Arbor – based academics.

4. The garden of the Power House, December 2009

Projects
At the end of the two-week period we, At the end of the two-week period, we were all exhausted, but there were some very interesting outcomes. Yet, there were also very interesting outcomes. Photographer Corine Vermeulen and curator Femke Lutgerink set up and executed a Walk-in Portrait Studio in Klinger Street inspired by the famous Walker Evens photograph of the License Photo Studio in New York; artist Lado Darakhevelidze did his ‘Future Postman’ performance and collected stories about Detroit’s future. Jimini created her work Speramus Meliora, for which she turned foraged plywood into a billboard with fret-worked words, which she then used to board up two charred houses. Finally, artist Monika Berenyi and graphic designer Cecilia Costa organized a poetry slam event with representatives of the famous generation of Detroit poets from the 60s and 70s. One of the highlights was definitely Melba Joyce Boyd's reading of her poem 'We want our city back', which inspired Joost Janmaat, me and architect Berenika Boberska to hang a self made chandelier above a recently cleaned out meadow on Moran Street. Mitch wrote a nice post on his blog on the ‘Euro invasion’.

5. The garden of the Power House, December 2009

Learning from Detroit
I remember a few conversations in Detroit with artists who participated in project. A photographer mentioned that while he knew that Detroit’s ruins had been photographed a zillion times, he could not resist shooting all the iconic pictures again. He felt after two weeks that he had barely enough time to understand photographically the effect of the spectacle of the ruined urban landscape let alone producing something ‘new’.

Another artist questioned her role as an outsider in Detroit, but also the effect of the Powerhouse project or Heidelberg project. She wondered how our engagement with the city was the result of the way you experienced the suffering of the place and its people. I also remember a discussion about Diederick Kraaijeveld’s art piece depicting an Afro-American woman and a discussion of his ‘see, buy, fly’ - making art method.

The agency of an individual artist or architect or more precisely the right to speak for the city, to reproduce, to use, to create the city is closely scrutinized when working in Detroit. Trying to understand this, as an outoftowner it seems that the knowledge of the city, the time you spend there, and where you lived, your working relation with the city, the way you engage socially, the racial group your part of, the things you do to make the city a better place, and the amount of money you make off that, are some of the guidelines for determining whether you have or have not the capacity to speak. Then obviously the question which guideline is most important depends from conversation partner to conversation partner.

6. Kerstin Niemann's house on Moran St, December 2009

The New Detroit?
Questions of ethics, and debates about appropriate ways of working in Detroit are old. Yet, everyone has to deal with their ongoing relevance. Cultivating awareness, is, at least, a good beginning.

The media spectacle and references to Berlin could to make the discussion more complex. The frivolous enthusiasm by newcomers for the potential of Detroit could add to the viability of the city, but at what costs?

Perhaps it can really be like curator Charles Esche suggested - that a group of ‘gardists’ might into existence. Individuals or groups that can set a strong course of action in their very local setting – investigating different ways of living and inspiring others to do the same. We can hope that new way of living is focused on improving Detroit for the sake of everyone who’s building a life here.

7. Tree of Heaven project garden, December 2009

Launch Volume # 22 The Guide

2009-12-15T16:20:00.006-05:00

We invite you to join us for the launch of VOLUME #22 The Guide.

Athenaeum News Centre, Spui, Amsterdam, December 22, 5-7pm

About this issue:
Guiding – as it is commonly understood – is not about creating; it’s about helping. The guide has no goal other than to lead someone safely to the destiny of their choice. The guide is skilled; he or she actually can lead the way, but does so without ambition beyond delivering quality service. The guide sells safety where risk is involved.

Contributors:
Arjen Oosterman, Jan van Grunsven, Ole Bouman, Rory Hyde, Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Kubo, Edwin Gardner, Filip Mischelwitsch, Jonathan Hanahan, Louisa Bufardeci, Sunny Bains, Anastassia Smirnova, Thomas Daniell, Kate Rhodes, Naomi Stead, Thomas Kilpper, Lucy Bullivant, Christian Ernsten + Charles Esche

As a special insert to this issue Volume presents the Atlas of Love and Hate produced by the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency.

VOLUME Magazine #22 was conceived and edited by Archis.

Work in progress: HAMUC

2009-12-01T11:55:00.006-05:00

Under the working title HAMUC: Hamtramck Unreal Estate Development Cooperative we're in the process of developing a Cooperative as a vehicle to put into practice "Bottom-up Urban Renewal". In this process we'll figure out what the goals of such a coop would be, how it would operate, what legal construction is needed or is possible under the current local cooperative law. So nothing is final, but these are the first idea's. Feedback is more than welcome. (click images for full size)

More information on Cooperative on Wikipedia:
Cooperative
Statement on the Co-operative Identity
Rochdale Principles

The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep

2009-11-30T09:13:00.003-05:00

'Detroit is dying. But, it is not dead yet.'
This great article was published almost a year ago but is well worth reading.

(For more on Jimini Hignett's work in Detroit click here.)

Requiem for Detroit

2009-11-30T09:03:00.003-05:00

At the IDFA (International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam) last week I happened to see a work-in-progress preview of a ‘Requiem for Detroit’ by ‘roll&roll’ documentary maker Julian Temple. It included some of our friends – Grace Lee Boggs, poet John Sinclair, the Packard plant and artist Tyree Gruyton. On the whole there were way too many white men talking and not enough coherent Afro-Americans included, but it linked threads of auto-industry and Motown and was, I suppose, entertaining enough. It’s a BBC-2 production, I expect it’ll be out sometime early next year.

This from the industry news site:
Detroit Requiem
“An award-winning independent production company has been commissioned by BBC Two to produce a documentary that will tell the 'roller-coaster' story of a US city's automotive industry.
Told through the testimony of the people who lived through it, Requiem for Detroit?, is a single episode 75-minute programme that is being directed by Julien Temple, from Films of Record, a Ten Alps company which specialises in high quality factual programming
He said that it will be powered by extraordinary archive – vivid projections of the famous American city's heyday on its now abandoned buildings – and the irrepressible music that continues to come out of Detroit, from ragtime and rap to techno.”
Read more here
More from Jimini Hignett here...

NY Times: In Detroit, Agencies Compete to Sell City as a Creative Haven

2009-11-16T05:29:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, November 15, Stuart Elliott wrote for the NY Times about selling Detroit as a creative Haven. Check it out.

Model D on 'Icons of Hope'

2009-11-11T09:07:00.002-05:00

Model D, a web magazine that creates a new narrative for Detroit, covered Diederick Kraaijveld’s project.

“Artist Diederick Kraaijeveld is standing over what looks to be a pile of junked wood. The pieces are assorted in color, jagged and broken, and the rusty, crooked nails jutting from the ends of a few slabs seem like prime territory for acquiring tetanus.

"I know where each one of these came from," he says as he plunges his hand into the pile and grabbing a yellow, short, stumpy, square plank. "This came from the Packard Plant. The color has a lot of texture and history to it." Sure, but watch those nails, please.

Kraaijeveld isn't from these parts -- as you could have probably guessed from the obscene amount of vowels in his last name. He comes from Hilversum, which is in Holland, about 40 minutes outside of Amsterdam. He was in Detroit, along with his friend and Dutch photographer Gideon Elings, salvaging pieces of wood from various spots -- mostly abandoned -- to build what he calls ‘Icons of Hope’.”

Click here to read more.

Idea of the day...

2009-11-09T09:19:00.001-05:00

press from NEW GEOGRAPHY via a mention in the NYT.

Motown To Misery

2009-11-01T16:09:00.003-05:00

Long article in today's Guardian about Detroit click here for the link.

It Takes a Village to Open a Bistro

2009-10-26T08:19:00.003-04:00

Toby Barlow in his recent op-ed in the NYT reveals a spirit of collaboration among Detroit's businesses, fighting Detroit's bad stigma is a common fight, one in which competition won't serve anyone.

Barlow writes: "I WAS recently sitting at the bar of Le Petit Zinc talking to the owner, Charles Sorel, when he said something I found shocking: “I can’t imagine opening a business anywhere but Detroit.” read the whole article here.

DUEA at Tirana Biannual

2009-10-25T11:02:00.007-04:00

Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen of Stealth Unlimited invited the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency to contribute to T.I.C.A.B – Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual.

With 60 artists and curated by five curators, the 4th edition of T.I.C.A.B was held in Hotel Dajti, once-upon-a-time the most grandiose hotel of Albania, built by fascist Italy in the late 1930s and during the communist past only open to foreigners. Today the Hotel lies looted and vandalized in the middle of the city.

