When art and space meet: An ethnographic approach to artistic practices and urban space in Detroit 3515133577, 9783515133579

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grounds diverse and manifold relations of artistic practices and urban space in Detroit and unveils the dynamics and conflicts as well as multiple meanings and histories of (artistic) spaces in Detroit that often run counter to dominant representations of space. Nora Küttel also shows how those practices produce spaces that are shaped by heterogeneity and participation. The research contributes to geography’s engagement with art by offering a critical perspective on the intersection of artistic practices and space with regard to issues of power and representation over and within urban space.

ISBN 978-3-515-13357-9

www.steiner-verlag.de

When art and space meet An ethnographic approach to artistic practices and urban space in Detroit

23

Franz Steiner Verlag

Sozialgeographische Bibliothek Band 23 Franz Steiner Verlag

Küttel

9 783515 133579

Nora Küttel

When art and space meet

Based on the premise that art as well as space are part and product of social, political, and economic relations, the book analyzes the dialectic relationship of artistic practices and urban space in Detroit. The city of Detroit, with its massive population loss, abundance of vacant lots and buildings, and continuing racialization and marketization of space, provides a unique, although not exceptional setting for this research. Through a set of ethnographic methods, Nora Küttel identifies five artistic practices that each refers to a specific aspect of space and its production, such as materiality or publicness. She fore-

Sozialgeographische Bibliothek Herausgegeben von Benno Werlen Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Ulrich Ermann / Matthew Hannah / Roland Lippuner / Annika Mattissek / Jeannine Wintzer Band 23

Nora Küttel

WHEN ART AND SPACE MEET An ethnographic approach to artistic practices and urban space in Detroit

Franz Steiner Verlag

Umschlagabbildung: Ausschnitt des MBAD African Bead Museum, Mai 2017, Foto: Nora Küttel Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2022 D6 Druck: Beltz Grafische Betriebe, Bad Langensalza Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-13357-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-515-13360-9 (E-Book)

Contents

Contents

5

List of abbreviations and proper names

7

1

9

Introduction 1.1 1.2

2

Art, society, and space 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

3

Production of art – production of space Structure

Relational art Socially engaged art Art and/ in/ as public space Culture-led urban regeneration

Space and place 3.1 3.2

The city, the urban, and space A global sense of place

12 14

17 18 22 25 29

34 34 49

4

Interim conclusion

54

5

How to keep grip of the general and the local

58

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

6

Ethnographic research The field? The situatedness of (my) knowledge Moving, observing, asking, and listening Analyzing, evaluating, and reflecting

The city of Detroit 6.1

Detroit’s historical context

58 60 64 72 81

85 86

6

Contents

6.2 6.3 6.4

7

Artistic practices 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

8

Seeking, finding, and recycling material Working site-specific Making and/ or displaying art outside Focusing on community Documenting and creating stories about Detroit

Producing art – producing space 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

9

Recent developments in Detroit Art and/ in Detroit Portraits of artists and interviewees

100 106 113

131 131 143 152 154 161

165

Representations of space Materiality Site Public Social Story

166 170 181 186 188 192

Space, artistic practice, and Detroit

196

10 Conclusion, or: space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far 200 10.1 10.2

Reflection Outlook

203 205

Bibliography

209

List of figures

229

List of obtained data and visited events

231

List of abbreviations and proper names

Abbreviation/ Term e.g. n. d. n. p. p. pp. para.

Full Name/ Definition for example no date no page page pages paragraph

BIPoC CCS DIY DSLR FHA GM HOLC HP IN MI MOCAD NEA RenCen PDD US

Black, Indigenous and People of Color College for Creative Studies Do It Yourself digital single-lens reflex (a type of digital camera) Federal Housing Administration General Motors Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Heidelberg Project Indiana (US state) Michigan (US state) Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit National Endowment for the Arts Renaissance Center Planning and Development Department, City of Detroit United States, abbreviation for the United States of America

[…] [word] [l] []

ellipse in a quotation word is added to a quotation for clarification letter is changed from upper case to lower case at the beginning of a word letter is left out at the end of a word

City of Detroit city of Detroit

referring to governmental body, proper noun referring to area within city limits, common noun

8

List of abbreviations and proper names

downtown Downtown Detroit Greater Downtown Midtown

referring to area/ location, common noun referring to official name of the neighborhood, proper noun referring to official name of the area, proper noun referring to official name of the neighborhood, proper noun

1

Introduction

From Ottowa, the Huron and the Potowatamie Then French and Europeans, enslaved Blacks came to be free an immigration influx, then a torrent from the South The People Of Detroit, ‘tis true they come from many routes To old Black Bottom’s death, and then the birth of Lafayette Park Old strip farms, townships, properties, transitions we’ve embarked Horses, autos; racetracks, roads; now Slow Roll rules the lanes The time has come, it has begun, Detroit sees change, again Newcomers here will walk with us into the coming years, Join those of us who’ve still held on, see how we’ve persevered We faced upheavals through the years, that caused Detroiters many tears So now, again we rearrange - the lifeblood of this town is Change (Music, 2015, para. 4)

One might assume that Detroit’s major export goods are cars or musicians; after all, isn’t it the Motor City? The Motor Town, home to Motown? But this is not the case – at least not solely. What the city of Detroit, located in Southeast Michigan bordering Canada, is known for, in the US and beyond, are its associated narratives1, images, and imaginings. At the beginning of the 20th century, these images highlighted the city’s strength and aesthetics, such as ‘The Paris of the West’ (Martelle, 2014, p. 58), ‘the greatest working-class city’ (Binelli, 2012, p. 8), or ‘the Arsenal of Democracy’ (Binelli, 2012, p. 8). What was once thought to be the epitome of the American Dream, however, later became known as ‘a death trap’ or ‘a ghost town’ (Draus & Roddy, 2016, p. 67), a city of crime, poverty, and loss with depopulated and dystopian landscapes depictured in movies such as RoboCop (Verhoeven, 1987) or Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch, 2013). Narratives about a dying or dead Detroit (Eisinger, 2013; LeDuff, 2014; Okrent, 2009;

1

When I use the term ‘narrative’, unless noted otherwise, I refer to publicly told “[…] stories that string together events to construct meaning and establish discourse […]” (Mohatt et al., 2014, p. 6). They “[…] are indicative of intersubjective understanding […] and are common among a group of people […]. Public narratives, thus, are the stories that shape collective memory through reliance on narrative elements such as characters, actions, places, and time […]” (Mohatt et al., 2014, p. 6).

10

Introduction

Sands, 2015; Tabb, 2015) became as common as the label ‘third world city’ (Draus et al., 2010, p. 664; Herron, 2007, p. 674), claiming Detroit to need foreign aid (Ewert, 2015). And as if this wasn’t enough for one city’s (identity) crisis, imaginings of rebirth, revitalization, regeneration, and resurgence of the city (Arnaud, 2017; Bachelor, 1998; Briller & Sankar, 2013; McCarthy, 1997, 2002; Trendafilova et al., 2012) appeared alongside those of the city as a blank slate, urban prairie or postindustrial frontier (Kinney, 2016, pp. 45f., 2018, p. 782; Kurashige, 2017, p. 94) from at least the late 1990s onwards. Detroit has been rendered so exceptional and ‘other’ (Hackworth, 2019, p. 114) that it almost appears to be a symbol rather than a city. Many of these depictions are highly problematic: They deny the presence as well as agency of Detroit’s 670,052 (United States Census Bureau, 2018a) present-day residents, they reproduce settler tales and colonial wordings, they are biased, shortened, and often attributed from the outside rather than from within the city. They often blame (former) residents for things they are not responsible for, and they lack depth and expertise. While “[…] these narratives and images get in the way of understanding what is actually going on in the life of the city” (Draus & Roddy, 2016, p. 68), they are, after all, not made up out of thin air. The city of Detroit lost almost two-thirds of its residents between 1950 and 2018, the largest proportion of them being White2 (Sugrue, 1996, p. 23; United States Census Bureau, 2018a). Vacancy is currently rated to be between 20 and 30% for residential addresses3 (Drawing Detroit, 2019) and vacant lots and buildings are not limited to certain neighborhoods but are spread out over the whole city (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 154). Additionally, poverty rates, especially for children, are disproportionally high – 43% of children under 18 live below the poverty line in Detroit whereas it is 18.4% in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn Metropolitan Area and 17.6% in the State of Michigan (United States Census Bureau, 2018a). Crime rates have been high for decades and, in 2019, Detroit’s violent crime rate was the highest among cities with more than 100,000 residents with 13,040 violent crimes4, among them 275 murders (Criminal Justice Information Services Division, 2019a; MacDonald & Hunter, 2020). And Detroit and its surrounding suburbs are among the most segregated areas in the US concerning race and class (Reese et al., 2017, pp. 368f.; Vojnovic & Darden, 2013, pp. 88f.). While these numbers might speak for themselves, they are not a result of chance or accident: “It was no storm that carried Detroit away. The disaster here was and is a matter of design. In that sense, Detroit is no

2

3 4

Throughout this study, I use the capitalized terms Black and White when referring to racial groups, acknowledging that both are not natural categories but social and historical constructs (see American Psychological Association, 2019; Appiah, 2020). This, however, only applies when I use the terms in my own words, meaning that I have not changed (capitalized) them in quotes. Additionally, Detroit has always been a rather low-density city with single- or multi-family (duplex) housing (Galster, 2012, p. 60; Hackworth, 2019, p. 29). According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation violent crime “[…] is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault” (Criminal Justice Information Services Division, 2019b, para. 1).

Production of art – production of space

11

exceptional place; on the contrary, it is the most representatively American place on the planet” (Herron, 2007, p. 669). This is not to say that Detroit is not unique – following Doreen Massey (1994, p. 5), every place is unique or specific when ‘place’ is considered as the coming together of particular social relations at a particular locus at a particular moment in time. Rather, the underlying causes of Detroit’s demise are structural. Among them is the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial city, accompanied by an increasingly capitalist and neoliberal urban development shaped by austerity, and the institutional racism that was expressed in discriminatory practices on the housing market such as redlining5 that continue to have an effect to this day. In at least the past two decades, part of the neoliberal script has also been the thesis of culture-led regeneration as well as the creative city, promoted especially by Richard Florida (2004). Post-industrial cities in Europe and North America in particular have adopted strategies where “[…] the arts (within a broader category of the cultural and creative industries) have gained a key role in strategies to deal with urban problems from social exclusion to the rehabilitation of post-industrial sites” (M. Miles, 2005, p. 889). Within this framework, attracting creatives is mostly regarded as a necessary step towards urban regeneration which follows “[…] a development vision that is profoundly market orientated (creative cities, assets, and actors, always in competition) and individualistic (creative subjects as hedonistic free agents)” (Peck, 2007, pp. 1f.). It, therefore, comes as no surprise that around and after Detroit’s bankruptcy case in 2013/ 2014, articles asking if or how art is saving or could be saving the city were published (Ewert, 2015; La Force, 2014; Montenegro, 2014; Tolf, 2014). These articles evoked my curiosity. Not with their actual message, though, but rather with what the subtext told: It seems that there is a relationship between urban space and art, artists, and artistic practices in Detroit, even apart from mere economic interests and top-down development strategies. Artists seem to be attracted to but also inspired by Detroit, and the city, in some form or other, is reflected or processed in artistic practices. These practices, however, have yet not gained much attention within geography and urban studies. Therefore, this empirically based study explores the relations and interactions of urban space and artistic practices in Detroit focusing on visual art practices that are often done without permission, commission, and authorization.

