The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

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.