The curators of Stealth asked the DUEA to give visuals of city life in Detroit from the perspective of the Unreal Estate project. With zero budget and very little time, Ana and Marc created an interesting composition out of some of our material.

Detroit Mayor’s Tough Love Poses Risks in Election

2009-09-26T06:04:00.002-04:00

Read the following article in the New York Times on the course of the new mayor Dave Bing. The article is written by Monica Davey, and published in the New York Times on September 25th, 2009

Detroit wood in Holland

2009-09-20T14:47:00.009-04:00

1. Wood on the veranda in Klinger

The Detroit wood is safe in Holland! After another few days of extensive salvaging (shown below in the Lee Plaza Hotel, a hotel considered one of the best in Detroit in the twenties - ´Art Deco with a Mediterranean twist- ) artist Diederick Kraaijeveld had gathered a nice base for his Icons of Hope. Almost all planks fitted in the Army Surplus bags. Fortunately the neighbors at Klinger Street were willing to lend their scales, so both bags could be filled until they both weighed the maximum allowed weight of 20 kilograms (or 45 American pounds). The coming months will be used to build the pieces. This weblog will keep you posted on that.....

2. Lee Plaza Hotel

3. Lee Plaza Hotel

4. Lee Plaza Hotel

5. Kraaijeveld with the Army Surplus bags

Detroit wood for Icons of Hope

2009-09-17T05:14:00.004-04:00

Great hunting grounds for Diederick Kraaijeveld in Detroit. With urban explorer and guide Dan and Dutch cameraman Gideon Elings he was able to salvage beautiful pieces of wood for his 'Icons of Hope'.

1. Kraaijeveld in action

Kraaijeveld builds pieces out of originally colored found wood. 'An abandoned fire station proved very resourceful', Kraaijeveld tells us, ' I found nice red painted planks there'. Even the Packard Car plant, that has been abandoned since the sixties, offered real interesting pieces of wood: the floors are covered in oak: the cars used to be driven over it IN the plant. ' And the administrative offices all had oak panelling. Most of it is still there', Kraaijeveld explains. 'Not all......., I took a few pieces'.

2. Courtroom Highland Park

3. Floor Packard Car plant

4. Police Office Highland Park

Friday is the last day of wood salvaging for Kraaijeveld, then the next quest is how to get it shipped to the Netherlands.

Salvaging old wood from Detroit

2009-09-13T13:29:00.005-04:00

Dutch artist Diederick Kraaijeveld will be in Detroit for a week to salvage colored wood from abandoned buildings in the Detroit area. Kraaijeveld builds monumental modern icons out of used wood in its original colors. He finds his wood in dumpsters, old buoildings, city dumps and along the shores all over the world. And now in Detroit MI.

He will build three ´Icons of Hope´ with the Detroit wood, back in his studio in Holland. The pieces will be exhibited in 2010 and then sold. All the proceedings will return to the Detroit Unreal Estate Project.

For Kraaijeveld, it will be an inspiring adventure to hunt for wood in Detroit. ´And it feels good to help the Detroit community as a thank you for that adventure´.

his site: www.oudhout.com

Below Kraaijveld presents us some of his recent work:

1.

2.

3.

Grown in Detroit

2009-09-10T10:49:00.004-04:00

New Award Winning Documentary on the Catherine Fergusson Academy for Young Women
by Mascha & Manfred Poppenk

The Quiet Revolution

2009-09-04T21:12:00.006-04:00

Grace Lee Boggs invites us to the second US Social Forum in Detroit, June 22-26, 2010, to help build greenhouses. Gardens, bicycles and poetry. Yes.

"Media giant buys Detroit home for reporters to track city"

2009-08-17T07:48:00.004-04:00

http://www.freep.com/article/20090816/COL27/908160442/1322/Media-giant-buys-Detroit-home-for-writers-to-track-city

BY BILL McGRAW
MOTOR CITY JOURNAL

13015 Klinger follow up

2009-06-23T05:10:00.014-04:00

A breakdown of the initial costs to get things under way and secure/prepare the house:

Purchase Price: $1.00
2008 Taxes: $1,571.12
Interior Demo (includes Dumpster rental/labor): $1,500
Lighting (solar) Interior/exterior: $300
New Lock: $60

total: $3432.12

[Photos by Mitch Cope]

A coop for 13015 Klinger

2009-05-28T07:58:00.006-04:00

Mitch Cope recently signed a purchase agreement for the home 13015 Klinger. There was fire damage in the interior, some extensive floor damage, however not unfixable.

Together with Mitch, Toby Barlow and Kerstin Niemann, we're currently setting up a coop for the house based on bylaws inspired by Lafayette Park and Dutch Housing coorporation Ymere.

The ambition to use the house, amongst others, as a residency.

Photos by Mitch Cope

Detroit is our Future: The Detroit UnReal Estate Agency in Windsor

2009-05-18T14:58:00.006-04:00

Across the river Detroit's Canadian twin city has been undergoing a comparatively protracted path of economic meltdown. This process is delayed as production in the auto industry reached its peak much later than in the US. Nevertheless the sprawl machine started up in the 1950s and it is still going strong in Windsor where it has spawned three new outlying townships (Tecumseh, Lakeshore, LaSalle) in the last twenty years. Commercial property owners have been busy boarding up and tearing down buildings in the city over the past couple of years, seemingly in final preparations for a funeral for the auto industry.

Henry Ford famously pronounced the demise of the city early on in the history of the auto industry: "we shall solve the city problem by leaving the city". Nowhere is this process more pronounced than in the Windsor neighborhood that bears his name: Ford Town (now Ford City). Drouillard Road is the main street that runs through this neighborhood. It was established around 1910 when Ford began to send auto parts from Detroit across the river for manufacturing in Canada in order to avoid tariffs levied on finished automobiles that were exported to Canada and other parts of the British Commonwealth. The growth and decline of this area was rapid: Ford City had reached its peak population in 1928 and by 1950 had been largely abandoned due to the closure of the main plant and the growth of the new suburbs, strip malls and other auto-related urban shifts.

Chrysler's assembly plant is currently the largest in Canada. The Chrysler complex covers approximately three square kilometers of southeast Windsor and is at the moment up for grabs. The security presence around the factory made it difficult to take pictures near any of the entrances.

Artists, Urban Blight and Gentrification

2009-05-06T10:31:00.003-04:00

There's a very interesting discussion of the possibilities and limitations of artists as agents of urban renewal, both in and beyond Detroit, on The Clyde Fitch Report. The author begins with his admiration for Richard Florida and the notion of "the creative class," but ends on a more critical and complex note--that he's "all for the creative economy," but "wants a diverse economy as well."

A useful comparison is the Wall Street Journal's wholly uncritical perspective. In a recent piece, "Artists vs. Blight," the Journal re-recruited artists as "leaders of an urban vanguard that colonizes blighted areas." What's at stake in this recruitment was made clear in a quote from the director of Cleveland's City Planning Commission: "At first, the strategy was (placing artists in) old warehouses, now it's whole neighborhoods ... The next phase is capitalizing on the presence of artist and art-related businesses and using it as the lever for high-density development." This is, of course, precisely the sort of development that aims to render the urban vanguard once again homeless...

Detroit in Dutch media

2009-05-03T07:40:00.002-04:00

NOVA, a Dutch news program featured Detroit last Saturday, May 2nd 2009. Apparently, Fiat is going to save Chrysler and 'Artists animate Detroit (Kunstenaars bezielen Detroit)' with Scott Hocking and the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency.

Property Sold!

2009-05-02T15:36:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately, the bank did not accept our offer. Instead they accepted another offer on this property.

'Euro Invasion Retreats'

2009-04-24T09:29:00.005-04:00

Taken from Gina Reichert/Mitch Cope's Power House Report:

What a strange couple of weeks. What a strange month! Gina and I feel like we got run over, beat down, sucked dry. That’s not to say we didn’t enjoy it because we did, were just a little fried out, burnt up and crispy creamed.

Not sure what happened. I think we learned a lesson about having people come and “work in the neighborhood”. Not sure how to explain what happened or didn’t happen, or what we thought should have happened. Not trying to be vague, just confused. That said the fine young men and women of apparently controversial Detroit Unreal Estate Agency were productive in cleaning out a couple vacant lots, painted a building to be painted further and put a down payment down on a building and mapped and photo documented several blocks in the neighborhood!
Somehow the neighborhood seems less friendly this week. Maybe it’s just the warming of the weather that brings out the rats, fires, garbage, and druggists, prostitutes, weirdos or maybe it’s just me. Most disheartening however is that there has been an increase in break-ins, including our good friend John’s house who had His two back doors kicked in and lost some irreplaceable jewelry that he made during his jewelry days. Although he has a beautiful German Shepherd - Lexy, for security, she was of no help. John suspected someone had been feeding her at night for about a week as she stopped being interested in breakfast, but he thought it was the neighbor kids throwing her scraps. In reality someone might have been trying and succeeding to befriend her before the big heist. She is a very sweet dog although she still is young enough that she could be trained to kill future intruders.