5

Redlining is a practice “[…] by mortgage lending institutions to draw a red line on a map around certain neighborhoods to indicate where loans are not to be made” (Vojnovic & Darden, 2013, p. 92). These neighborhoods were usually those occupied by Black and often poor residents.

12

Introduction

1.1

Production of art – production of space

I draw from a perspective where I assume that art – and hence, the artist and their practice – is connected to society, to space, and place, and thus to the urban in material and immaterial relations. All artistic positions have references to the present and to the social conditions in which the artists live (Scherzinger, 2017, p. 265)6. When thinking of space, I follow Henri Lefebvre’s (1991b) theory on the production of space, regarding space as a social product. This approach, as Schmid (2005, p. 10) suggests, if not only treated as a spatial theory, but as a social theory, brings together cultural, linguistical, political, social, and economic aspects of the production of space. Additionally, the concept of place as conceived by Doreen Massey (1984, 1994) adds to my theoretical perspective. It enables, among others, analysis of the uniqueness as well as conflicts and power struggles of social relations that come together at a particular locus and moment to form what is known as ‘place’. The guiding research question of this study is, therefore: To what extent are artistic practices producing spaces7 in Detroit; and to what extent are spaces producing artistic practices in Detroit? Embedded in this relationship of art and space in Detroit is the assumption that one depends on, reacts to, and produces the other. It is a dialectic relationship which can only be differentiated in theory, while in practice, “[…] space is not a mute, already existing background across which art is produced and consumed, rather the making of art and the making of space are entwined” (Hawkins, 2017, p. xvii). I look at artistic practices to analyze reconfigurations, transformations, and reinterpretations of space and vice versa since spatial practice and artistic practice are regarded here as intertwined (Paglen, 2014, p. 31) and I’m interested in the mutual dependencies and influences of artistic practices and urban space in Detroit. Within this research design, space and the production of space are regarded as synonymous, since space is always active, dynamic, and changing. Thus, the subject of the analysis is not the arrangement of (material) objects and artifacts, but the – practical, mental, and symbolic – relating of these objects (Schmid, 2005, p. 321)8. Through this lens, I explore the manifold relations of spaces and artistic practices in Detroit. This conception of space, however, also implies that this study can only be a snapshot in time and space, since Detroit, like any other place, is always changing and evolving.

6

7

8

Original: “Alle künstlerischen Positionen besitzen Bezugspunkte zur Gegenwart und den gesellschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen, in denen die Künstler leben” (Scherzinger, 2017, p. 265). Because of the close relation of space and place, their distinction is not always clear-cut and places, defined as the particular articulation of social spatial relations are spatially produced, too. Therefore, and for a more fluent reading, the question refers to both, spaces and places, but only reads spaces. Original: “Der Gegenstand der Analyse ist nicht die Anordnung von (materiellen) Objekten und Artefakten, sondern das – praktische, mentale und symbolische – in Beziehung setzen dieser ‘Objekte’” (Schmid, 2005, p. 321).

Production of art – production of space

13

Since Detroit offers a variety of phenomena that could be analyzed under the above-mentioned art-space-relationship, I chose to focus on visual art and artists who, within their artistic practices, engage with Detroit in terms of its material, social, political, and symbolic layers of urban space9. This decision is also based on a shift of perspective such as the one that civil-rights activist Grace Lee Boggs (2012) suggested: Detroit is a city of Hope rather than a City of Despair. The thousands of vacant lots and abandoned houses provide not only the space to begin anew but also the incentive to create innovative ways of making our living – ways that nurture our productive, cooperative, and caring selves. (p. 105)

Boggs highlights possibilities and re/creation in Detroit rather than loss, absence, or desperation. While I refrain here from evaluating as strongly as Boggs does, it is the underlying assumption and framing of space in her quote, which is of importance to the present study. Two main strands of theoretical approaches and research shape this study: On the one hand, they concern space and on the other hand art. I follow conceptions that regard space as socially produced. Societies, including political and economic ideologies, produce their own spaces. At the same time, every individual contributes to the production of space, too, and has the (theoretical) possibility to subvert the common conceptions and productions of space. Lefebvre (1991b, 1996), as well as Massey (1994, 1995a), focus on the dynamics, changeability, and progress of space and place without neglecting the hierarchies and power struggles that are inherent in them. By emphasizing the multiplicities and diversities of space and place, both also offer a (utopian) vision where power relations could be undermined and changed. Social change, then, is spatial change and vice versa (Paglen, 2014, p. 31). Over the decades, an almost endless pluralism of perceptions, adoptions, and interpretations of Lefebvre’s opus has been and continues to be published. Besides his original work, I will address his theories by including the readings of Schmid (2005) and Vogelpohl (2011). Both offer perspectives that bring together the strands of space, society, and city that are particularly relevant for this study. Additionally, the publications of Purcell (2002, 2008, 2014) are consulted for an approach to Lefebvre’s right to the city which focus on the theoretical layers as well as practical execution of the theory. Throughout his work, Purcell (2014) understands the right to the city as “[…] similarly a beginning, an opening, a starting out down the path toward a possible urban world. That possible world is a long way off, and it is also, at the same time, right in front of us” (p. 152).

9

It is of importance to state that this study is by no means painting a complete picture of either the city of Detroit or art and artistic practice in the city of Detroit. This never was my aim in creating this study and never will be my aim in any research I do. What I can try to achieve concerning Detroit as my overall spatial research subject, though, and I hope that hereby I will, is to contribute a puzzle piece to the analysis of artistic practices and phenomena in present-Detroit.

14

Introduction

Regarding art, I follow perspectives that emphasize the relation of society, urban space, and art as powerful and dialectic ties, as already stated above by Hawkins (2017, p. xvii) and Scherzinger (2017, p. 265). Luger (2017b), too, remarks that both, “[a]rt and the city are constantly being made, re-made, operating within and helping to shape the currents of power at various scales […]. Art and the city are, have always been, and will always be, inextricably linked” (p. 231). Further, publications on public art as well as site-specific art, such as those by Cartiere and Zebracki (2016b), Deutsche (1988), Kwon (2002), Lewitzky (2005), and Lossau and Stevens (2015b) are central to the approach of art and/ in/ as public space since they engage with diverse forms of relations between public, art, and space, largely irrespective of culture-led regeneration and creative city narratives. And finally, this study is informed by works such as by Berger (2018) and Rosler (2010, 2011a, 2011b) which focus on artistic practices that actively participate in urban development. While plenty has been written about art and/ in cities in geography and urban studies, the relationship of art and urban space has not received as much attention, especially not from a perspective that is informed by the spatial theories of Lefebvre and Massey. Exceptions are the works that engage with graffiti and street art such as Iveson (2013) and Zieleniec (2016) that look at these practices through the lens of Lefebvre’s right to the city. Like many practices of graffiti and street art, the artistic practices at the center of this study are self-initiated, not commissioned, and sometimes at or across the border of legality, too. This theoretical, as well as empirical gap, is where the present study comes in, aiming at four intertwining objectives: - describing, understanding, and interpreting selected artistic practices in Detroit from a geographical perspective, - applying Lefebvre’s as well as Massey’s spatial theories as perspectives and foils to look through in order to analyze the relationship of artistic practices and space, - contributing to the scholarly work on Detroit that has been going on for decades within and beyond geography and urban studies, - and finally, on a subordinate level, enriching current debates on art, artists, and artistic practices within the discipline of geography by paying attention to the topic of the artistic production of space apart from regeneration strategies or economic foci.

1.2

Structure

The book structures into ten chapters of which chapters 1 (Introduction) and 10 (Conclusion) constitute the framework. Chapters 2 and 3 lay out the theoretical focus and provide the theoretical perspectives necessary for the discussion (chapter 8). The focus of chapter 2 lies on introducing diverse perspectives on art which can be divided into three main themes. First, relational art and socially engaged art are introduced. The central

Structure

15

issue of these concepts is the relationship of art/ artistic practices and their engagement as well as relationship with society. Second, the focus slightly shifts towards space when the relationship of art/ artistic practices and urban public space is explored. At the center are the concepts of art and/ in/ as public space as well as site-specific art. The chapter closes with a discussion of culture-led urban regeneration strategies often associated with and applied in post-industrial cities. These different theoretical discourses not only set the scene but also provide points of reference taken up later. Chapter 3 introduces the two spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, and thus adds the second major theoretical approach for this study. Beginning with Lefebvre and the historical context of his works, I will retrace his steps from engaging with the city, the urban, and then with space, culminating in his concept of the production of space which will be central here. After a brief look at his thoughts on the right to the city, the first part of the chapter closes with discussing the challenges connected to these theoretical approaches. The second part focuses on place as conceptualized by Doreen Massey in her theory of a global sense of place. After laying out how Massey understands and differentiates space and place, I will move to the characteristics of place. Of particular importance for the present study will be the uniqueness, multiplicity, changeability, and dynamism of place as well as the connected issues of power and dominance. Chapter 4, the interim conclusion, bridges the theoretical discussions and the empirical part, bringing together the key points of the theoretical strands and refining them regarding the research question. Chapter 5 engages with the methodical approach. Beginning with an introduction to ethnography, I will proceed with discussing ethnography as a fieldbased practice and engaging with matters of reflexivity, positionality, and the situatedness of knowledge. The second part of the chapter addresses the specific methods that I applied to gather data – ‘moving ethnography’, participant observation, and interviews – and explains why and how I applied them, and finally, how the gathered data were analyzed. The chapter closes with a methodological criticism as well as an outlook concerning methodical and methodological points. Following this, chapter 6 now focuses on Detroit. The emphasis in the first part of this chapter is on Detroit’s history, especially the 20th century, as well as recent developments. This look back into the city’s history is necessary since, first, space and time are regarded as entwined (Massey, 1994, p. 5), second, no place disappears in the course of development (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 86), and third, “[…] social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social space has a history […]” (1991b, p. 110). This part of the chapter closes with a slight change of perspectives where I look at the issues of race and urban change from the perspectives of my interviewees to add this to the city of Detroit’s historic and recent developments. The second part of the chapter focuses on art in Detroit, highlighting current trends and discourses concerning visual arts in Detroit that also provide ground for

16

Introduction

further discussion in the subsequent chapters. The chapter closes with introducing the interviewees and additional artists that are at the center of this study. Chapter 7 now presents the results. It is structured into five artistic practices that I identified in the data as well as in the literature research and the study of other source material: 1) seeking, finding, and recycling material, 2) working sitespecific, 3) making and/ or displaying art outside, 4) focusing on community, and 5) documenting and creating stories about Detroit. While differentiated in this chapter, the practices can overlap or even become indistinct. The term ‘practice’ refers to how artists operate. It includes the actual making of art but also the ideas, thoughts, and concepts connected to it, and therefore could also be described as their modus operandi. To discuss these practices further regarding their spatiality, in chapter 8, I will consider the approaches to art in chapter 2 as well as the theories of space and place outlined in chapter 3. The chapter begins with reconsidering the historical, economic, social, and political circumstances of the city of Detroit discussed in chapter 6 regarding their production of space, especially the representations of space. Then, based on the structure of chapter 7, the practices’ relations to space are at the center. Each of the five practices refers to a specific aspect of space and the production of space. These aspects – while of course not being this clear cut in reality but rather overlapping – are corresponding to the practices mentioned above, and are named as materiality, site, public, social, and story. Chapter 9 completes the discussion by bringing together the empirical strands of practices and spatial aspects and specifies them regarding the research question. The study closes with a conclusion where the individual chapters are brought together for a final review as well as a reflection on its limitations and challenges. This final chapter ends with an outlook on further research that emerged throughout the course of this study. Before this introduction closes, I would like to address that this study is written in the first person. Instead of using a rather objectified ‘the author’ or ‘the researcher’, I most often write as ‘I’. This is grounded in a perspective shaped by feminist geographies that deny an objective way of doing research and call upon positionality and the situatedness of knowledge as well as the responsibilities I have as a researcher. I chose an active, rather than a passive voice to emphasize that this study, too, is written from a perspective that is positioned, situated, and therefore a partial story (Belina, 2013, pp. 10f.; Haraway, 1988, p. 589).

