Read an Excerpt
The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit
By Andrew Herscher The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 Andrew Herscher
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-03521-2
CHAPTER 1
Unprofessional Practices
Ruin Harvest
Food Infill
Municipal Therapy
Furtive Inhabitation
The city of unreal estate is, in part, a city of ruins. These ruins are usually regarded as distressing eyesores or entrancing spectacles; they can also be posed, however, simply as material, able to accommodate new uses. These accommodations are various; the ruin can fabricate something that will amaze, delight or disturb; something that contributes to or detracts from the common good; something that provides respite from other ruins or renders the city's ruination even more intense.
Some ruin harvests are clandestine, their results appearing suddenly and mysteriously: abandoned houses inexplicably painted, one after another, under cover of night. And other ruin harvests are public entertainments: a group of people coming together to watch films projected on the whitewashed walls of an empty house. Abandoned by inhabitants, the ruin is nonetheless occupied by distinct, if enigmatic architectural potentials. Why abandon a building that itself has been abandoned? Why not seize upon just such a building to do something that cannot be done elsewhere and otherwise?
Ruin Harvest
Detroit Demolition Disneyland
In the winter of 2005, Detroit's municipal government prepared to host the Super Bowl by ramping up its demolition of abandoned houses and thereby "beautify" the city. At the same time, a series of abandoned houses in Detroit were painted bright orange. In a communiqué sent to the online site, The Detroiter, a group of artists claimed authorship of the project, which the group termed "Detroit Demolition Disneyland." Describing its project, the group wrote that it simply endeavored to appropriate houses "whose most striking feature are their derelict appearance" and foreground them by painting them Tiggerific Orange, "a color from the Mickey Mouse series, easily purchased from Home Depot."
In its communiqué, the group claimed that, through painting houses, it invited Detroit's citizens to "look not only at these houses, but all the buildings rooted in decay and corrosion." This scrutiny, claimed the group, brought "awareness." The precise object of this awareness, however, was left undefined. Abandoned houses themselves? The city's attempt to repress awareness of that abandonment by destroying its most conspicuous examples? The agency of art to critique that repression? Or the limits of art, able to rhetorically critique an urban disaster without proposing alternatives to it? Indeed, while invoking "action," the only action that the group explicitly attempted to incite in its audience was mimetic: "Take action. Pick up a roller. Pick up a brush. Apply orange." It is just this sort of action, however, that casts the Detroit Demolition Disneyland as an occupation of unreal estate — an occupation that registers a site's deviation from a norm without destroying that very deviation in the process.
FireBreak
The tens of thousands of vacant and abandoned homes in Detroit have frequently been targets of arson. Sometimes this arson provides a means for property owners to collect insurance on homes they are unable to sell; sometimes it is a means for neighborhood residents to eradicate activities that they deem threatening or damaging to their community; and sometimes it is a form of recreation that is of particular salience in a city where dedicated recreation facilities are scarce or inaccessible.
FireBreak appropriated a series of burned-out, single-family houses throughout Detroit as sites of architectural celebration, performance and provocation. Instigated by Dan Pitera, director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center at the University of Detroit's School of Architecture, FireBreak transformed burned houses from unusable private property to proto-public space — properties that temporarily sustained public occupations and uses. Some of the FireBreak interventions exploited formal properties of burned houses; in HouseBreath, for example, a house was draped in sheer orange strips of fabric so that gaps in the façade would be accentuated by gusts of breeze and wind. Others exploited the status of abandoned houses as large-scale templates for formal transformations; the Hay House was created by attaching 3000 rolls of hay to the house's facades. Still other projects re-fashioned abandoned houses as venues for performances or events. The entire exterior surface of the MovieHouse was painted white and films were projected nightly on one of its facades during the course of one summer, while the SoundHouse sheltered a performance by a group of musicians, allowing the sound of the performance to filter out to the neighborhood while visually screening them from the exterior.
In the FireBreak projects, post-arson conditions became objects of investigation, speculation and even pleasure, rather than simply sites of absence or lack. In Pitera's words, "the 'gap,' the vacancy, the abandonment ... has become the space of social, cultural, and environmental actions, interactions, and reactions. What is seen as void of culture is actually culturally rich."