I tried replacing his back door, but as usually with these old houses as soon as you take something apart you reveal years of problems. In John’s case it’s the rotting and sinking of the back porch. We discussed jacking it up and sure enough as I crawled under the porch to see what was up, there was already a jack under there with several things wedged in on top of some shaky cinder blocks which are on top of sand. I’m not sure if we can improve on that system in the near future so my idea was to just add to the top of the porch. If it keeps sinking, just add another layer to the floor. Eventually maybe it will become a solid mass and then it will be done! Why fight it, unless a new foundation is poured, which isn’t going to happen. John didn’t want me to finish the job until we fixed the sloping floor so I boarded up the unfinished back door and put a 2×4 behind the other broken back door for security.

With the dissatisfaction of not being able to finish that job I started taking apart the windows and front door of the Power House. Finally getting back to actually doing some physical work on the Power House, although the anxiety of wanting something finished probably is not the best attitude when doing rehab. Today after three days of working on the front door it’s in and it’s level and it works, but still no locks yet. Since everything was built together and hasn’t been replaced since 1924 except for Home Depot door that was slapped on before the bank sold it to us, everything else is dry rotted or too badly chewed up from previous fixes to reuse. I spent half the day carving out a new threshold while the Bosnian brothel across the street looked on and made fun of my constant tinkering and leveling. Finally after much fussing the threshold sat neatly into the spot where the old one laid for 85 years. Now I need spray foam to seal the deal. So I boarded up the door opening and headed back home for a sandwich before getting the spray foam and a beer.

Before I could go though I had to check out the daily neighborhood house fire. Today it was a fire on McDougal. I have always found fires to be strange community events, even as far as they are tragic. Today I just found this tragic even though it was a vacant home. Someone is setting fire to these vacant homes for fun, is all i could think, but the next house is not vacant. I had no desire to talk to anyone of the many who crowded up and down the street to watch and trade information as I usual do.

On my way back I witnessed a weird car accident where a car full of kids getting out of school clipped an SUV tearing off the plastic front of the truck and rolled into a parked car. It seemed as if they had no breaks, they just kept going, hitting things, finally running into a parked car. It was one of those weird scenes where the occupants of the car seemed to be in a trance as their car went out of control.

Back home I sit and write this note and drink beer with the cats, it’s all I can do.

The PHOTO is of Lado, from Georgia, one of the Dutch Art Institute students embarking on his project “What is your Future of Detroit?”

The Chandelier

2009-04-21T06:59:00.013-04:00

'We want our street lights on'

[photos: Corine Smith-Vermeulen]

Chandelier constructers, garbage collectors, pruners and painters: Berenika Boberska + Mitch Cope + Christian Ernsten + Edwin Gardner + Joost Janmaat + Gina Reichert + Jeroen Visser + ...

The meadow

2009-04-21T06:12:00.012-04:00

'We want our garbage gone'

Garbage collectors, pruners and painters: Berenika Boberska + Mitch Cope + Christian Ernsten + Edwin Gardner + Joost Janmaat + Jeroen Visser + ...

New homeowners at 13167/9 Moran?

2009-04-19T17:24:00.013-04:00

Last weeks' local projects

2009-04-19T16:37:00.017-04:00

This selection of projects executed in the Hamtramck area during the last two weeks includes work by Jimini Hignett, Raymond Huizinga, Corine Vermeulen-Smith and Femke Lutgerink.

Corine Vermeulen-Smith and Femke Lutgerink set up a local free photo studio for a week. They took photographs of neighbors and interview them for their stories.

++++

Raymond Huizinga photographed the neighborhood of Hamtramck. He photocopied the photos and exhibited them on ramdomn buildings. The grey-ness of the mini exhibitions exemplified according to him the ruined state of the old city of Detroit, and the confusionment of the photographer who tries to tackle it.

Migrating from Hamtramck to Warren

2009-04-18T13:12:00.017-04:00

Historically lots of homeowners from the Hamtramck area moved out to Warren. For examples Polish families have strong roots in both neighbourhoods. Currently also Bangladeshi and others are migrating from Hamtramck to Warren, as, for example, the former owners of the house of Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope on Klinger Street.

Though culturally strongly related the spatial outlook of Warren is quite different from Hamtramck area. With the GM Tech Center and the new city hall as its centre of gravity, a well organised grid of wide streets make up the city. The residential areas with range houses are flanked with strip malls. In the historical part of the town the Kuhnhen Brewery is worth a visit.

We want our city back

2009-04-17T14:47:00.002-04:00

The poetry reading curated by Monika Berenyi and Cecilia Costa featured poets and artists from Detroit’s Artists Workshop, Alternative Press, Broadside Press, and Lotus Press, including Detroit poet laureate, Naomi Long Madgett, John Sinclair, Melba Joyce Boyd, Bill Harris, James Semark, George and Chris Tysh, and others.

This beautiful evening’s reading was part of Monika and Cecilia's local oral history project dedicated to the collective history of Detroit’s poetry and print culture from the 60's and 70's. One of the highlights was definitely Melba Joyce Boyd's reading of her poem 'We want our city back'.

We want our city back

We want our city back.
We want our streetlights on.
We want our garbage gone.
We want our children
playing on playgrounds,
but not with loaded guns.
We want to retire
by the river
and raise collards greens
in abandoned fields.
We want our ancestors
to rest in peace.
We want our city back.

We don't want law and order.
We want justice and jobs.
We don't want small business.
We mean serious business.
No more Mom and Pop wig shops.
No more Mickey D's
rappin with the homies.
No more Dixie Colonels
serving Kente cloth cuisine.
No more taco supreme.
No more indigestion or
quick-fix politics.
We want our city back.

[First two verses]

Presentations and Poetry Readings at MOCAD

2009-04-17T09:31:00.002-04:00

Last night about 120 people attended the presentations of artists and architects and the poetry slam at MOCAD. A photo impression..

Detroit Modernism

2009-04-15T18:52:00.003-04:00

Tonight we're gonna have a talk with Toby Barlow who wrote the NYtimes piece which got the media blitzkrieg started around Design99 and some of the other artists working in Detroit.

Toby is also on the board of the cooperative that runs Lafayette that we wrote about earlier. Besides our interest in the organizational aspects of the co-op, the architectural merits of Lafayette park also deserve some attention, a 78 acre (320,000 m2) planned by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell.

more on Lafayette Park at Dwell, and a slideshow

The Globe and its neighbors

2009-04-15T08:23:00.005-04:00

Just east of downtown, not far from the Renaissance Center is a curious parcel of land alternately filled or emptied of history and habitation.
When Dennis Archer was mayor in the mid-1990's, this neighborhood was still host to a vibrant street scape of small manufacturers, local businesses and bars. Some of these streets are still visible, lined with the early to mid 19th century structures on Franklin and Orleans streets. That which still stands does so in spite of the seizure of the area and the razing of its buildings for casino construction that never came to this part of town.
If you get a chance, walk or ride a bike through these streets just north of the river. The Globe (middle and bottom) building is where Henry Ford learned to weld and build--a mammoth old carriage shed with a sign announcing the Globe Trading Lofts. The sign, up since 2006, is weathered, and, like the casinos that announced their arrival without showing up here, it remains to be seen what these streets and buildings will see. Last week the building was unbelievably open to peer into.
Nearby (top), a growing collection of hand built shelters assembled from scrap houses the area's pre-loft community.

More press

2009-04-14T23:37:00.001-04:00

The local online magazine Metromode as well as the online version of the German Spiegel covered recent activities of the Unreal Estate Agency in Detroit.

Gathering garbage at Moran and Conant Street

2009-04-14T23:19:00.007-04:00

Results of cleaning up MORAN 13216, 13220 and 13224 as well as CONANT 13335, 13341 and 13347 (build).

Walk-in Portrait Studio open now!

2009-04-14T17:35:00.004-04:00

From Tuesday April 14th until Friday April 17th the Walk-in Portrait Studio on 13106 Klinger Street opens its doors from 11 AM – 4 PM. Inspired by the famous Walker Evens photograph of the License Photo Studio in New York (see picture) we set out to create a studio on Klinger Street. The purpose of the studio is to get to know the area by photographing its people and collecting their stories. Buildings are important, but in the end the people living in them make up the community.