2

Art, society, and space

The relationship of the arts and geography is an established one but also one that is dynamic and diversifying, as Hawkins (2012) states in the introduction to her article Geography and art. An expanding field. Site, the body and practice: “Recent work has reorientated the temporal focus from the historical framing of 18thand 19th-century landscape painting practices towards a body of 20th-century art, encompassing everything from early and mid-century modernist visual art through to digital and intermedia practices” (p. 52). Geographers have engaged with a variety of artistic media, themes, and theories (for a compilation of various studies by geographers/ with a geographic focus see Hawkins, 2012, pp. 54ff., 2014, pp. 2f.), among them the relationship of art and space which, according to Hawkins (2017), “[…] are inseparable […]. To think of art is to think of space. But yet art is not just in space, it is also of space, and importantly space is of art” (p. xvii). This also implies, as Paglen (2014) suggests, that geographers, unlike art critics, focus on […] questions along the lines of ‘How is this space called “art” produced?’ In other words, what are the specific historical, economic, cultural, and discursive conjunctions that come together to form something called ‘art’ […]? […] Instead of approaching art from the vantage point of a consumer, a critical geographer might reframe the question of art in terms of spatial practice. (p. 30)

So, when addressing art in this chapter, I do not always refer to space or the artspace-relationship explicitly, but I still do address art through my lens as a geographer and, naturally, in respect of the research question. Now art10, similar to related terms like culture and creativity, is lively debated, complex in its meaning, and impossible to define and clarify ultimately.

10

While art in this chapter is discussed rather broadly, this study’s focus lies on visual arts in particular. This umbrella term is adopted here to emphasize the visual aspect and experience of them and in order to distinguish them from other art forms such as performance arts, auditory arts, or literary arts (Esaak, 2019). While the mediums of visual arts range from decorative arts such as jewelry making or pottery to drawing and painting, those gathered

18

Art, society, and space

Therefore, in line with the underlying exploratory and empirically based approach of this study, I will open possible directions to consider art rather than give a conclusive definition. Thus, the readings I offer are chosen in relation to the artistic practices that are described and discussed in chapters 7 and 8. This chapter begins with a focus on the social aspects of art and offers an introduction to the concept of relational art, followed by the subject of socially engaged art. The second half of the chapter then turns its focus towards the relation of art and space, concentrating on public space as well as culture-led urban regeneration strategies.

2.1

Relational art

The art world11 has undergone massive changes in the past decades, especially in the twenty-first century. Alongside the dominant order of exhibitions, museums, galleries, and art fairs, new art-directed networks, project spaces, and working arrangements have arisen with their own patterns of inclusion, professionalization, and recognition. Since then, a growing cohort of artists has started to operate in diverse areas, such as education, urban planning, research, and social engineering, while at the same time being active in numerous social fields. (van den Berg & Pasero, 2013b, p. vii)

With the fields and areas in which artists are active diversifying, artistic practices are also increasingly blurring boundaries, making it even more difficult to grasp what art may or may not be. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), in the glossary of his much-discussed book Relational Aesthetics, remarks that “[n]owadays, the word ‘art’ seems to be no more than a semantic leftover of this narrative12, whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects” (p. 107). Art seems to be thoroughly relational, from its production to its result and from its conception to its reception (Becker, 1982/2011, p. 1; Bourdieu, 1993, p. 35), being, so far at least, human-made and thus social. Art can be a

11

12

and discussed in the scope of this study are murals (including mosaic decorations) as well as paintings on pavement, trees, or street furniture, installations, photographs, linocut prints, and mixed-media work (e.g., installations combined with written word). Art world is a term especially used by jazz pianist and sociologist Howard S. Becker, describing the following: “All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the artwork we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation. The forms of cooperation may be ephemeral, but often become more or less routine, producing patterns of collective activity we can call an art world” (Becker, 1982/2011, p. 1, emphasis added). The narrative Bourriaud (2002) hints at describes art as “[…]‚ a set of objects presented as part of […] art history. This narrative draws up the critical genealogy and discusses the issues raised by these objects, by way of three sub-sets: painting, sculpture, architecture” (p. 107, emphasis in original).

Relational art

19

signifier of certain times, spaces, or cultures (DaCosta Kaufmann, 2004, p. 342; Hildebrandt, 2012, p. 724).

Excursus: The artist Just as art and artistic practices are developing, diversifying, and changing over time, so are the roles and tasks (self-)ascribed to artists. It would go beyond the scope of this study to discuss ‘the’ artist in history and present in-depth. I will therefore only briefly touch upon some crucial developments. For centuries, artists worked as contractors for “[…] those who paid for them, be it the clergy trying to strengthen believers’ faith by installing ornate altars in churches, or the gentry trying to impress the common folk by installing statues and monuments on the streets” (Lossau & Stevens, 2015a, p. 2). Carrying out commissions also meant that artists had to work according to their patrons’ orders and were often limited in their expression and creative freedom. During the renaissance, art academies were established in Europe, formalizing and certifying the artistic handicraft (Berger, 2018, p. 59). With art becoming increasingly detached from religious and political ties during the 18th century and the incipient romanticism, […] artists have routinely harbored messianic desires, the longing to take a high position in social matters, to play a transformative role in political affairs; this may be finally understood as a necessary – though perhaps only imaginary – corrective to their roles, both uncomfortable and insecure, as handmaidens to wealth and power. (Rosler, 2010, p. 11)

However, customers still played a decisive role in the 19th century, even though “[…] artists, now no longer supported by patronage, were free to devise and follow many different approaches both to form and to content […]” (Rosler, 2010, p. 11). It is the avant-garde era of the 20th century that brought significant change toward “[t]he modernist idea of art as the medium of a self-determined and autonomous subject […]” (Lossau & Stevens, 2015a, p. 1). In her book Loft Living (1982), Sociologist Sharon Zukin also identifies a shift towards “[…] art as ‘a way of doing’ […] [that] affected the way art was taught” (p. 98). According to her, the teaching of art as a way of doing focused particularly on the training of techniques and “[…] made art seem less elitist. If almost anyone can be taught to follow a technique and thereby reproduce ‘art,’ then anyone, anywhere, can legitimately expect to be an artist” (p. 98). It is therefore not surprising that in the past decades, the number of people who self-describe as artists has risen (Rosler, 2011a, p. 6). But it is not only the technical skills that ‘create’ growing numbers of artists. It is also the blurring of boundaries of genres as well as boundaries of what is or can be considered art that lead to increasing numbers of artists (Berger, 2018, p. 54). Further, a growing interest in socially engaged art – from artists as well as from funders and commissioners – increasingly creates a dilemma for artists “[…] interested in audiences beyond the gallery […]: serve instrumental needs of states and governments or eschew artworld visibility entirely” (Rosler, 2011a, p. 13). This is closely linked with questions concerning the use or function of art and I will return to these topics again when discussing socially engaged art and public art.

20

Art, society, and space

Further, Becker (1982/2011) assumes an interplay between an artist’s reputation and their work: “[W]e value more a work done by an artist we respect, just as we respect more an artist whose work we have admired” (p. 23). If, furthermore, an artwork is valued according to its monetary value, van den Berg and Pasero (2013a, p. ix) refer to a concept they describe as ‘market imperative’. The term hints at the development towards characterizing artworks according to their (potential) success on the market; a development that is, among others, critical because it commodifies art as a luxury good and might limit its public accessibility. Bourriaud (2002), on the other hand, in his aforementioned book discusses art’s relational character in the context of participation, coining the term ‘relational aesthetics’. According to him, relational art is “[…] an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space […]” (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14). Relational aesthetics are grounded in intersubjectivity, collaboration, and encounter: “Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum” (Bourriaud, 2009, p. 22). Further, Bourriaud (2002) describes art as a social interstice, a term borrowed from Marx, describing “[…] a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system” (p. 16). Thus, relational art creates social interactions, rhythms, and spaces that differ from daily life. It offers a “[…] liminal space between aesthetics and politics […]” (Miller, 2016, p. 168), an experimental area where possible future developments are tested. Relational aesthetics can be found in performances that integrate the audience, for instance, to create social interactions and togetherness (Berger, 2018, p. 50; Bourriaud, 2002, p. 15). It is then an art practice where relations, events, and happenings often only briefly materialize and where the production of an object is subordinate. Since Bourriaud introduced his concept of relational aesthetics in 2002 (in English; it was initially published in French in 1998), it has stirred up discussion surrounding participatory art practices as well as been criticized from various angles. Miller (2016) suggests that instead of taking relational aesthetics as a theoretical approach, it should be discussed “[…] as a curatorial vignette of emerging participatory art practices that Bourriaud sought to showcase in his 1996 exhibition Traffic, at the CAPC13 Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux” (p. 169, emphasis in original). Thus, it is more of a documentation of a trend in the art world than it is an art theory. This is similar to Gillick’s (2006) observation that “[t]he book does contain major contradictions and serious problems of incompatibility with regard to the artists repeatedly listed together as exemplars of certain tendencies. Yet the crucial fact is that Relational Aesthetics was written as a response to the artists whose work it discusses” (p. 96, emphasis in original). So,

13

CAPC stands for Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains which is the former name of the museum (CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, 2019).

Relational art

21

whether reading it as documentation or as theory, there are points of criticism that should be considered. Recurring in most critical receptions are epistemic and ontological issues of relational aesthetics. It is claimed to be “[…] highly schematic” (Kester, 2011, p. 30) and tautological; thus, Miller (2016) asks: “If the work of art is identical to its emergent properties, (i.e. the relations produced) what is the work itself? What is the thing that produces these relations?” (p. 169). Further, Berger (2018, p. 50) states that, referring to the remark that relational aesthetics rather document a trend or phenomenon than develop a theory, Bourriaud merely identifies a similar artistic practice of many artists that seek to create a social framing with a higher sociality. However, not much is said about the artists’ intentions, the consequences of these actions as well as actual changes because of these brief moments of contact (e. g. during a shared meal)14. Hence, Bourriaud is often criticized for aestheticizing relations (Bishop, 2006, p. 2; Martin, 2007, p. 371). Concurring with the main criticism briefly discussed above, one observation Bourriaud makes should be pointed out, nevertheless. According to him, “[…] the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real […]” (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 13). What Bourriaud ascribes to art is reminiscent of Wright’s (2010) concept of real utopias which refers to “[…] ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change” (p. 6). Both approaches describe the possibilities to experiment and try different social models through art. In the following, I will therefore address the ‘social’ aspect of art further.