Salvaged Landscape
In Detroit, the city typically clears away the remains of burned homes. In so doing, the city's history of arson becomes visible only through the architectural absences it yields. In "Salvaged Landscape," architect Catie Newell apprehended the remains of one burned house as a resource for new construction; adjacent to the abandoned but iconic Michigan Central Station, this house became both a palette of materials with specific formal qualities and a scaffold upon which a selection of those materials could be assembled, displayed and inspected.
The resulting installation formed a passage into the burned house as well as a construction that emphasized the contrast between the charred surfaces and pristine interiors of the wood from which it was fabricated. While the site and residue of arson are usually regarded as dangerous and unappealing, "Salvaged Landscape" posited this site and residue as raw material for the production of new aesthetic and spatial experiences. The project thereby eschewed "solutions" to arson in favor of attempts to claim, inhabit and exploit arson's material and spatial remainders — a devotion to working with unvalued places and materials that is characteristic of unreal estate development.
"Salvaged Landscape" was also designed to be a piece that could be removed from the burned house it was made from and displayed elsewhere. The facilitation of this displacement registered two conditions. One condition is the city's almost inevitable destruction of burned houses, even when architecturally reconfigured — its inability to recognize unreal estate's unvalues. Another condition, however, is the possibility for these unvalues to become valuable in other contexts — the ever-present capacity for unvalues to be transformed into values. "Salvaged Landscape" is thus symptomatic of unreal estate's precarious existence between actual misrecognition and possible commodification.
There are many hungers in the city of unreal estate: for memory without anger, for futures worth wanting, for a politics offering authentic alternatives. There is also, still, a hunger for food. The residents of the food desert in Detroit are among the hungry. Providing for themselves in omnipresent liquor stores and corner markets, they make do in ways that, outside the desert, defy easy comprehension. But some take on the ambition to cultivate the desert, converting empty lots into gardens or farms, while others circulate produce on vans, pick-ups or converted ice cream trucks that wend their way through neighborhoods where fresh fruit and vegetables are otherwise scarce.
A cascade of activities often accompanies these food infills. Growing food, an act of self-determination, invokes other such acts, from the personal to the collective. The products of food infill are thus consumed in meals that tempt other occasions, from think-tanking and partying to political organizing and community building. Food consumers are thereby offered any number of other identities: gardeners, farmers, food activists, community advocates, locovores, gourmands or hybrids of any of the preceding.
Food Infill
Earthworks Urban Farm
The Earthworks Urban Farm is one of the largest urban agriculture initiatives in Detroit. It emerged from an intersection of two conditions: first, the desire of Capuchin friars and associated volunteers to feed and otherwise assist needy residents in Detroit's impoverished Eastside, and second, the availability of large plots of vacant urban land on the Eastside for non-profit community service activities.
Earthworks was initiated in 1997 as a garden located adjacent to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. This soup kitchen not only served healthy meals, but also distributed food, clothes and furniture to needy families, provided showers and a change of clothes to homeless people, and offered substance abuse treatment programs, a children's art therapy studio and a children's library.
Originally cultivating produce for the soup kitchen, Earthworks expanded a few years later to a .75 acre site several blocks away, behind the Gleaners Community Food Bank, and began to distribute its yield at weekly markets hosted at Eastside health clinics. In subsequent years, Earthworks also began process produce into such products as canned tomatoes, pickled beets and jams, as well as honey and beeswax hand balm made from bee hives situated on the roof of the food bank. In addition, it added a greenhouse where seedlings are grown for use both by Earthworks and for gardens of local families, communities, and schools that participate in the Garden Resource Program Collaborative. In 2008, Earthworks began to host monthly community potlucks where food justice issues are advanced and discussion groups with patrons of the soup kitchen are held.
Just like the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, with its diverse assemblage of service programs, Earthworks assembles a diverse array of agricultural programs into a single urban institution. The complexity of this assemblage, indexing perceived social needs, exploits openings in both space (a vacant lot becoming a farm, a roof becoming an aviary) and in time (dinners becoming activist discussion groups and community-building occasions). The filling of these openings creates, in turn, opportunity to facilitate new models of food consumption, community and urban environment.