In return of a story people get their picture taken. A week later they can pick up their photograph for free. Our first customers were the three neighbor kids Zana (15), Aliysha (13) and Brian (9) and a guy named Taras (21), who is a Ukrainian-Polish-Russian translator living on McDougall Street already his whole life. He just pulled up his car, got in and took the time to have his picture taken. Stating that he saw our advertisement all over the place. Not so many stories came out yet, only that all people we saw today feel that the neighborhood changed for the best the last couple of years. There is more activity and there are more younger people around. Charles (50) and Felicia (48), living on Gallagher Street, feel that people in the neighborhood mind their own business, but also look out for each other when necessary. They cherish that feeling very much.

Keep you posted.

The Walk-in Portrait Studio is a project by Corine Vermeulen-Smith and Femke Lutgerink.

Detroit Iconoclasm

2009-04-13T21:15:00.004-04:00

The last days it has been in the news that the Detroit council has voted to demolish Michigan Central Station There are many doubts about what this actually means for real. It could all be just political power play to force the situation around the station forward, ... who knows. More about the station at the Infrastructurist, where I also found this: Detroit's notorious icon featuring in Godfrey Reggio Naqoyqatsi

The Michigan Central footage begins at about 1:10 in the clip. The soundtrack is composed by Philip Glass, played by Yo-Yo Ma.

via Infrastructurist

Legalize it

2009-04-13T18:51:00.003-04:00

Some of the practices and economies around town that you might regard as distinctly Detroit are also distinctly illegal. For example scrapping, trespassing, having live stock on urban farms and squatting. Instead of forcing these practices into illegality, what would be the effects of legalizing them?

Take scrapping. Scrapping is bad. Perfectly good foreclosed homes are gutted for the copper piping and other metal. Monumental churches turn into ruins because the sheeted roofs have been stolen. High-end products are reduced to nothing but their material value. But at the same time, scrapping frees up material to be put to use again. Also, scrapping provides income for the jobless. It provides more jobs, and tax income, when it feeds into the larger metal (exporting) industries. Scrapping creates an economy.

Likewise, keeping animals within the city is a (very minor) practice. Chicken on Detroit’s urban farms have become known as ‘yard birds’, to fit them within the restrictions the municipality has on urban live stock. People using the desire lines, the cut-offs that diagonally traverse the empty fields in Detroit’s grid, are technically trespassing. When people just leave after their house got foreclosed by the bank or the municipality, they are squatting their own home.

Point is: scrapping, trespassing, squatting and having live stock is very much a practice. If nothing more, you want to acknowledge that it is happening. You might want to consider it is generating value of some sort to someone. And finally, you might want to see it as a possibility to build upon, by legalizing the practice.

By acknowledging this practice you give it a context, instead of either pretending it does not happen or simply condoning it. For all of these practices, you could assess its negative and positive effects. Draw it into a larger sphere of morality. Insert it into a larger body of social and political acceptable conduct, as it is ultimately defined in the law. Finally, you could think about regulating them.

Very much like the way soft drugs and squatting has been legalized in the Netherlands. It is regulated, it has been made conditional, and there has been a trade-off between rights and duties. It is legal to squat, if the building has been empty for a year, the owner has no clear intentions for use, and it alleviates the housing shortage. It is legal to grow marijuana, as long as it is produced in very low quantities and on a non-commercial basis.

Try to think beyond the cultural and practical constraints (to have a law is something, to enforce it is something else); where could the legalization of such distinct Detroit practices lead? And would this line of thinking even open up new ways to look at and deal with other highly negative urban practices, like arson and crack houses?

Public, bank and corporate ownership

2009-04-13T15:08:00.003-04:00

We currently mapping corporate, bank and public ownership in the city square bounded by Davidson, Conant, Halleck and J. Campau Streets. Via the website of the City of Detroit we came up with the reference data for Gallagher, Klinger and Moran Streets.

[Instructions: go to online services, then go to property tax, then scroll down the page and hit 'Accept']

GALLAGHER
12522 GALLAGHER URBAN DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LLC
12544 GALLAGHER WAYNE COUNTY INVENTORY
12545 GALLAGHER A & J REAL ESTATE
12556 GALLAGHER HOME SOLUTIONS PROPERTIES LLC
12622 GALLAGHER FEDERAL HOME LOAN MORTGAGE CORP
13150 GALLAGHER NRC CONSTRUCTION INC
13201 GALLAGHER DEUTSCHE BANK NATL TRUST CO
13224 GALLAGHER WAYNE COUNTY INVENTORY

MORAN
12591 MORAN NRC CONSTRUCTION INC
12627 MORAN NRC CONSTRUCTION INC
12651 MORAN MI LAND BANK FAST TRACK AUTH
12657 MORAN NRC CONSTRUCTION INC
13143 MORAN CITY OF DETROIT-TAXABLE
13144 MORAN CHARTER ONE BANK
13148 MORAN DEUTSCHE BANK TRUST COMPANY
13161 MORAN CITY OF DETROIT
13185 MORAN WAYNE COUNTY INVENTORY
13226 MORAN CITY OF DETROIT-P&DD

KLINGER
12500 KLINGER UDDIN REAL ESTATE HOLDING CO, LLC
12521 KLINGER FEDERAL NA MORTGAGE ASSOC
12527 KLINGER GOLDEN EAGLE CONSTRUCTION INC
12533 KLINGER RECOVERED TREASURES, LTD
12826 KLINGER GOLDEN EAGLE CONSTRUCTION
12833 KLINGER SECURITY BANK OF COMMERCE
12845 KLINGER CITY OF DETROIT-P&DD
12850 KLINGER WAYNE COUNTY INVENTORY
12916 KLINGER MI LAND BANK FAST TRACK AUTH
12922 KLINGER MI LAND BANK FAST TRACK AUTH
13027 KLINGER AURORA LOAN SERVICES LLC
13039 KLINGER WELLS FARGO BANK, N.A.
13107 KLINGER MI LAND BANK FAST TRACK AUTH
13109 KLINGER MI LAND BANK FAST TRACK AUTH
13234 KLINGER NRC CONSTRUCTION INC
13309 KLINGER WAYNE COUNTY INVENTORY

Farmer Ford

2009-04-12T16:25:00.003-04:00

Did you know Ford is an urban farmer? Since a couple of years, Ford has planted 200 acres of abandoned parking lots and storage plots with corn, wheat, sunflowers and soy beans.

From their press statement:

DEARBORN, Mich., Sept. 17, 2008 – As sunflowers bloom in Dearborn, Ford is shining a light on sustainable landscaping.

Ford Motor Company maintains nearly 200 acres of sunflower fields, prairies and grow zones around its world headquarters and research and engineering campus in an effort to conserve natural resources, create wildlife habitat and lower grounds maintenance costs.

“We’re being strategic about what we plant, where we plant, and how we maintain our landscapes in an effort to reduce costs and improve the environment,” said Terry Burt, manager, Fairlane Grounds, the group responsible for Ford’s landscaping and grounds maintenance.

For example, Ford planted 100 acres of corn and sunflowers this year on several large fields near its world headquarters. By replacing what would otherwise be traditional turf grass, the company saves approximately 30 percent on the cost of labor, gas, and fertilizer, while creating an attractive habitat.

Planted in late summer, the crops provide food for birds and animals throughout the winter. Fox, wild turkeys and coyote have been spotted on Ford properties, several of which have been certified by the Wildlife Habitat Council.

In addition to planting annual crops like sunflowers, Ford uses many native plants that are wellsuited to the local soils and climate and therefore do not require significant use of fertilizer, pesticides or irrigation.

According to Burt, finding the right balance between traditional and sustainable landscapes is key to gaining public acceptance. “People want to do what’s right for the environment, but they aren’t accustomed to what ‘natural’ looks like,” said Burt.

To help educate the public, Ford has installed several grow zone signs around the fields designating them as natural habitats.

Because of the amount of land Ford devotes to sustainable landscaping and its visibility from the freeway and other major roads, Ford’s efforts are attracting a lot of attention. “Based on the number of phone calls we receive from people asking questions and expressing their gratitude, we know we’re making a difference,” Burt said.

Lines of Desire

2009-04-12T16:04:00.004-04:00

Detroit is a grid city. Maybe not as absolute as other American cities, but still, a grid city. To such and extend that in some of the most decayed areas of town, the grid (next to the electricity posts) is the only remnant of urbanism in an otherwise grassy expanse.