14

Original: “Festgestellt wird von Bourriaud letztlich aber nur eine zunehmende ähnliche Arbeitsweise vieler Künstler*innen, deren Ergebnis die Schaffung einer geselligen Rahmung mit dem Effekt der Herstellung erhöhter Sozialität ist. Über die Intention der Kunstschaffenden, die Folge der Aktionen und tatsächliche Veränderungen über den kurzen Moment des Kontakts (z B. bei einem gemeinsamen Essen) hinaus wird nichts ausgesagt” (Berger, 2018, p. 50).

22

Art, society, and space

2.2

Socially engaged art

Although a social turn15, “[…] the phenomenon by which more and more artists understand the shaping and transformation of social relations as an important part of their practice” (van den Berg, 2019, p. 3), can at least be traced back to the social movements of the 1960s (Finkelpearl, 2012 pp. 7ff.), socially engaged art practices have regained momentum in theory and practice over the past three decades. As diverse as the practices and the approaches to them are, just as diverse are the terms capturing them, ranging from the previously discussed relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002) to “[…] socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, collaborative art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice” (Bishop, 2012, p. 1). In the following, I will use the term ‘socially engaged art’ because it allows for a more open definition and discussion. This is based on the assumption that socially engaged art practices and their terminological siblings describe a spectrum of practices and activities rather than being an exact description. What socially engaged art has in common “[…] is its dependence on social intercourse as a factor of its existence” (Helguera, 2011, p. 2). It is an art practice “[…] wherein artists take the social site, including its community, as subject, material and audience […]” (Hawkins, 2012, p. 56). Thus, socially engaged art takes diverse forms regarding its material and materialization, the way and degree an audience participates as well as its authorship. Helguera (2011) even goes so far as to state that socially engaged art “[…] is a hybrid, multi-disciplinary activity that exists somewhere between art and non-art […]” (p. 8). Art historian and critic Claire Bishop has frequently elaborated whether socially engaged art should be discussed differently than other art forms or if other criteria should be applied. According to Bishop (2012), […] one of the biggest problems in the discussion around socially engaged art is its disavowed relationship to the aesthetic. By this I do not mean that the work does not fit established notions of the attractive or the beautiful, even though this is often the case […]. More

15

An important figure of the social turn in the arts was the German artist Joseph Beuys (19211986) who coined the term social sculpture. Assuming that everyone is an artist, for Beuys, “[…] art had to be a way of life, not a profession. In his concept of ‘social sculpture,’ everything was sculpture, everything was art, and every aspect of life could be approached creatively, with a sense of inventiveness and ritual” (Brenson, 1995, p. 30). Further, Beuys “[…] saw humanity placed in a position of responsibility to take its evolution in its own hands. This included an almost anarchistic idea of human self-administration […]. Beuys was convinced that people had long since reached the point of being able to administer themselves […]” (van den Berg, 2019, p. 28). However, among other things, this “[…] insistence on the individual responsible person […] made him an inappropriate model for the next generation of socially engaged artists” (van den Berg, 2019, p. 36). I will therefore not go into depth of his work, but Beuys should be mentioned here anyhow for his importance in art practice and art theory. For a recent reception and discussion of his (theoretical) work, see e.g., van den Berg et al. (2019).

Socially engaged art

23

significant is the tendency for advocates of socially collaborative art to view the aesthetic as (at best) merely visual and (at worst) an elitist realm of unbridled seduction complicit with spectacle. At the same time, these advocates also argue that art is an independent zone, free from the pressures of accountability, institutional bureaucracy and the rigours of specialisation. The upshot is that art is perceived both as too removed from the real world and yet as the only space from which it is possible to experiment: art must paradoxically remain autonomous in order to initiate or achieve a model for social change. (pp. 26f., emphasis in original)

Thus, Bishop believes that socially engaged artworks should be treated as art, too. Thereby, the aesthetic, social as well as political aspects of socially engaged art are not regarded as exclusive to one another but are considered together (Bishop, 2012, pp. 26f.). Her thoughts are based on, inter alia, philosopher Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics. Without going into depth on his work, it should be noted that the key issue he discusses is one of contradictions and paradoxes of art: In the aesthetic regime16 of art, art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. […] The key formula of the aesthetic regime of art is that art is an autonomous form of life. This formula, however, can be read in two different ways: autonomy can valorize over life, or life over autonomy – and these lines of interpretation can be opposed, or they can intersect. […] Art can become life. Life can become art. And art and life can exchange their properties. These three scenarios yield three configurations of the aesthetic, emplotted in three versions of temporality. According to the logic of the and, each is also a variant of the politics of aesthetics, or what we should rather call its ‘metapolitics’ – that is, its way of producing its own politics, proposing to politics re-arrangements of its space, re-configuring art as a political issue or asserting itself as true politics. (Rancière, 2010, pp. 118f., emphasis in original)

Accordingly, thinking with the aesthetic regime means accepting and negotiating the contradiction of heteronomy and autonomy of art and regarding it as “[…] the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, which is characterized by the paradox of belief in art’s autonomy and in it being inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come” (Bishop, 2012, p. 29, emphasis in original). Consequently, engaging with socially engaged art’s contradictions also encourages discussion and analysis of artistic practices individually and not generalized.

16

Within Western tradition, Rancière (2006) identifies three regimes of art, with the aesthetic regime of art being the latest one, describing the past two centuries up until now: “The aesthetic regime abolishes the hierarchical distribution of the sensible characteristic of the representative regime of art, including the privilege of speech over visibility as well as the hierarchy of the arts, their subject matter, and their genres. By promoting the equality of represented subjects, the indifference of style with regard to content, and the immanence of meaning in things themselves, the aesthetic regime destroys the system of genres and isolates ‘art’ in the singular, which it identifies with the paradoxical unity of opposites: logos and pathos. However, the singularity of art enters into an interminable contradiction due to the fact that the aesthetic regime also calls into question the very distinction between art and other activities. Strictly speaking, the egalitarian regime of the sensible can only isolate arts specificity at the expense of losing it” (p. 81, emphasis in original).

24

Art, society, and space

Closely connected to the discussion of socially engaged art is also the relationship of art and politics, as the quote by Rancière (2010, pp. 118f.) points at. I will therefore briefly address this below by following political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s (2007) concept of a critical artistic practice where she identifies three dimensions of art-politics-relation. First, Mouffe (2007) does not regard “[…] art and politics in terms of two separately constituted fields, art on one side and politics on the other, between which a relation would need to be established” (p. 4). According to her, “[t]here is an aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art […] [and therefore] it is not useful to make a distinction between political and non-political art” (p. 4). The second dimension concerns critical art: “All art is political in that it contributes to the symbolic structure of society, but this does not mean that every artistic practice is necessarily critical” (Marchart, 2019, p. 24). Thus, critical art, Mouffe (2007) further states, […] is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony. (pp. 4f.)

Accordingly, critical art questions the dominant hegemony and can offer alternatives to it. To do so, though, critical artists do not necessarily work outside of the usual art field but could also “[…] be found within gallery spaces and art institutions[, using] these institutions as platforms for intervening into hegemonic common sense” (Marchart, 2019, p. 24). The final dimension addresses activist art, which, opposed to critical art, “[…] will change or abandon conventional media, leave art institutions behind, and employ strategies of political activism […]” (Marchart, 2019, p. 24) to pose alternatives. Although Mouffe (2007) concedes that “[i]t would be a serious mistake to believe that artistic activism could, on its own, bring about the end of neo-liberal hegemony” (p. 5), she still regards artistic activism/ critical artistic practice as “[…] an important dimension of democratic politics” (p. 5). To put it briefly, “[…] for Mouffe all art is political, but only some art is critical, and only some critical art is activist art” (Marchart, 2019, p. 24). Further, she argues “[…] for explicitly politicized art, in the two modes of criticality and artistic activism” (Marchart, 2019, p. 25), that intervene and subvert the hegemony from within as well as outside of established art institutions and media. Thus, in the remainder of this study, I regard critical as well as activist art not as different from socially engaged art but as specific forms of it. Even though socially engaged art shifts the attention towards social interactions, their immaterial relations, and/ or societal topics, it also, as Hawkins (2012) notes, “[…] raises new questions about art-site relations and their politics” (p. 58). In the case of the present study, site is understood based on the spatial theories of Massey and Lefebvre further addressed in chapter 3. Hence, site is, broadly speaking, comprised of material and immaterial relations, and integrated into multiscale networks that reach from a global to a local level. A specific development of art-site relations is art’s move from established institutions like studios, galleries, or museums to urban spaces as sites of production, interaction, exhibition, and reception (Hawkins, 2012, p. 56). In the following, I, therefore,

Art and/ in/ as public space

25

turn to the relations and interdependencies, as well as issues and obstacles of art and urban space, focusing on public space.

2.3

Art and/ in/ as public space

To discuss the topic of public art, a closer look at public space first is inevitable. Public space is a widely contested complex issue. Definitions focus on various aspects such as the binary of public and private, the accessibility, or the ownership of public spaces. And not uncommonly, they consciously contain contradictions since public spaces take a variety of forms and functions (Parkinson, 2012, pp. 10ff.). Berger (2018, p. 27) adequately states that public space is foremost an imaginary narrative, loaded with normative and idealized attributions in repeatedly changing narrations17. Deutsche (1988) points in a similar direction when she states that “[r]ather than a real category, the definition of ‘the public,’ like the definition of the city, is an ideological artifact, a contested and fragmented terrain” (p. 12). Therefore, I define public space through the discussion of public art. So for now, as a working definition, I understand public space rather broadly, as suggested by Hewitt and Jordan (2016), as theoretically “[…] accessible spaces which are generally open to people – parks, roads and pavements, beaches, as well as spaces that are owned by the state or the people: public libraries, national parks, government buildings – including objects and services that are paid for by taxes […]” (p. 30). The roots of contemporary public art can be dated back to the late 1960s in Western Europe and the United States. Kwon (2002, p. 60) identifies three paradigms that describe the development of public art in the past decades: ‘art in public places’, ‘art as public spaces’, and ‘art in the public interest’. Art in public places, which dominated public art in its first decade, was mainly characterized by “[…] modernist abstract sculptures that were often enlarged replicas of works normally found in museums and galleries” (Kwon, 2002, p. 60). There was still a tight bond between artists and the established art institutions, as Lacy (1995) notes: “Although the move to exhibit art in public places was a progressive one, the majority of artists accommodated themselves to the established museum system, continuing to focus their attention on art critics and museum-going connoisseurs” (p. 24). These commissioned works had hardly any relation to the places they occupied and the sites “[…] mattered only to the extent that they posed formal compositional challenges” (Kwon, 2002, p. 63). Moreover,

17

Original: “Öffentlicher Raum ist vor allem auch ein imaginäres Narrativ, aufgeladen mit normativen, idealisierten Zuschreibungen in immer wieder wechselnden Erzählungen” (Berger, 2018, p. 27).

