The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency: A Preface
The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency was founded in 2008 as an open-access platform for research on urban crisis, using Detroit as a focal point. Against the apprehension of Detroit as a problem that needs to be solved, the Agency has regarded Detroit as a site where new ways of imagining, inhabiting and constructing the contemporary city are being invented, tested and advanced.
In its research, the Agency has produced an array of concepts to describe and analyze Detroit; tendentiously recovered a series of accidents, false starts and prematurely abandoned projects; and sublimated urgent expressions of longing. This work has been unified by an interest in animating valueless or abandoned urban property by new cultural, political and social desires. Sometimes this interest has yielded experiments such as the nighttime illumination of vacant lots by hijacked electricity; sometimes it has yielded the collaborative mapping of territorial incongruities with licit and illicit community groups; sometimes it has yielded the production and distribution of manifestos, atlases, postcards and other urban texts; and sometimes it has yielded the recruitment of art and architecture students for unreal estate agency via the teaching of studios in institutions of higher learning.
The Agency's program of feral research is an outcome of its engagement with unreal estate; the Agency thereby exists as one of this guide's subjects. At the same time, however, my own unreal estate agency emerged amid the Agency's collective work. The Agency, then, is both within and beyond this guide, at once a context for the guide and a text included in it.
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