In every neighborhood whith empty lots new pathways emerge. A thin but vast network of dirt routes, overlaying and negating the asphalt grid. They call these lines desire lines. Lines of desire. The planned versus the practical. The designed versus the accidental.

It seems to suggest that where in the past, people took the city on in a straight foward way, these days, they seem to take it more diagonally..

Home defenders save homes from foreclosure

2009-04-12T10:24:00.001-04:00

Home defenders save homes from foreclosure from Bink on Vimeo.

via GOOD - Squatting in Foreclosed Homes: Criminal or Commendable?

An existing Detroit coop

2009-04-11T14:51:00.005-04:00

[From Wikipedia]

The 1300 Lafayette East Cooperative is a large apartment building on the near-east side of Detroit, Michigan, facing the Detroit River and Windsor, Ontario, with its address "1300" printed in such large letters on its roof, that it can be read from Windsor.

The building was constructed in 1961, and stands at 29 floors, incorporating a ground floor with lobby, meeting, and commercial space, a mezzanine with a party room and offices for rent to residents, and 28 residential floors. The building is constructed atop a two-floor underground parking garage. It is composed of mostly steel, concrete, and glass incorporating the Modern architectural style.

Originally designed as an apartment building, it has housed a number of notable residents, including Diana Ross. It fell on hard times in the 1970's, obtaining a reputation as a "drug den". After a mortage default by the owner, it briefly became the property of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who had insured the mortage. It was subsequently converted to co-op ownership in a most unusual manner - without the involvement of a commercial developer - on the initiative of tenants who organized to avoid a sale to commercial interests or the City of Detroit.

Learning from Detroit

2009-04-10T13:34:00.009-04:00

American and international media coverage of the cultural activities by actors as Design 99, the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency and others in Detroit tends to highlight how artists makes use of the current real estate crisis, how they are attracted by easy living in $100 houses and the post-industrial spectacle of the city. Without trying to negate these qualities of Detroit, I would like to argue that there might be something more to it.

Speaking as a member of the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, I'm curious about the lessons that can be learned from Detroit. Learning from Detroit starts I think with a re-evaluation of the urban development discourse that engineered the city, and a different understanding of what engagement with this place and its people means.

Below I drafted some of the credentials of the Unreal Estate project:
The Unreal Estate project intends to tap into the inventories of local assets and expertise in the city. In an interdisciplinary team we imagine stimulus strategies for local make-ability. As such, we don’t necessarily work against the effects of deindustrialization, suburbanization and outsourcing. Renovating the postindustrial city - along the lines of Richard Florida’s creative class – or, in turn, seeing the urban ruins as artistic opportunities is not our central motivation.

We respect that Detroit’s urban environment is still the home of many individuals and families, who ‘built’ their lives here. Align to this, it is our ambition to design or support stimulus strategies for urban transformation that lead to a resilient user-based city, which is enabling a vision on local opportunities. And, simultaneously, we intend to re-interpret and built on the value of decay, as well as, the intrusion of wildlife in the city. Decline is also creation and growth of something else if we can reframe our expectations, and offers different potential for co-existence, and strategies for urban development.

We intend to understand in artistic ways how urban engagement, as well as, urban play work under this condition. The collapse of the free market ideology creates a sense of emergency and the opportunity for a new kind of artistic agency, in which, to paraphrase Charles Esche, regional art and site-specific production are combined’, a kind of everyday life art.

Thus Unreal Estate project poses these questions:
How to intervene on the city seeking the participation of the less advantaged people? Is it possible to start urban transformation as artists avoiding the traditional patterns of gentrification and economic exploitation of symbolic values? How to imagine a new equilibrium between the city, the human communities and the natural elements (plants, water, wilderness)? How to exchange culturally between this particular (urban) situation and other places in the world?

We realize that Detroit is an important example of contemporary urban living and, potentially, a case for a hands-on study on future urban scenario’s, which are also applicable for other places in the United States and in the rest of the world.

Biking the Motor City

2009-04-09T13:41:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I made a 20mi / 32km bike trip in Detroit. From Hamtramck to Downtown and back. Traveling this distance by bike gives you a good sense of the vast scale of this city, although this distance is but a small fragment of the size of the entire Metropolitan area of Detroit.

Central Detroit

View Biking the Motor City in a larger map

Where some of my initial thoughts on the derelict homes, factories, warehouses and skyscrapers were tainted by romanticism, now they're drained in the realization that this is an urban reality that is everywhere. An omnipresent sprawling landscape of destruction, generated by the rationality of hyper-capitalism. Fed by the misplaced escapism of the American dream, of starting over-and-over-and-over-and-over again in the suburbs, sub-suburbs, exurbs to the point that the notion of urbanity evaporates completely.

How to reinvent living together, 'a community' and perhaps even civilization on top of the ruins of the raison d'être of the previous one...

The Braddock Report

2009-04-08T15:03:00.002-04:00

A quick follow-up to this older post about Braddock, PA, the self-declared bottom of the country.
The video of Mayor John Fetterman's lecture at Taubman College last week is up and running, available for free streaming on iTunes U. Rarely have we had the auditorium packed with such a mix of architects AND urban planners...
Interesting follow-up discussions, in need of further following-up.

Hamtramck city block facade

2009-04-08T10:31:00.005-04:00

click for full size (this is just one side)

In order to map the neighborhood we're mapping the all-around-city-block-'facades' around.

Sorry, out of Gas

2009-04-08T09:59:00.002-04:00

via anArchitecture

about architects dealing with crisis

check out:
the book
the exhibition website

Unreal No More

2009-04-07T21:02:00.005-04:00

The City Council today passed a resolution calling for the emergency demolition of the Michigan Central Depot...

A Cooperative - A Community Lab

2009-04-06T19:20:00.009-04:00

Detroit is unique nowadays because of the lack of oversight. Too much organisation might make areas sterile. Yet some degree of planning could create new forms of creative community development.

One plan we're working on now is a combination of a new masterplan + a cooperative ownership system + a business plan - A Community Lab

The masterplan
The masterplan would suggest a number of ways of spatially re-organizing the neighborhood. Based on an inventory of opportunities and urgencies, we could link for example empty lots or foreclosed houses or suggest possibilities for reforestation, public parks, neighborhood watch, garbage collection or urban farming areas.

The cooperative
The cooperative ownership system could function as a way to generate incentives for citizens to engage with their neighborhood beyond their own individual homes. Potentially it could also be a way to generate value on the level of the neigbourhood, which in turn will reflect in re-appreciation of 'the community', its spatial and cultural environment and its future.

1. Urgency driven
A cooperative could buy up foreclosed houses, help out citizens that are on the brink of foreclosure. Neighbours might sell their houses to the cooperative, when they are on the verge of being foreclosed and become tenants. For homeowners it might offer a way to stimulate the upgrading of the neighbourhood in terms of public space and stimulating local communal and small-business developments.

2. Oppurtunity driven
The cooperative could potentially also open up new ways of creative engagement with old neighborhoods. It could provide a platform for sharing resources from ruined houses, as well as, information about how to obtain empty plots. It might promote activities as urban farming, and it could also function as a common for the re-inviting nature into neighborhoods, forms of reforestation or letting urban areas go fallow.

The business plan
The business plan would be a stimulus for people to engage with either form of creative speculation, which was mentioned above. The plan would challenge people to think about the nearby future of their immediate environment. The plan could be very commercial, more artistic or agricultural. The plan together would ideally work from the premises of a lab, a place for experimentation and engagement.

Volume 19# Architecture of Hope

2009-04-06T15:07:00.004-04:00

Last weekend, along side the Masters of Intervention event with a lecture by Nader Vossoughian, titled Happy City, the next issue of Volume ‘Architecture of Hope‘ was presented at Felix Meritis (Amsterdam).

This issue includes the work, entitled 'Lowriders' by Detroit-based photographer Corine Vermeulen-Smith.

the 100 dollar house

2009-04-06T12:59:00.001-04:00

Geolocate this post.

Posted with LifeCast

2009-04-06T12:58:00.001-04:00

Geolocate this post.

Posted with LifeCast

Morning meeting - Hamtramck

2009-04-06T10:54:00.003-04:00

Geolocate this post.

Posted with LifeCast

From SoHo to Detro?

2009-04-02T02:10:00.002-04:00

Andrew Herscher

from the Detroit Free Press, April 1, 2009

There is currently a flurry of media attention on Detroit as a haven for enterprising young artists, sparked by Toby Barlow's recent opinion piece in the New York Times ("For Sale: The $100 House," March 7, 2009). Nationally and internationally, this attention has been suffused with wonderment, if not astonishment, and also hope. Can artists really save a piece of a "ruined city," a "dying city," a city that has defied all other attempts at renewal? What has yet to be acknowledged, however, is how an artistic revival of Detroit might present the city with challenges in its very success.