26

Art, society, and space

in 1967, the National Endowment for the Arts18 (NEA) in the US established the Art in Public Places Program which offered grants for public art projects. In the beginning, their focus was to “[…] ensure that high-quality art reached a broad public audience” (National Endowment for the Arts et al., 2009, p. 214). The artworks were predominantly of aesthetic value and had the purpose of beautification or enhancement of their surroundings. Consequently, what was public about these artworks is where they were located, which is “[…] outdoors or in locations deemed to be public primarily because of their ‘openness’ and unrestricted physical access” (Kwon, 2002, p. 60). These public artworks were thus often indifferent and detached from their physical site as well as from the recipients, as reflected in the following quote: Many critics, artists, and sponsors agreed that, at best, public art was a pleasant visual contrast to the rationalized regularity of its surroundings, providing a nice decorative effect. At worst, it was an empty trophy commemorating the powers and riches of the dominant class—a corporate bauble or architectural jewelry. (Kwon, 2002, p. 65)

In reaction to this criticism and to the observations that often, public art – in the form of autonomous sculptures – was neither beautifying public space nor had a social impact, site-specificity, and thus ‘art as public spaces’ became more and more important in the mid-70s (Lewitzky, 2005, p. 81). In the minds of those intimately engaged with the public art industry at the time, including artists, administrators, and critics, establishing a direct formal link between the material configuration of the art work and the existing physical conditions of the site—instead of emphasizing their disconnection or autonomy—seemed like a very good idea. Such an approach was advocated as an important step toward making art works more accessible and socially responsible, that is, more public. (Kwon, 2002, p. 66)

Interestingly, public art is defined here as being accessible and socially responsible whereas, in the previous decade, it was mostly the accessible location that determined it. However, the quest for social responsibility often led to […] a functionalist ethos that prioritized public art’s use value over its aesthetic value, or measured its aesthetic value in terms of use value. This shift […] conflated the art work’s use value, narrowly defined in relation to simple physical needs […], with social responsibility. (Kwon, 2002, p. 69)

Hence, the expectation towards public art to be site-specific often led to functional, unobtrusive artworks that blended into the existing built environment and urban design. Also, this shows a different approach and evaluation towards

18

“Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEA is the designated arts organization of the U.S. government” (National Endowment for the Arts, 2012, p. 3). The NEA has several funding categories that support initiatives as well as individuals and the creation of artworks, activities, placemaking and community projects. Although a federal agency, the NEA claims to choose its “[c]andidates […] based on merit, not on policy aims or on political favoritism. In any case, direct grants do not finance the bulk of artistic activity in the U.S.; they fill gaps, enhance arts education, nourish arts creation, assist in the presentation and delivery of artworks, and enable preservation” (National Endowment for the Arts, 2012, p. 3).

Art and/ in/ as public space

27

public art on the one hand and non-public art on the other: “Public artworks may be understood as useful in terms of their properties as material objects, sensory experiences, spatial contexts or representational discourses” (Lossau & Stevens, 2015a, p. 2) because they are expected to be site-specific and socially engaged. The criteria hinting at the functions of art are, however, usually not applied to non-public art. According to Lewitzky (2005, p. 85), artists and critics increasingly regarded these public artworks as symbolic thresholds and affirmative decorations of inner-city experiences19. Besides, public art became increasingly subjected to city marketing and image production in competitions between cities. This, in turn, led to the third paradigm of art in the public interest. It is shaped by a more interventionist, dynamic, and/ or socially engaged art that regards site not only as something physical in the sense of a built environment but also as social. This change of perspective […] stems from the belief that the meaning or value of the art work does not reside in the object itself but is accrued over time through the interaction between the artist and the community. […] What this means is that the artist’s assimilation into a given community now coincides with the art work’s integration with the site. The prior goal of integration and harmony in terms of unified urban design is reorganized around the performative capacity of the artist to become one with the community. (Kwon, 2002, p. 95)

This may lead, for example, to a co-production of an artwork in which an artist and members of a community create together – or the collaborative process of co-creation is already the artwork itself and there is no material result –, or the interaction derives from the fact that members of a community recognize themselves (or their community) in the artwork (Kwon, 2002, pp. 95f.). Following this, public art has developed into an umbrella term for a variety of practices and works which can be “[…] permanent works, temporary works, political activism, service art, performance, earthworks, community projects, street furniture, monuments, memorials, and […] ‘plunk’ and ‘plop’ art” (Cartiere, 2008, p. 9). Further, Hildebrandt (2012, p. 739) remarks that terms like participation, collaboration, and interaction document a change and paradigmatically stand for a new relationship in the reception and production of art which is increasingly situated outside of established institutions like museums and galleries – and thus is more difficult to identify and decode as such20. Most discussions on public art focus on works commissioned by a spectrum of authorities, ranging from state actors to businesses and grass-root initiatives. However, what is often excluded from these discussions, surprisingly, is art in public spaces that is unauthorized and subversive. Practices such as Graffiti and Street Art, for example, are

19

20

Original: “[…] wird Kunst im öffentlichen Raum von Künstlern und Kritikern zusehens als symbolische Schwelle und affirmative Dekoration innerstädtischer Erlebniswelten wahrgenommen” (Lewitzky, 2005, p. 85). Original: “Begriffe wie Partizipation, Kollaboration und Interaktion dokumentieren diesen Wandel und stehen paradigmatisch für ein neues Verhältnis in der Rezeption und Produktion von Kunst, welche sich zunehmend außerhalb der Kunstinstitutionen des Museums oder der Galerie situiert – und damit als solche viel schwieriger zu erkennen und zu entschlüsseln ist” (Hildebrandt, 2012, p. 739).

28

Art, society, and space

usually not discussed under the umbrella of public art but as art forms – if labeled as art at all – in public spaces. This again shows the complexity of the term ‘public art’, but also that public art as a practice is contested as well as continuously evolving, developing, and differentiating. Of particular interest in the present case is the site-specific notion that public art may have. However, site-specificity here is understood in broader terms than just geographical location. It does not only relate to the physical site, but also to the social as well as to local and regional specifics. Scale matters here insofar as “[c]ities, and within them, artists, and indeed artworks, are often rooted in multiple scales at once” (Luger, 2017b, p. 231). Artists may be connected, inspired, or working globally, but the specific site where an artwork is created, situated, or received can still have a significant impact on its meaning: “Correspondingly, art and its networks remain firmly rooted to place, and local context is crucial to understanding art/policy assemblages” (Luger, 2017b, p. 235). This notion of place, in turn, emphasizes the difference between public art and art placed in a gallery, with the latter usually being more restricted – not only by rules or admission fees but also by the way artworks are perceived and received (Lossau & Stevens, 2015a, p. 10). Thus, critical site-specific art has the ability “[…] to intervene, through the artwork, in its site. The reciprocity between artwork and site altered the identity of each, blurring distinction between them and preparing the ground for the enhanced participation of art in wider cultural and social practice” (Deutsche, 1988, p. 14). If public art is or seeks to be site-specific in this sense, various factors and consequences need to be considered. For example, Sharp et al. (2005) note, that [c]ritical artists claim that their work establishes a conversation between the spaces and the people who inhabit them. This is perhaps questionable: who really has a conversation? To what extent does this rely upon an élitist language of art and politics? (p. 1016)

Hence, an artist eager to engage and start a conversation is not necessarily able nor successful to do so. Further, an important difference between art within and outside of a gallery is that the art placed outside, for instance in a neighborhood, cannot be as easily avoided as gallery-art could. Thus, artworks might become part of someone’s everyday life – whether they like it or not (J. Sharp et al., 2005, p. 1017). At the same time, public artworks, through irritation, intervention, or specifically calling attention, may initiate contemplation and discussion on urban spaces: As a practice within the built environment, public art participates in the production of meanings, uses, and forms for the city. In this capacity, it can help secure consent to redevelopment and to the restructuring that make up the historical form of late capitalist urbanism. But like other institutions that mediate perceptions of the city’s economic operations – architecture, urban planning, urban design – it can also question and resist those operations, revealing the suppressed contradictions within urban processes. (Deutsche, 1988, p. 10)

But, as Deutsche also notes above and as indicated before, public art can be part of capitalist strategies to revitalize urban areas. Art, in this context, is increasingly commodified and regarded as an investment, often associated with terms like cultural investment or culture-led regeneration.

Culture-led urban regeneration

2.4

29

Culture-led urban regeneration

For about three decades, especially in post-industrial cities of the ‘Global North’, urban policy has adopted various strategies to foster the arts – ultimately aiming at a broader economic upturn: Persuasive advocacy on the part of professionals and organisations within the cultural industries has been a factor in persuading governments that, in post-industrial situations, the cultural industries, and related knowledge sector of electronic communication and higher education, can provide a new economic base. A small number of successful cases tends to be advanced as evidence that a cultural turn in policies for urban renewal can deliver revitalisation of post-industrial cities. (M. Miles, 2005, p. 889)

Thus, art has become a part of urban development models and tools, ranging from image improvement and marketing to tourism, and sometimes even to strategically planned gentrification (Scherzinger, 2017, pp. 36f.). These strategies may lead to considering art, above all, according to its economic value and impact. Hence, it poses the questions of what the role of artists in a city is or should be, as well as what “[…] such developments actually mean in terms of the lives of those people who live in that city? In short, to what extent is culture-led regeneration more about rhetoric than it is about reality?” (S. Miles & Paddison, 2005, p. 834). Further, Peck (2007) also remarks that even if cultural strategies have a progressive notion, they might still be “[…] folded into a development vision that is profoundly market orientated (creative cities, assets, and actors, always in competition) and individualistic (creative subjects as hedonistic free agents)” (pp. 1f.). In addition to that, Berger (2018, p. 17) examines how this is associated with an apparent dichotomy between the autonomy of artists on one side and their instrumentalization – for social and/ or economic purposes – on the other. She takes up the common question of artistic freedom and suggests addressing artistic practice beyond this binary opposition: Art, as an agent of social change, demands answers from artists and responsibility for the results of their own or their instigated actions. The question of responsibility is involved in every discourse on participation and sustainability, but it is rarely addressed (Berger, 2018, p. 17)21. The ambiguity of the role and effect of artists and their relation to urban (re)development was already discussed in Sharon Zukin’s publication Loft Living (1982), which offers a sociological analysis of artist moving into and living in former warehouses in the district of SoHo in New York City. Herein, Zukin (1982) develops the concept of the ‘artistic mode of production’ which “[…] represents an attempt by large-scale investors in the built environment to ride out and to control a particular investment climate” (p. 176) using “[…] art and historic preservation” (p. 176) to attract capital. “In short, large-scale investors were

21

Original: “Kunst als Agentin gesellschaftlicher Veränderung fordert Antworten von Künstler*innen und Ver-Antwortung für die Ergebnisse der eigenen oder angestifteten Handlungen. Das Fragen nach Verantwortung schwingt in allen Diskursen zu Partizipation und Nachhaltigkeit mit, wird aber in den allerseltensten Fällen adressiert” (Berger, 2018, p. 17).

