- Feral Research
- Chapter
- University of Michigan Press
- pp. 107-116
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Feral Research
Detroit Geographical Expedition
In 1968, radical Detroit geographer William Bunge founded the Detroit Geographical Expedition. The Expedition was a platform to produce a new sort of spatial knowledge—neither disciplinary nor professional knowledge, but knowledge that could serve as a resource for Detroit and, most especially, for the city's disenfranchised African-American population. For two years, Bunge and his students at Wayne State University collaborated with Detroit activists and residents to expose the spatial effects of racism, disinvestment and impoverishment in the city. Then, in still-mysterious circumstances, Bunge either resigned or was fired from his position in Wayne State's Department of Geography in 1970 and the Expedition disbanded.
The four reports of the Expedition were never published, but copies of these reports were archived in the Map Collection of the University of Michigan Graduate Library in Ann Arbor. In 2009, a group of Michigan architecture students found these reports in the course of conducting research on Detroit. Inspired by the Expedition's ambitions, the students re-founded the Expedition and attempted to continue Bunge's effort to produce “maps that could change the map of the world.”
Based on the family connections of one of its members, the Expedition initiated a collaboration with residents of an Eastside neighborhood and began a project to map that neighborhood's spaces of insecurity. Over the next 18 months, the project developed into a complex atlas documenting a series of spatial conditions, events and practices in and around the neighborhood. Following the precepts of the original Expedition, this documentation was founded on the urban knowledge and experience of the city's marginalized communities, groups and individuals.
As the Expedition's atlas was being prepared for publication, a crack house whose location was documented in the publication was burned, probably by neighborhood residents. Members of the Expedition split over their interpretation of this burning; most thought it represented an unwelcome extension of their research while a few thought it was one of the most profound ways that this research could be put into practice. This split subverted the atlas project but also led to the Expedition taking new form as a laboratory for urban advocacy.
Pink Pony Express
The; Pink Pony Express is a research collaborative investigating small-scale urban initiatives in Detroit. The basic strategy of the Ponies is research through making, with every exploration taking material form. These forms occupy or are brought back to the places under study, so that the practice of the Ponies includes a kind of “giving back” to the communities they live and work in. What the Ponies return, however, may not be immediately recognizable to the members of those communities; their work gives back what was never possessed in the first place, with research thus becoming an occasion for generous and eccentric exchange.
In one typical project, the Ponies mapped the itinerary of the Peaches and Greens produce truck as it sold fresh fruit and vegetables to liquor stores and on street corners in Highland Park. Rather than producing a literal map, however, the Ponies made a still-life tableau of all the fruit and vegetables sold in one day, photographed the tableau on Belle Isle, made pies and tarts with the assembled produce, and then gave those baked goods away at the Peaches and Greens market. The Ponies also have experimented with cooking on manhole covers heated by steam from Detroit's controversial municipal incinerator; broadcasting messages of urban possibility on Christian ministry radio shows, Sunday church services and church message boards; and physically mapping social networks on a block of Farnsworth Street. By returning, in various ways, the results of these experiments to members of the relevant communities, the Pink Pony Express enters the world of unreal estate instead of merely producing commentary on that world from a position of presumed distance.
The city in crisis is a city of loss, but also a city of gain: in ruined buildings, in the flora and fauna of abandoned landscapes, in the detritus that gathers where homes and neighborhoods are forsaken. What's left behind and left unattended are waste products, but only in a conventional sense; they are also perverse treasures, available to eccentric forms of care.
Waste curation seizes on the products of post-industrial decay. These products can be curated by endowing them with new forms—the “ghetto palm” that colonizes ground around abandoned buildings offers wood for the crafting of furniture, the berry bushes that grow on vacant lots offer fruit for scavenging and jamming. Curation can also involve the circulation of detritus from one site, where it is useless, to another site, where it assumes new functions—the doors, windows and ornaments of abandoned buildings taken to buildings under construction or reconstruction. These techniques are drastically sustainable—waste curation is a technique for sustainability in drastic circumstances.