In his op-ed, Barlow described Detroit as "a vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished." The title of his piece referred to a $100 house bought by one couple, artist immigrants from Chicago. This house, cited in almost all subsequent media reports, seems to stand for the creative possibilities afforded by a city where many living expenses have descended to a bare minimum. Yet, while these possibilities are undeniable, the effects that would follow from their realization are not at all clear.

From some perspectives, these effects would be valuable and desirable, and so the colonization of decimated neighborhoods in Detroit by artists would be cause for celebration. Urban theorist Richard Florida, for example, poses such artists as the vanguard of a "creative class" that drives the economic development of post-industrial cities. First come the artists and their creative colleagues, Florida argues, and then come improvements in property, the development of retail and service businesses, and a rise in property values and tax bases: creativity conjures disposable income and tax revenues and a city becomes renewed in the process.

In this model, artists are fist stage gentrifiers, preparing the ground for the doctors, lawyers and other professionals who would eventually follow them--and who, inevitably, would also replace them. This replacement, sometimes termed the "SoHo effect" for the location where it first became visible, is the success of gentrification in its own terms--but it is a success that, from other perspectives, is highly qualified.

With the renewal that gentrification brings comes not only property development and rising property values, but also the displacement of those for whom ungentrified neighborhoods possess their own particular advantages--these are not only artists but also the working class, recent immigrants and other marginalized communities. Through their facilitation of gentrification, then, artists start a process that eventually leads to their own eviction and to the destruction of precisely the environment that attracted them and allowed their creativity to flourish.

It might seem utterly bizarre to decry the future effects of gentrification in Detroit, a city that is now desperate for investments of any sort and hopes of any kind. And yet, what might be even more bizarre is how just this same desperation and hope once characterized SoHo itself. In 1962, the City Club of New York published a report entitled The Wastelands of New York, which focused on the area that is now known as SoHo. The report described that area as an "enormous commercial slum" with disastrously low property values. A few decades later, of course, the problems facing SoHo became entirely different--the problems of a massively overdeveloped enclave of and for the wealthy.

So how to proceed from SoHo to Detro? Mitch Cope and his wife, Gina Reichert, are among Detroit's artist pioneers. In an interview a few days ago on ABC's "20/20," Cope said that "money isn't on my radar; we're going about it all wrong if we're trying to make a profit." but as the very question that elicited his answer illustrates, money is indeed on the radar, and not only for the media, but also for Detroit's property developers, investors and landlords, and a host of municipal and state agencies besides. Money would certainly change Detroit; who would benefit from that change is, however, an open question. One can only hope, then, that Cope, Reichert and the artists who are gathering around them can negotiate the emergence of Detro without losing what attracted them to the city in the first place.

We Almost Lost Detroit

2009-03-29T17:18:00.004-04:00

by Gil Scott Heron

listen to [mp3]

It stands out on a highway
like a Creature from another time.
It inspires the babies' questions,
"What's that?"
For their mothers as they ride.
But no one stopped to think about the babies
or how they would survive,
and we almost lost Detroit
this time.
How would we ever get over
loosing our minds?
Just thirty miles from Detroit
stands a giant power station.
It ticks each night as the city sleeps
seconds from anniahlation.
But no one stopped to think about the people
or how they would survive,
and we almost lost Detroit
this time.
How would we ever get over
over loosing our minds?
The sherrif of Monroe county had,
sure enough disasters on his mind,
and what would karen Silkwood say
if she was still alive?
That when it comes to people's safety
money wins out every time.
and we almost lost Detroit
this time, this time.
How would we ever get over
over loosing our minds?
You see, we almost lost Detroit
that time.
Almost lost Detroit
that time.
And how would we ever get over...
Cause odds are,
we gonna loose somewhere, one time.
Odds are
we gonna loose somewhere sometime.
And how would we ever get over
loosing our minds?
And how would we ever get over
loosing our minds?
Didn't they, didn't they decide?
Almost lost Detroit
that time.
Damn near totally destroyed,
one time.
Didn't all of the world know?
Say didn't you know?
Didn't all of the world know?
Say didn't you know?
We almost lost detroit...

Scott-Heron's song "We Almost Lost Detroit", written about a previous accident at a nuclear power plant, was included in the No Nukes album of concert highlights. (wikipedia)

More media coverage!

2009-03-21T12:53:00.003-04:00

'Taking a Chance on a $100 House'

After the New York Times and CNN, now also ABC NEWS 2020 reports on how artists see opportunities in Detroit. Click here for the full video.

CNN visits Design 99's Power house

2009-03-20T03:47:00.003-04:00

CNN's Anderson Cooper visits the Design 99 Powerhouse. Click here for the video.

Full article NYTimes by Toby Barlow

2009-03-20T02:47:00.003-04:00

NY Times
March 8, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
For Sale: The $100 House
By TOBY BARLOW

Detroit

RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee.

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

Toby Barlow is the author of “Sharp Teeth.”

Media Hits RSVP Warren

2009-03-19T13:22:00.004-04:00

These are the media hits from the RSVP event. In
addition to the story that ran in the Warren Weekly, Arjen Oosterman was
featured in metromode and Alexander D'Hooghe and Ole Bouman were featured in a Michigan Now radio spot Dutch Ideas to Remake Detroit and Lucia Tozzi from Arbitare also wrote a travelogue of her experience here.

Old space for new ideas: An embarassment of a certain type of richness

2009-03-17T21:30:00.006-04:00

In 'How Buildings Learn..' Stewart Brand writes lovingly of adaptive re-use versus big box solutions. New ideas, he reasons, benefit from the flexible and adaptable spaces of malleable old buildings, while old ideas demand the support of their own structures. Witness a failed KMart, Roy Rogers or other retail solutions housed in constructions limited by their aspirations as they sit vacant.

Detroit has a wealth of these--pictured above is the Russell Industrial Center just at the Clay Ave exit of I-75. One million square feet on 10 acres, a once 30-year headquarters of Leona Helmsley's underknown direct mail empire (less glamorous than her hotel business) the Russell is home, creative incubator, studio space for an eclectic creative community including poster designers, architects, glass blowers, incense makers, host to open houses and parties that always make me think Detroit must be the most happening city on the planet.

Pictured from bottom up to the top: Tower visible from the road, 'the bridge' the fabulous elevator and the courtyard. I'll put up some images of the Packard Plant soon--Detroit's industrial infra structure is waiting and ready, a great host for new ideas.

What the *#&! is Social Design?

2009-03-13T10:31:00.001-04:00

In San Francisco? Check out the exhibit and report answers.

Forgotten Detroit

2009-03-11T13:17:00.003-04:00

Yet another site with beautiful photographs of beautiful but decrepit buildings... ruins actually...

http://www.forgottendetroit.com/index.html

Bushvilles

2009-03-10T10:17:00.004-04:00

Daily Kos reported on 'Bushvilles' recent development of shanty towns in the US which remind of the 'Hoovervilles' in the time of the Great Depression. Click here to see the YouTube film.

"A Strange, New American Dream"

2009-03-09T00:45:00.004-04:00

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency received a mention in the New York Times, in an op-ed piece about Design 99 and "the $100 houses" for sale in Detroit. The piece, authored by Toby Barlow, points out that Detroit is not simply a city in decline, but is, simultaneously, a "vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished": the site for realizing "a strange, new American dream." We might want to discuss whether the opportunities in Detroit are, in fact, "limitless," but we can only celebrate Barlow's acknowledgement of the city's potentials.

Evil Twins

2009-03-08T16:03:00.002-04:00

or how we're fooling ourselves to think we've reached the post-dialectical.
Gorgeous images by Camilo Jose Vergara. Check it out!

Detroit Story Blog

2009-02-24T05:50:00.002-05:00

Here's a site full of Detroit stories, worth checking out -

http://www.detroitblog.org/

Some Structures from Detroit

2009-02-19T19:40:00.002-05:00

This is one of my favorite structures on the east side of Detroit where I work.
At the corner of Mt. Elliot Street and Zender there's the great hand-painted sign opposite the small gathering spot. On any given day there's a small crowd, in the summer daily cookouts of some sort.
The sign is a reminder of some of the very local organizations, specifically block clubs, that have some access to City Hall as well as a good network for getting a bunch of people to come together and get something done--this pavilion one example.