30

Art, society, and space

forced to redirect their attentions towards a strategy of cultural consumption if profits were to be extracted from the built environment” (Lees et al., 2008, p. 118). In Landscapes of power: From Detroit to Disney World (1991) Zukin further discusses how culture is increasingly forced to be market conform. According to her, processes of deindustrialization and gentrification are shaping landscapes22 in the way that spaces of production are given up and spaces of consumption are turned towards. Further, cultural capital is no longer regarded only through its symbolic value, but also through its economic value. Consequently, space is structured by flows of capital, e.g., real estate development, places of consumption, and on the other hand, flows of capital are structured by space (Zukin, 1991, pp. 268ff.). Gentrification and its relation to artists/ artistic practice were already remarked upon by Zukin (1982, pp. 5f.) too, and has been much discussed since then. Instead of entering this extensive debate as well, I refer to Markusen (2006) who offers a reflective and considered approach: Artists are involved in the process of neighborhood turnover and redevelopment. They often move into abandoned or cheap buildings, invest sweat equity to fix them up, stabilize neighborhoods by their presence on the streets, and bring business to local retail stores. Or they may rent or buy housing or workspace developed by others, displacing poor or minority residents or retailers. Sometimes they are victims of gentrification themselves, as land and building prices escalate and they are forced out. […] The significance of artists in this process depends a great deal on the local environment and state of the economy. (p. 1936)

What is crucial about artists’ role in gentrification is thus that “[i]t is not their wealth that sets off, markets, and completes the process of neighborhood gentrification” (Markusen, 2006, p. 1937), but their social and cultural capital that is valorized and commodified, and consequently attracts economic capital (Ley, 2003, p. 2542). This means that [a]rtists may be used by developers, even willingly, but they are not the architects or chief supporters of private property and land-use practices that favor single-site transformations of land use against community wishes. […] It is important to remember, too, that many artists are of the community in which they live, including many artists of color and immigrant artists. Many are also poor. Their relative poverty along with their need for artistic space drives them along the sweat-equity route. (Markusen, 2006, p. 1937)

This, by no means, should be understood as absolving artists from their responsibility. Quite the contrary, it is an appeal to their obligations and accountability but also suggests regarding gentrification as a structural issue. In the early 2000s, however, with the release of Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class: And how it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (2004), a “[…] new urban imperative […]” (Peck, 2005, p. 740) was created: To flourish (economically), cities must attract a creative class. This

22

When Zukin (1991) uses the term landscape, she defines it as follows: “Not only does it denote the usual geographical meaning of ‘physical surroundings’, but it also refers to an ensemble of material and social practices and their symbolic representation. In a narrow sense, landscape represents the architecture of social class, gender, and race relations imposed by powerful institutions” (p. 16).

Culture-led urban regeneration

31

creative class, on the other hand, is attracted to places that are “[…] inclusive and diverse” (Florida, 2003, p. 7). The assumption builds upon Florida’s (2003) creative capital theory: “From my perspective, creative people power regional economic growth and these people prefer places that are innovative, diverse, and tolerant” (p. 8). The theory […] (1) […] identifies a type of human capital, creative people, as being key to economic growth; and (2) it identifies the underlying factors that shape the location decisions of these people, instead of merely saying that regions are blessed with certain endowments of them. (Florida, 2003, p. 8)

According to Florida (2003), creativity is “[…] a fundamental and intrinsic human characteristic. In a very real sense, all human beings are creative and all are potentially members of the creative class” (p. 8). The creative class, then, consists of people that “[…] engage in work whose function is to ‘create meaningful new forms’” (Florida, 2003, p. 8). Further, Florida (2003) distinguishes between a super-creative core – consisting of artists, professors, architects, opinion-makers, and many more – that produces “[…] new forms or designs that are readily transferable and broadly useful […]” (p. 8) and the creative professionals “[…] who work in a wide range of knowledge-based occupations in high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and health-care professions, and business management” (p. 8) and whose jobs concentrate on problem-solving23. In the US, the creative class thus comprises about a third of the total workforce (Florida, 2003, p. 8). To attract the creative class, places need to meet three factors – the 3Ts: technology, talent, and tolerance. Florida (2003) defines “[…] tolerance as openness, inclusiveness, and diversity to all ethnicities, races, and walks of life. Talent is defined as those with a bachelor’s degree and above. And technology is a function of both innovation and high-technology concentrations in a region” (p. 10). I cannot go into depth discussing and critically examining all three of the Ts here. So, in the following, as an example, I will briefly take up the ‘T’ tolerance. For Florida (2004, pp. 250ff.), a place is tolerant when it is open towards diversity. Diversity, in turn, is composed of three indexes: The Gay Index, the Bohemian Index, and the Melting Pot Index. The latter is based on “[…] the relative percentage of foreign-born people in a region” (Florida, 2004, p. 333). The Bohemian Index is comprised of the “[…] measure of artistically creative people. It includes authors, designers, musicians, composers, actors, directors, painters, sculptors, artist printmakers, photographers, dancers, artists, and performers” (Florida, 2004, p. 333). It is also based on census data. The underlying assumption of the Bohemian Index is “[…] that places with a flourishing artistic and cultural environment [which is measured by the number of people active in above-mentioned occupations] are the ones that generate creative economic outcomes and overall economic growth” (Florida, 2004, p. 261). The Gay Index, on the other hand, is based on census data, prepared and published in the article

23

Thus, excluded from the creative class are, according to Florida (2004, pp. 328ff.), the working class, service class, and agriculture.

32

Art, society, and space

Demographics of the Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States by Black, Gates, Sanders, and Taylor (2000). Florida (2004) uses the Gay Index24 because, according to him, “[a]s a group, gays have been subject to a particularly high level of discrimination. […] To some extent, homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people” (pp. 255f.). Florida’s remarks have been met with elation by several urban governments that subsequently developed strategies to attract the promised creative class, but also by a lot of criticism (Peck, 2011, p. 2; Thiel, 2017, p. 23; Wetherell, 2017, para. 19). A lot of the latter has focused on the data, or rather the way it was prepared and used: “[…] Florida’s arguments are largely fashioned on the basis of some suggestive correlations, for example between gays and technology-intensive growth […]” (Peck, 2005, p. 757), but lack causality and further explanation. Also, Markusen criticizes how the creative class was sorted: Florida’s creative class groupings are based on major occupational groups – he does not look inside each of these to see what they contain. […] These occupations may indeed be creative, but so too are airplane pilots, ship engineers, millwrights, and tailors – all of whom are uncreative in Florida’s tally. The discussion of the creative class is fudged yet more by Florida’s selective use of interviews and anecdote to suggest behaviors and preferences that are not representative of the ‘class’ as a whole. (Markusen, 2006, p. 1923)

This coincides with an insufficient and economy-focused definition of creativity, especially when it comes to creative work and its distinction from non-creative work (Markusen, 2006, p. 1924; Wetherell, 2017, para. 9). Especially remarkable here is that artists are merged with other, very different occupations under the creative class-umbrella: Artists may enjoy limited and indirect patronage from elites, but, as a group, they are far more progressive than most other occupational groups which Florida labels as ‘creative’. Whereas elites tend to be conservative politically, artists are the polar opposite. Artists vote in high numbers, and heavily for left and Democratic candidates. They are often active in political campaigns, using their visual, performance, and writing talents to carry the banner […]. (Markusen, 2006, p. 1935)

Further, this disguises economic variation within the grouped creative class and thus, challenges such as precariousness and displacement are not addressed by Florida (Rosler, 2011a, p. 6). Also, since Florida (2004, pp. 335ff.) uses metro data, he ignores “[…] the important spatial distribution of people by residence and workplace throughout the city” (Markusen, 2006, p. 1923), and thus socio-spatial differences and variations. Therefore, Markusen (2006) summarizes that “[o]verall, the creative-class and, by extension, creative-city, rubric is impoverished by fuzziness of conception, weakness of evidence, and political silence” (p. 1924). Further, and very importantly, Florida thus lay the foundations of neoliberal creativity strategies:

24

On the statistical insignificance of Florida’s Gay Index, see Clark (2003).

Culture-led urban regeneration

33

The seductiveness of creativity strategies must be understood in terms of their basic complementarity with prevailing neoliberal development fixes, their compatibility with discretionary, selective, and symbolic supply-side policymaking, and their conformity with the attendant array of development interests. Creativity strategies presume, work with, and subtly remake the neoliberalized terrain of urban politics, placing commodified assets like the arts and street culture into the sphere of interurban competition, enabling the formation of new local political channels and constituencies, and constituting new objects and subjects of urban governance. [...] Taking the flexible/insecure/unequal economy as given, these post−progressive urban strategies lionize a creative elite while offering the residualized majority the meager consolation of crumbs from the creative table. (Peck, 2007, p. 11)

Finally, besides the points of criticism mentioned above, I would like to emphasize that the generalizations and homogenizations that underly Florida’s concept, and especially the indexes, are not only mostly false conclusions and suggestive correlations. To some extent, they are also harmful since they (in quantitative terms) try to commodify and (in qualitative terms) disregard the pluralism, variety, and diversity of societies – which, interestingly, it tries to put at the center. The previous pages have explored the diverse perspectives on art. It became clear that within these perspectives, art is regarded as having strong and influential relationships with society as well as with (public) space and the city. The following chapter now turns its focus closer toward these three aspects (society, city, and space) by introducing the spatial theories of Lefebvre and Massey.

3

Space and place

Assuming that neither art nor space simply exist but are produced, this study asks how artistic practices produce spaces and how spaces produce artistic practices. As I will show in the following, the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey are particularly suited to approach this research question, especially when they are combined. While Lefebvre focuses on conceptualizing the terms city, urban, and space, as well as on the processes and relations of the production of space, Massey emphasizes the characteristics and dynamics as well as (multiple/ unique) identities, meanings, and histories of place. For both, spaces and places are social and relational products that are shaped by power relations as well as power struggles. In what follows, I will first outline Lefebvre’s ideas on space, beginning with the context of his work and his conceptualization of ‘city’ and ‘urban’, followed by the genesis of the production of space. Then, after an introduction to ‘the right to the city’, I will close this part by mapping out central challenges and criticisms that are necessary to discuss. In the second part of this chapter, I will introduce Massey’s theory on a global sense of place. In the subsequent chapter, both spatial theories will be brought together as well as combined with the theoretical approaches to art discussed before to refine them for the analysis.