D-Town Farm
The D-Town Farm is an urban farm in the Rouge Park neighborhood operated by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. The Network was started as a response to a number of food-related issues in Detroit's predominantly African-American population: the lack of grocery stores in many neighborhoods in Detroit; the replacement of home-cooked meals by fast food in many African-American families; and the dependence of those families, and the communities they are part of, on distant others for their sustenance.
The D-Town Farm was developed by the Network as part of a larger project to provide food security, which the Network defines as "easy access to adequate amounts of affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate food." The farm sits on a two-acre site on the City of Detroit's Meyer Tree Nursery, which the city agreed to let the Network use for ten years. The farm includes organic vegetable plots, two beehives, a hoop house for year-round food production, and a composting operation. Produce from the farm is sold at the farm itself, at Eastern Market, and at farmers' markets throughout Detroit; it is also distributed through the Ujamaa Cooperative Food Buying Club, which the Network also operates. The farm's activities are presented publically in a number of formats, including an annual Harvest Festival and the Food Warriors Youth Development Program, in which elementary school students at three African-centered schools (Aisha Shule, Nsoromma Institute and Timbuktu Academy) are introduced to urban agriculture.
Through the D-Town Farm and allied programs, solutions to food insecurity have intersected with a range of other issues and sponsored a range of other effects; the farm is a site of community-building, collective-identity formation and political action, as well as agricultural production. The Network's response to food insecurity has thus cascaded into responses to other problems, not all of which are food-related, facing Detroit's African-American population.
Georgia Street Community Garden
The Georgia Street Community Garden was started by Mark Covington, who grew up in the Eastside neighborhood around the garden's site. Covington began to spend more time in the neighborhood after he was laid off from his job in 2008. His effort to clear garbage from three city-owned vacant lots next to his grandmother's house soon evolved into a project to cultivate those lots as a community garden for the neighborhood, where many families face food insecurity. The garden, mainly planted in vegetables, is tended by both neighborhood children and a network of volunteers drawn from across Detroit and its suburbs; the garden serves as a nexus for the formation of new social networks as well as a new means of food security.
Taking advantage of unreal estate's openness to occupation and redefinition, the Georgia Street Community Garden is also a platform for a variety of neighborhood-based events, actions and initiatives. The garden has thus become a venue for collective children's book readings, family film nights, and public barbeques. It has also become part of a broader project of neighborhood revitalization; the Georgia Street Community Garden Association has acquired abandoned buildings adjacent to the garden from the City of Detroit and plans to convert them into a corner market and community center.
Brightmoor Farmway
Brightmoor is a neighborhood in Northwest Detroit with large numbers of abandoned buildings and vacant lots. The neighborhood's growth was spurred in the beginning of the 20th century by the nearby development of auto industry facilities; its decline was reciprocally spurred by the post-war suburbanization of those same facilities. As the neighborhood's working-class residents left to find employment elsewhere, their houses were sold to landlords. In weak-market conditions, these houses were cheaply rented, leading to further downturns in property values. In combination with a national economic slowdown, a local epidemic of crack cocaine use, and an upsurge of gang violence, Brightmoor's decline became precipitous in the 1980s.
Around one quarter of all property in Brightmoor is currently vacant. In recent years, some neighborhood residents have come to perceive this vacancy as offering a precious opportunity to self-organize the development of their community. This perception led to the founding of a series of gardens and pocket parks on vacant lots. In the summer of 2009, a consortium of community organizations then began to plan the linkage of these gardens and parks by a neighborhood-scale "farmway." As this farmway developed, it has come to include not only a path connecting around 20 existing gardens, but also new pocket parks, new community gardens, a wildflower garden, an orchard and a market garden for neighborhood youth. The farmway both joins these self-organized projects to one another and also joins them to Eliza Howell Park, an existing public green space in the neighborhood. In so doing, the farmway has created a neighborhood infrastructure that connects agricultural and cultural spaces, planned and informal initiatives, and sites of food production and food consumption, all taking place on readily available unreal estate.
Peaches and Greens
In response to the food insecurity that many low-income residents of central Detroit experience, the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation initiated Peaches and Greens to make fresh produce available to residents of the central Woodward neighborhood. Enhancing the neighborhood's access to nutritious food, the project has also facilitated the development of new kinds of political agency and the emergence of new cultural practices.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit by Andrew Herscher. Copyright © 2012 Andrew Herscher. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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