On Civil Disobedience

2009-02-18T19:49:00.004-05:00

Thanks for the links Jimini.

Although the Global Guerrilla blog pessimistically commented on what I found to be the article of the day!

"I’m thrilled that the American people are rising up and exercising the power that Wall Street has taken away from them."

Three Interesting & Relevant Sites

2009-02-18T13:01:00.003-05:00

Just happened across these whilst looking for something else...

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/

http://www.opacity.us/

http://www.urbz.org/

Enjoy.

ARCHIS RSVP#13: AFTER THE CRISIS, FEBRUARY 20-22, 2009

2009-02-14T05:51:00.001-05:00

ARCHIS in cooperation with Abitare, Netherlands Architecture Institute and the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Tech are holding an RSVP event in Warren, MI, February 20-22, 2009 focused on finding pragmatic answers to how we can move from crisis to project within the current real estate crisis. The upcoming RSVP event will focus on the communities in the City of Warren with the highest rates of foreclosure. Participants will explore approaches to residential housing in an attempt to move beyond merely stabilizing our neighborhoods and toward rethinking our vision for them and creating the next generation of suburban development. This event is hosted by the City of Warren and Macomb County and generously sponsored by the Michigan State Housing Development (MSHDA).

The 3-day event has the potential to infuse new energy into a very difficult situation. Hopefully you will be able to join us sometime throughout the weekend, please see the schedule below for details. As space is limited, please rsvp to tonimoceri@gmail.com stating which part of the weekend's events you will be participating in. Also note that Friday's bus tour has a limited capacity of 25 people so rsvp as soon as possible to reserve your seat.

Be sure to stop by Kuhnhenn Brewery Saturday night to meet our international guests more casually.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
Introductions, Presentations and Tour of the City of Warren, 9a.m. – 5p.m.
Location: Warren City Center, One City Square, Warren, Michigan 48093

9:00a.m. – 9:30a.m. Welcome and Introductions (Mayor Fouts, City of Warren)
10:00a.m – 12p.m. Contextual Presentations (25 min presentation and 15 min for questions)
- Warren Demographics and Overview / Development of Macomb County
- Residential Housing Market (Builder's Association)
- Regional Forecast (SEMCOG)

12p.m. – 1:00p.m. Lunch

1:30p.m. – 3:30p.m. Community Bus Tour, capacity 25 people (Guides: Gina Cavaliere and Rose Furlong, City of Warren)
- Includes stop at Warren Community Center and presentation by the Warren Historical Society
3:45p.m. – 5:00p.m. Contextual Presentations 25 min presentation and 15 min for questions)
- Suburban Development (Lawrence Tech)
- Use of history and language in development of metro Detroit (TBD)

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
Public Forum, 4p.m. – 8p.m.
Location: Winnick Homes, Heritage Village, 29112 Heritage Pkwy, Warren, Michigan 48092

- Presentations on scenarios for dealing with housing and the real estate crisis (Alexander D'Hooghe, Ole Bouman, Arjen Oosterman and Lucia Tozzi). The presentations will be followed by an open forum to discuss and exchange ideas about the scenarios focusing what is most suitable for locations in Warren.
- Light dinner provided

Welcome Party/ Networking, 9p.m. – 1a.m.
Location: Kuhnhenn Brewery, 5919 Chicago Rd, Warren, Michigan 48092

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22
Workshop, 12a.m. – 4p.m.
Location: Conference Room B, Warren Community Center, 5460 Arden, Warren, Michigan 48092

- Workshop to develop proposals based on scenarios from Saturday's event, open to anyone interested in participating. The outcomes will be discussed at the end of the day.
- Light refreshments provided

Marjetica Potrc

2009-02-03T07:50:00.007-05:00

Marjetica Potrc is a well known architect and artist, in her visit in the Dutch Art Institute for a lecture series for the project Detroit: Unreal Estate Agency, presented her work in two sessions Detroit and New Orleans and Participatory Design.

In 2005, Potrc was commissioned to make a project in the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo that was relocated in a new place. Her proposal was not accepted. It was characterised as visual pollution because of the incorporation of wind turbines as the main element of the installation. Then, she decided to relocate green technologies in two different sites: the rural community of the Barefoot College in Rajasthan and the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for teenage mothers in Detroit. An installation of solar panels at the Barefoot College and of a hybrid wind turbine/solar panel system at the Catherine Ferguson Academy aimed to bring viability in these communities through sustainable technology.

By referring the 40 years of neo-liberal period from 1968 to 2008 and the latter economic crisis as consolidated time of neo-liberal politics and economics. Potrc characterizes Detroit city as the case of disaster of neo-liberal economy, a shrinking, moving city. The crash of the car industry makes the city like a “donut” with the green area in the middle, the 80% of the buildings are gone from the downtown and the suburbs are expanded. From 2 million people now the half people live in the city and mostly Afro-Americans. Most of white population live in suburbia and reach now the 5.000.000 of population that in the past were only 500.000 people.

As Potrc said, If we speak now about the exit of neo-liberalism period; we can speak also for the end of the capitalistic city. Then the question is What is a post capitalist city?

Modernist architecture by pretending a global architecture was fitting very well in capitalistic and communistic regimes and ideologies. Now we are a step ahead, we are entering the time of survival. Environmental, equality issues and it’s very interesting that right wind parties re-appropriated the left agendas.

In her practice, develops workshops and focuses on the participation of people that lived in the specific sites. In her research looks more in rural populations and conditions that was down upon modernistic time. As she mentioned "…Now the rural communities have bright ideas for survival and solutions for the future also… …Community in crisis is forced to go on and we can see not only in their cases survival solutions but the creation of a new citizenship built up from the down..."

1n 2007, she went in New Orleans, after Katrina without want to criticize the government, as most of the artists did, but to define how the society re-invented itself.

She created the Shotgun House with Rainwater-Harvesting Tank points to two recent trends in New Orleans: the revival of the local architectural style known as the Shotgun House, and the move toward self-sustainability. Both are post-Katrina developments and correspond with the deconstruction of modernist architecture and the search for a new, 21st-century social contract for democracy. Local harvesting of energy resources indicates the appearance of new environmental and, subsequently, new political boundaries.

Marjetica Potrc presented also The dry toilet a collaborative project with Liyat Esakov that was the result of a six-month stay in Caracas in 2003. During that period they researched the informal city under the auspice of the Caracas Case Project. A dry, ecologically safe toilet was built on the upper part of La Vega barrio, a district in the city without access to the municipal water grid. The aim of the project was to rethink the relationship between infrastructure and architecture in real-life urban practice in a city where about half of the population receives water from municipal authorities no more than two days a week.

A place "where there’s virtually no market"...

2009-02-02T17:05:00.010-05:00

I don't think the young mayor is half as "charmed by Braddock’s decaying beauty" as the NY Times editors are... It's an interesting follow-up to the Matteo Pasquinelli article posted below. The reporting of Braddock indexes the rise of the "punk aesthetic" stock. The article might as well have been filed under Arts or Travel.

Beyond the ruins of the creative city

2009-01-21T09:22:00.004-05:00

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at the end of something — of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us in the ruins of the cities… Urban ruins were the emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live... A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture.
Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to
life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flower. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Read the full article here

Krimp / Shrinkage

2009-01-14T15:00:00.002-05:00

Actualiteitencollege Academie van Bouwkunst Rotterdam
donderdag 14 januari 2009
19u30-22u00

Dankzij een stroom van reportages, artikelen en documentaires over het met sloop bedreigde Oost-Groningse dorp Ganzendijk weet sinds kort heel Nederland dat er - na een eeuw van vrijwel constante groei - ook iets bestaat als krimp in de ruimtelijke ordening.
Hoewel bevolkingsaantallen in sommige steden (waaronder Rotterdam) al eerder onder zijn komen te staan druk staan heeft dit nooit een grote ruimtelijke impact gehad. De individuele ruimtebehoefte van de niet-vertrekkende bewoners groeide immers, onder andere doordat minder mensen in meer en grotere woningen gingen wonen, en ook vestigden vertrekkers zich vaak in de directe nabijheid van de leeglopende steden waardoor het voorzieningenniveau intact bleef. Vanwege deze - afgezien van een sterk toegenomen mobiliteit - beperkte gevolgen is krimp tot voor kort dan ook nauwelijks onderwerp van onderzoek geweest. Dat lijkt nu langzaam te veranderen.