3.1

The city, the urban, and space

While Lefebvre’s “[…] work has gone in and out of fashion several times […]” (Kelly, 1992, p. 62), it has been receiving a renewed and sustained interest among scholars from disciplines such as geography, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and architecture for about three decades now (Schmid, 2005, p. 9). The interest in his work can be explained by several developments: Lefebvre’s books probably most referred to in urban studies, Le droit à la ville (1968), La Révolution urbaine (1970), and La Production de l’espace (1974), had not been translated

The city, the urban, and space

35

from French into English until the early 1990s or even later25. Accordingly, readings of his thoughts that were targeted towards a larger, English-speaking community, were mostly developed thereafter. Further, Schmid (2005, pp. 12f.) identifies three phases of reception concerning Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space in the past three decades: Starting from the development of critical urban studies associated with, among others, the works of Harvey (e.g., 1973/1988), and Soja (e.g., 1989), to then pointing out the meaning of space to understand social processes26, and finally to the current phase which Schmid (2005, p. 14) describes as a critical and systematic appropriation of Lefebvre’s work. Hereafter, without going into detail discussing the preceding division of three phases, several contributions to Lefebvre’s work should be emphasized27. Over the past two decades, a variety of work concerned with Lefebvre has been produced, with diverse foci and outcomes: “He [Lefebvre] has been, and is, read in often contradictory ways” (Shields, 1999, p. 3). Soja (1989, 1996), even though criticized for misinterpreting Lefebvre28, contributed significantly to his re-reading and stimulating debates. Shields’ Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle (1999), over large parts built upon Soja’s work, and declaring itself as “[…] the only comprehensive guide to Lefebvre’s work” (p. i), indeed provides a comprehensive summary of Lefebvre’s work that starts with his early years and finishes with a discussion of the production of space, touching the critique of everyday life and other topics in between. Moreover, Elden (2004) gives an overview on the oeuvre of Lefebvre – from “Rethinking Marxism” (pp. 15ff.) to “Politics and the state” (pp. 211ff.) –, whereas Stanek (2011) provides a discussion that is more concerned with Lefebvre’s applicability for architecture at the intersection of sociology and urbanism. Goonewardena et al. (2008) offer an anthology of ‘third wave’29 readings of Lefebvre with contributions from researchers of different – yet almost only western – backgrounds and corresponding approaches, among

25

26

27

28 29

Le droit à la ville (1968) was published in the collection Writings on Cities in (1996), La Révolution urbaine (1970) as The Urban Revolution (2003b) and La Production de l’espace (1974) as The production of space in (1991b). Original: “Sie [die zweite Phase] war weniger an einzelnen Konzepten zur Frage des Städtischen interessiert, als vielmehr an einer bestimmten Perspektive: die Bedeutung des Raumes für das Verständnis aktueller gesellschaftlicher Prozesse aufzuzeigen” (Schmid, 2005, p. 13). This is merely a selective overview of publications, on one hand chosen by their influence and significance for my own work, and the other hand restricted to publications in German and English due to my language proficiency. Thus, other authors might come to very different accounts when presenting readings of Lefebvre. The critique mostly focuses on Soja’s interpretation of Lefebvre’s use of the term dialectic. For further reading see Schmid (2005, pp. 308ff.) and Günzel (2017, pp. 77f.). “The ‘third wave’ of Lefebvre readings we propose links urban-spatial debates more persistently and substantively with an open-minded appropriation of his metaphilosophical epistemology shaped by continental philosophy and Western Marxism. In so doing, it also rejects the debilitating dualism between ‘political economy’ and ‘cultural studies’ that in effect marked the distinction between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves of Lefebvre studies, making it impossible for us to return to a simply updated or expanded earlier school of thought on Lefebvre” (Kipfer, Goonewardena, et al., 2008, p. 3).

36

Space and place

them Christian Schmid, Stuart Elden, and Andy Merrifield. Schmid (2005) also provides a thorough German-language interpretation of Lefebvre’s spatial theory. He sticks closely to Lefebvre’s original work and gives a comprehensive theoretical context before he conducts the analysis. Recently, Vogelpohl (2018) drew attention to how Lefebvre’s work could be discussed from a feminist perspective30, identifying three topics that have been pivotal to feminist research, and that could be used to think Lefebvre’s work further: positionality, intersectionality, and combining different forms of knowledge (Vogelpohl, 2018, pp. 154f.). Lastly, it is crucial to point out Harvey’s work. From his early work onwards, he followed, adapted, and re-interpreted Lefebvre’s work, especially on the production of space and the right to the city (e.g., Harvey, 1973/1988, 2008, 2012), eventually developing his own theoretical approaches crucial to today’s radical geography and political economy (Schmid, 2005). In his immense body of work, Harvey, deriving from a Marxian perspective, focuses in particular on a political economy of space, developing theoretical approaches such as ‘the spatial fix’ (Harvey, 2001), and ‘the time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989b). In the following discussion of Lefebvre’s spatial theory, I will focus on his original work (its English translation) and take into account some of the interpretive works, especially those by Schmid (2005) and Vogelpohl (2011) which offer helpful theoretical context while staying close to Lefebvre’s original work.

The (historical) context Lefebvre’s work is heavily influenced by the times and events he experienced and the people he studied, collaborated, and fought with. During the Second World War, for example, Lefebvre, who had joined the resistance, fled to several different locations hiding from the Vichy government. Spending the last years of the war in the Pyrenees, he started to conduct fieldwork in his rural community – work, which later led to his doctoral thesis31 (Shields, 1999, pp. 26f.). Although living a remote and almost isolated life, “[…] his experiences in the Pyrenees during the war gave him a social basis for field research that finally led away not only from traditional philosophy but also away from equally abstract and intellectual debates and critiques of philosophy” (Shields, 1999, p. 28). Another formative time followed during the 1960s, when Lefebvre lived in Paris, the European heart of the student protests of May 1968. According to Schmid (2005, p. 74), being in the midst of these events essentially shaped his understanding of theory and practice: For Lefebvre, theory should never be an end in itself, but rather be

30

31

Besides, other feminist geographers have detected approaches in Lefebvre’s writings that can be of use for feminist research/ers: “Lefebvre cannot be described as a feminist, yet his theoretical understandings of the social dynamics of space have clear implications for gender relations” (Beebeejaun, 2017, p. 325). The thesis was published as La vallée du Campan. Étude de sociologie rurale (Lefebvre, 1963).

The city, the urban, and space

37

reconnected to social practice and social movements (Schmid, 2005, p. 74)32. Moreover, the city of Paris was largely influenced by French urbanism and spatial planning of that time. It […] had become a scene of a constant negotiation between the tendency toward liberalization, which accepted the social inequalities as a natural datum of economic order and limited itself to the correction of particularly acute situations, and the critique of liberalism, stemming from Marxists, progressive Catholics, and reformist bureaucrats. (Stanek, 2011, p. 23)

Deeply affected by these developments, contradictions, and issues, Lefebvre published his most influential books on urbanism and spatial theory, among them Le droit à la ville (1968) and La production de l’espace (1974). One major theoretical influence on Lefebvre was, besides Hegel and Nietzsche, Karl Marx33, whose theories were a starting point for many of Lefebvre’s thoughts and which he developed further (Elden, 2004, p. 3). His reading of Marxism is sometimes described as a Humanistic Marxism (or Marxist Humanism), focusing on “[…] the importance of the felt experience of dullness, boredom and estrangement as a source of Utopian inspiration and revolutionary resolve” (Shields, 1999, p. viii). It stems from Marx’s early works and his theory of alienation34 on which, then, Lefebvre builds the three-volume opus Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre, 1991a, 2002, 2008). His Marxism is characterized by a more open and less dogmatic interpretation of Marxist theory. Although he, for instance, uses Marxist terms like ‘production’ within his theory of the production of space, this is not only understood in an economic sense but much broader (Elden, 2004, p. 44): By taking ‘production’ in its widest sense (the production of oeuvres and of social relations), there has been in history the production of cities as there has been production of knowledge, culture, works of art and civilization, and there also has been, of course, production of material goods and practico-material goods. (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 102, emphasis in original)

This emphasizes Lefebvre’s attempt at a holistic contemplation of social life which permeates his theories. Accordingly, Purcell (2014) summarizes Lefebvre’s Marxism as the following: And so what emerges in Lefebvre’s work is a Marxism that rejects the state, that maintains itself as an open and evolving project, and that comes to understand itself as more than anything a democratic project, as a struggle by people to shake off the control of capital and the state in order to manage their affairs for themselves. (p. 145)

Lefebvre’s essay Right to the City from 1968 is probably where this interpretation of Marxism becomes most explicit (Lefebvre, 1996, pp. 63ff.), as well as most

32 33

34

Original: “Für Lefebvre sollte Theorie nie Selbstzweck sein, sondern immer an eine soziale Praxis und an soziale Bewegungen zurückgebunden werden” (Schmid, 2005, p. 74). For interest in further readings on Lefebvre’s appreciation, struggle, and interpretation of Marx, I can recommend Elden (2004, pp. 15ff.), Schmid (2005, pp. 75ff.) and Shields (1999, pp. 8ff.). In the chapter “Die entfremdete Arbeit” of Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, Marx discusses different forms of alienation that workers experience, among them alienation from their product and alienation from the process of production (Marx, 1844, pp. 653ff.).

38

Space and place

connected to urban space: He identifies an urban crisis and formulates the demand for a right to the city for the first time, which two years later is further and broader developed in The Urban Revolution where he states that “[t]he urban revolution is a planetary phenomenon” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 113). Schmid (2005, p. 11) herein identifies a fundamental change of perspective and a reorientation from the analysis of the object ‘city’ to the process of urbanization and the development of urban society35. In the subsequent work, The Production of Space (1991b), Lefebvre then brings society and the category ‘space’ even closer together, developing the theory of the social production of space (Schmid, 2005, p. 11). In the following I will therefore first introduce and discuss Lefebvre’s theory on planetary urbanization, focusing on its three levels – the global, the mixed, and the private – then proceed further to the theory on the production of space and then finally to the right to the city. As mentioned above, Lefebvre’s theories should not be solely read as theories, but as (a reconnection with) analysis and practice. This, and its openness to interpretation, should be kept in mind when reading the following pages since it will be central to the analysis of the empirical research of this study.

From city to urban In the opening words of The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre (2003b) states that “[s]ociety has been completely urbanized. […] An urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization” (p. 1, emphasis in original). But then, this urban society is virtual, conceived by Lefebvre as a result of industrialization and as an aim at the same time (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 177, 2003b, p. 2). This processual and dynamic, as well as historical, and sometimes even utopian perspective pervades many of Lefebvre’s works. So, even if he regards industrialization as “[…] the point of departure for reflection upon our time36” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 65), he notes that “[…] the city has a historical existence that is impossible to ignore” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 57). Lefebvre (1996) names three historical types of cities, the oriental city, the antique city, and the medieval city, which he describes as oeuvres, as use value rather than exchange value37: In short, they [cities] are centres of social and political life where not wealth is accumulated, but knowledge (connaissances), techniques, and oeuvres (work of art, monuments). This city

35

36 37

Original: “Damit verbunden war ein grundlegender Perspektivenwechsel, eine Umorientierung der Analyse vom Objekt ‘Stadt’ zum Prozess der Urbanisierung und der Entstehung einer urbanen Gesellschaft” (Schmid, 2005, p. 11). Here, ‘our time’ should, of course, be understood as the time of Lefevre writing Le droit à la ville (1968), so referring to the late 1960s. In simple terms, exchange value describes the economic valorization of use value; for further details on Marx’s discussion of these terms, see e.g., Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Marx, 1858/1983).