Waar andere landen vooral in verouderde industriesteden vaak al decennia worstelen met de gevolgen van bevolkingskrimp maakt Nederland voor het eerst op zeer beperkte schaal kennis met dit verschijnsel, met name in een aantal perifere regio’s met hoofszakelijk kleine of middelgrote steden. Veelal wordt krimp als bedreigend ervaren voor het voorzieningenniveau en de leefbaarheid van de omgeving. Krimp kan echter ook gezien als kans om tot nieuwe benaderingen van en oplossingen voor ruimtelijke vraagstukken te komen. Op deze avond wordt vanuit drie hoeken geprobeerd het verschijnsel in perspectief te plaatsen.

Emiel Arends (dS+V) licht zijn afstudeeronderzoek naar Parkstad Limburg toe, waarin hij een ruimtelijke strategie heeft ontwikkeld die reageert op de gevolgen van de bevolkingsterugloop in dit gebied.

Marcel Musch (BVR) gaat in de resultaten van zijn studie naar Kerkrade-West. De studie maakt deel uit van het eerste ontwerplab Krimp, waarin twee teams van architecten en stedenbouwkundigen zich in het voorjaar van 2008 bogen over de ontwerpopgave in Parkstad Limburg als gevolg van de krimpende bevolking. De ontwerplabs zijn een initiatief van de BNA en de studiestichtingen Stagg, Staro en Stawon en werden georganiseerd in samenwerking met Aedes en KEI. Het tweede ontwerplab, over Zeeland, vond dit najaar plaats en op dit moment wordt de laatste hand gelegd aan twee deelstudies over krimp in Friesland.

Een strategie voor de omgang met een veel extremere vorm van krimp wordt toegelicht door Christian Ernsten van ‘denk en doe-tank’ Partizan Publik. In het project Detroit UnReal Estate Agency verzamelt het collectief informatie over de 'unreal estate' van Detroit, ofwel opmerkelijke, uitgesproken, karakteristieke of andere interessante verschijningsvormen van stedelijke cultuur. Unreal Estate richt zich daarbij op nieuwe vormen van stedelijke praktijken in de meest brede zin. Dit kunnen architectonische of artistieke activiteiten zijn, maar ook institutionele projecten of activiteiten rechtstreeks gerelateerd aan het dagelijks leven in de stad. Doel van Unreal Estate is om te komen tot het ontstaan van een nieuwe ‘alledaagsheid’ en de ontwikkeling een nieuw waardensysteem voor Detroit.

Moderator van de avond is Jeroen de Willigen, stedenbouwkundige/directeur De Zwarte Hond en coördinator stedenbouw aan de Rotterdamse Academie. Hij is lid van de BNA-stuurgroep Bouwen aan Krimp en ontwierp voor De Zwarte Hond o.a. de Blauwe Stad, net als Ganzedijk gelegen in het Groningse krimpgebied Oldambt.

Programma
19u30 Inloop
19u45 Welkom door Jeroen de Willigen
19u50 Parkstad Limburg door Emiel Arends
20u20 Kerkrade-West door Marcel Musch
20u50 Detroit Unreal Estate door Christian Ernsten
21u20 Discussie
22u00 Einde

'Tools for Actions'

2009-01-14T10:14:00.004-05:00

Another interesting event I ran into is the exhibition 'Tools for Actions' at the CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE (CCA). Check it out:
http://cca-actions.org/

CCA
1920, rue Baile
Montreal, Québec, Canada

C_M_L

2009-01-14T09:58:00.006-05:00

To all,

I just received the following message in my inbox. I think this is a
handy site for us to check out once in a while.
And, at one point I think we should submit our project, as well.

Dear Friends,

This is the first in a series of newsletters that serve as platforms for artists, curators, and others to present and exchange projects and materials pertaining to art that engages with social situations beyond the context of the gallery space. You will receive a quarterly e-mailed newsletter that includes recent projects submitted to our online archive along with a guest-curated article. The web site will contain an ongoing accumulation of these projects and articles, which will provide a direct line of access and egress to the field of current critical cultural practices.

Sincerely,
The editors of C_M_L
http://c-m-l.org/

Anthony Graves
Carla Herrera-Prats
Lasse Lau
Robert Ochshorn

Preparing an Intervention Strategy

2009-01-12T04:22:00.004-05:00

Tuesday 13 January 2009, 10:30–18:30

3rd Dutch Art Institute workshop of the Detroit UnReal Estate Agency taught by Partizan Publik.

Title:
PREPARING AN INTERVENTION STRATEGY
The preparation of an intervention strategy is a work in progress – process with the clients or aimed at clients, on the site and with the officials. The participants will have to develop a wide overview of the do’s and don’ts, the wishes and demands and, importantly, a ‘nose’ for the right intervention in the complex society of Detroit.

We think, though, that the definition of economic value, even if according to alternative value systems, reproduces the logic of the real estate market—precisely the logic we are trying to subvert. Instead of proposing alternative values, then, what if we hijack the notion of value entirely? What if we attempt to undermine the accumulation of value (ie, the logic of real estate) completely? What if those features of real estate that are currently understood to diminish or eliminate value (inefficiency, redundancy, waste, danger, disfunctionality) are precisely those that we value? In so doing, we think, we could radically shift the perception of Detroit’s value: what is “destroying” the city would be rendered as projective or potential and, reciprocally, what is thought to “reconstruct” the city (optimization, functionality, efficiency) would be rendered as destructive?

With a lecture by artist Marjectica Potrc.

DUEA is acuratorial project is a collaboration between Partizan Publik, architect Andrew Herscher, curator Femke Lutgerink and architect Mireille Roddier.

AFTER ZERO ~ OUT NOW!

2009-01-05T18:12:00.005-05:00

Arjen Oosterman (ed.), VOLUME 18 'After Zero'

Originally a wacko, hippy-esque ideology, ‘sustainability’ - aka ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘green’ - has now become globally accepted. But as what - an environmental urgency, a political issue, a technical problem, a historic destiny, a new world order? And what are the consequences of this acceptance?

The sustainability consensus is dangerous since the concept has no political content and can be used for any cause. Carbon neutrality and zero emissions are like magic formulas, cover-ups for complicated ethical questions about the inequalities in our societies.Yet striving for zeros or hiding in neutrality does not lead to a better life in a more desirable house in a superior city for everyone.

After Zero is not about design inspired by the fear of tsunamis or Katrinas. Volume proposes an understanding of our society beyond zero. To kick off we discuss two perspectives: sustainability in a post-capitalist city and the potential of urban agriculture.

With contributions related to Detroit by, amongst others, Andrew Herscher, Mireille Roddier, Joost Janmaat, Scott Hocking, Marjectic Portc, Corine Smith and many others, as well as, a special section on the Post Capitalist City.

Delirious Recession

2008-12-23T18:49:00.007-05:00

Andrew Herscher

A recent editorial by Nicolai Ourousoff, architecture critic of the New York Times, provides a very instructive glimpse into contemporary architectural politics.

According to Ourousoff's editorial, "It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out," the profession of architecture was recently in the midst of a "major renaissance"--"one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history." This "renaissance"/"delirium" (does one always have to be the other?) came about, according to Ourousoff, because architects "once deemed too radical for the mainstream" were finally able to enter that mainstream: Koolhaas, Gehry, Hadid, et al were "courted by developers" and "celebrated as major cultural figures," and their innovations were seized upon as potential elements of "shrewd business strategies," able to "win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects."

You could immediately inquire into the nature of this "renaissance" and ask, for example, what it was, exactly, that was being reborn here: ambition? avarice? a naked will to power? or the profession of architecture itself? And, still further, you could investigate whether a renaissance of architecture that serves to sponsor such things as what Ourousoff delicately terms "large-scale urban projects" is a renaissance worth having at all.

But such questions are no longer germane because, Ourousoff writes, the recession has withdrawn the capital that fueled the renaissance. This withdrawal, however, is a mixed blessing; while it has put a stop, for now, to architecture's willingness to "service the rich," at the same time, "a lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad": some "spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline" and "promising cultural projects" which are now, unfortunately, on hold.

What's striking about Ourousoff's narrative is how architecture is portrayed as a mere pawn to economic forces it can only attempt to exploit or survive. Architecture either gorges on capital, as in the recent renaissance, or it starves on capital's absence, as in the current recession. What's precluded, by definition, in Ourousoff's narrative is how crises in capitalism are not only problems for architecture but also opportunities, facilitating new sites of work, new forms of intervention, and new concepts of practice--how, in short, recessions contain their own delirious possibilities.

"It was fun till the money ran out," Ourouroff's headline announced. What he doesn't know how to announce, or even hope for, is how to "have fun" after the money runs out" how less can be more, even--or especially--when the matter at hand is capital.