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is itself ‘oeuvre’, a feature which contrasts with irreversible tendency towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products. Indeed, the oeuvre is use value and the product is exchange value. (p. 66, emphasis in original)

The city as oeuvre is a narrative Lefebvre uses primarily to point out what cities have been in previous times and have lost in the era of industrialization (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 235). In The Urban Revolution (Lefebvre, 2003b, pp. 8ff.), he also describes this as a chronicle development from a political38 to a mercantile39 and then to an industrial city. The industrial city, then, is described as “[…] often a shapeless town, a barely urban agglomeration, a conglomerate, or conurbation […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 14). It is the product of modernist planning of the functional city, focusing on separating the city into “[…] functions of dwelling, working, recreation, and transportation […]” (Poerschke, 2016, p. 199), primarily associated with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and the Athens Charter which was passed in 1933. The consequences of the functional city not only materialized in the built environment, but had larger social effects: The separation of dwelling and working, for example, led to the dissolution of the coherence between different areas of life on the individual level – work, family life, and leisure are now experienced as disjointed and alienated – and the need for collectivity, which enables the existence of cities as a result of encounters and collective design in the first place40 (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 235), creating what Lefebvre (1991b, p. 49) calls ‘abstract space’. Thus, the process of suburbanization, for instance, led not only to a functional and morphological separation from the urban core but created homogeneous and monotonous areas (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 77; Schmid, 2011a, p. 43). The urban core, on the other hand, is aestheticized “[…] as place of consumption and consumption of place” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 73) or “[s]ometimes (in the United States) these centres are abandoned to the ‘poor’ and become ghettos for the underprivileged” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 71). The city thus enters a phase of consumer-oriented and capitalist market ideas, where exchange values increasingly replace use values (e.g., concerning housing and land prices) (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 79, 2003b, pp. 20f.; Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 236). Lefebvre describes this as a double or dialectical process, where industrialization and urbanization are two aspects of the same process, although clashing, conflicting, and complex, that will eventually produce the urban society (Schmid, 2005, p. 144); he also uses the term ‘implosion-explosion’ to demonstrate that even though

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40

“The political city accompanies or closely follows the establishment of organized social life, agriculture, and the village” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 8, emphasis in original). “The merchant city succeeded the political city. At this time (approximately the fourteenth century in western Europe), commercial exchange became an urban function, which was embodied in a form (or forms, both architectural and urban)” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 10, emphasis in original). Original: “Die Trennung von Wohn- und Arbeitsplatz verursacht beispielsweise die Auflösung der Kohärenz zwischen verschiedenen Lebensbereichen auf individueller Ebene – Arbeit, Familienleben und Freizeit werden nun als unzusammenhängend und entfremdend erlebt – und des Bedürfnisses nach Kollektivität, deren Existenz erst Städte als Ergebnis von Begegnungen und gemeinsamer Gestaltung möglich macht” (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 235).

40

Space and place

cities are losing their (social) qualities under industrialization and “[…] many old urban cores are deteriorating or exploding” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 71), cities are still growing in size and numbers, and metropolitan areas, as well as interurban connections, are sprawling (Lefebvre, 1996, pp. 70f.; Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 236). Returning to the beginning of this subchapter and Lefebvre’s postulate of the urban society, the term ‘urban’ finally needs to be discussed briefly, since it is one of Lefebvre’s essential vocabularies41. The urban describes overcoming a production of space that is homogeneous, fragmented, and hierarchical42 (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 236) and produces abstract space. It is a critique on existing cities as well as an aim, something to strive for: The urban is rather a possibility, a potential that lies within urbanization, but which needs fundamental social change – an urban revolution – to be realized43 (Schmid, 2005, p. 153). Hence, urban is programmatic and it […] cannot be defined either as attached to a material morphology (on the ground, in the practico-material), or as being able to detach itself from it. […] It is a mental and social form, that of simultaneity, of gathering, of convergence, of encounter (or rather, encounters). It is a quality born from quantities (spaces, objects, products). It is a difference, or rather, an ensemble of differences. The urban contains the meaning of industrial production, as appropriation contains the sense of technical domination over nature, the latter becoming absurd without the former. (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 131, emphasis in original)

The three terms simultaneity, gathering, and difference are central here and together define yet another term, centrality44 (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 237) which is also an aspect in Lefebvre’s thoughts on the right to the city. Further, the urban is distinguished as the intermediate of three specific levels to analyze society – the global, the mixed, and the private level – which will be discussed in the following section.

41

42 43

44

Thus, at the beginning of the third chapter of The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre (2003b) states: “From this point on I will no longer refer to the city but to the urban” (p. 45), indicating a shift towards a discussion more focused on society. Original: “[…] wenn Urbanisierung für die Überwindung homogenisierender, fragmentierender und hierarchisierender Raumproduktion steht” (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 236). Original: “Das Urbane ist vielmehr eine Möglichkeit, ein Potential, das in der Urbanisierung angelegt ist, das zu seiner Verwirklichung aber grundlegender gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen bedarf - einer urbanen Revolution” (Schmid, 2005, p. 153). Centrality is also defined as form: “The form of centrality which, as a form, is empty, calls for a content and attracts and concentrates particular objects. By becoming a locus of action, of a sequence of operations, this form acquires a functional reality. Around the centre a structure of (mental and/or social) space is now organized, a structure that is always of the moment, contributing, along with form and function, to a practice. The notion of centrality replaces the notion of totality, repositioning it, relativizing it, and rendering it dialectical” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 399, emphasis in original); for further interest in Lefebvre’s concept of form/ urban form, I recommend chapter 9 ‘Levels of Reality and Analysis’ and chapter 12 ‘On urban form’ in Writings on Cities (Lefebvre, 1996).

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41

The global, the mixed, and the private level Before looking closer at the three specific levels that are differentiated, a definition of the term ‘level’ already hints at their purport: Taken in its widest sense, the idea of level encompasses the idea of differences between levels. […] Wherever there is a level there are several levels, and consequently gaps, (relatively) sudden transitions, and imbalances or potential imbalances between those levels. (Lefebvre, 2002, p. 119, emphasis in original)

A level, thus, can only exist in relation to other levels to which it can distance or relate itself. The levels, in this context, can be understood as scale (Brenner, 2000, p. 368). To analyze society, Lefebvre then distinguished three levels: a global level (G), a mixed level (M), and a private level (P). On the global level (the distant order), power is exercised by “[…] the state as will and representation […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 78). Will, in this context, describes the political strategies of those who hold the power, whereas representation addresses politician’s “[…] ideologically justified political conception of space […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 78). Thus, the global level indicates a distant order, those of the nation-state, but also of the global market, and other (international) interrelations of space, “[…] of knowledge, of institutions, and of ideologies […]” (Kipfer, Schmid, et al., 2008, p. 290). Whereas on the one hand, the global level seems to be abstract, conceptual, and immaterial, on the other hand, it projects and materializes itself into the built environment: “[…] buildings, monuments, large-scale urban projects, new towns, […] roads and highways, the general organization of traffic and transportation, the urban fabric […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 79). Schmid (2005, p. 157) thus concludes that long before the current debate, Lefebvre describes and analyzes processes of globalization45. The second level, the mixed, mediator, or intermediary, describes the level of the city that sits between the global and the private level: “This specifically urban ensemble provides the characteristic unity of the social ‘real’, or group […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 80). It projects itself into the urban environment as “[…] streets, squares, avenues, public buildings such as city halls, parish churches, schools […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 80). Lefebvre (2003b) ascribes a pivotal role to the level M: “Even if level M is defined only as a mediator (mixed) and not as something essential or central, it is still the site and nexus of struggle” (p. 91, emphasis in original), the “[…] terrain suitable for defense or attack […]” (p. 89). At the same time, level M is not only mediating between level G and level P, but also at risk of being deteriorated and dissolving between the two levels (Kipfer, Schmid, et al., 2008, p. 290; Schmid, 2005, p. 157) Finally, the private level (nearby order) is associated with everyday life. It is the level of various forms of dwellings, as well as “[…] the diversity of ways of living, urban types, patterns, cultural models, and values associated with the

45

Original: “Lange vor den aktuellen Debatten beschreibt und analysiert Lefebvre den Prozess der Globalisierung” (Schmid, 2005, p. 157).

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Space and place

modalities and modulations of everyday life” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 81). It is, as well, the level of lived experience. As shortly mentioned before, Lefebvre identifies an urban crisis. Now, using the concept of the global, mixed, and private level, the crisis can be described as follows: On the global level, a process of generalization and homogenization, forced by industrialization is underway. On the opposite side, on the private level, “[…] motivations […] converge with technological and technocratic concerns” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 95), leading to functionalization and control over the everyday life – driven by an industrial logic as well (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 95; Schmid, 2005, pp. 117, 157). It seems that consequently, “[…] this would be the end of both habiting and the urban as sites of bundled opposition, as centers” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 95) and thus the end of the urban society. On the previous pages, I showed the historical context of Lefebvre’s work, as well as his relation to and interpretation of Marxism and his concern to reconnect theory and practice. Further, I pointed out several themes that run through Lefebvre’s work, such as alienation, everyday life, production, and lived experience. I then approached the urban as the result of a changing perspective of Lefebvre, from the city as a historical object to the process of urbanization. By introducing the global, mixed, and private level, Lefebvre identifies the urban (society) in crisis. Combining these levels challenged him towards another change of perspective, to a theory that can cover them even more comprehensively: the production of space.

The production of space Lefebvre’s focus gradually shifted from the city to the urban and eventually to space. But his approach is “[…] not [to analyze] things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 89). In the search for a ‘unitary theory’ (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 11), he aims at bringing the physical, mental, and social fields46 together: “In other words, we are concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias” (Lefebvre, 1991b, pp. 11f.). According to Lefebvre, social practice and spatial practice are deeply connected. Thus, assuming that “(Social) space is a (social) product” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 26, emphasis in original) proclaims that these two aspects are not just inseparable, but that one “[…] refers back to the other, reinforces the other, and hides behind the other” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 27). It also implies that “[s]pace does not exist ‘in itself’; it is produced” (Schmid, 2008, p. 28), and thus the production of space needs to be analyzed when researching space. As mentioned before, production

46

Fields can be understood here as domains or topoi (Lefebvre, 2003b, pp. 32, 191), or “[…] regions of force and conflict […]” (Lefebvre, 2003b, p. 29).

The city, the urban, and space

43

should be understood in a wider sense than simply the production of goods: “If there is production of the city, and social relations in the city, it is a production and reproduction of human beings by human beings […]” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 101). Further, this entails that “[…] every society […] produces a space, its own space” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 31). Now, to bring together the above-mentioned physical, mental, and social fields as production of space, Lefebvre introduces a twofold triad47 of dialectic formants48, consisting of spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space), and representational space (lived space) (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 33). Further, underlying the triad are three modes of production: material production, the production of knowledge, and the production of meaning (Rössel, 2014, p. 33; Schmid, 2008, p. 41). The spatial practice embraces the production and reproduction of space based on the perceived space. It consists of everyday and non-reflexive practices, based on the materiality of space (material production), and internalized through experiences and routines. Spatial practice also includes the bodily experience of space (Lefebvre, 1991b pp. 33, 38; Löw, 2016, p. 112; Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 238). The second formant, the representations of space, describes the conceived space “[…] of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 38). Representations of space comprise discursive, as well as materieldiscursive elements – speech, maps, plans, images –, and conceived space is pervaded by signs, symbols, and codes (production of knowledge), implemented by the above-named actors (Lefebvre, 1991b, pp. 33, 38, 233; Merrifield, 1993, p. 523; Schmid, 2008, p. 37). Informed by knowledge and ideology, representations of space “[…] intervene in and modify spatial textures […] as a project embedded in a spatial context and a texture which call for ‘representations’ that will not vanish into the symbolic or imaginary realms” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 42, emphasis in original). Representational space (sometimes described as spaces of representation), then, describes “[…] space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39, emphasis in original); the lived space. It is the collective space of inhabitants, users, and artists that “[…] overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces […] tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39) (production of meaning). Further, Löw (2016) herein perceives the “[…] aspect of space that can circumvent predominant orders and discourses and imagine other spaces. It is often the refractory spaces of artists or

47

48

Lefebvre developed the triad as twofold because he uses two approaches to space: a phenomenological (perceived, conceived, lived) and a semiotic (spatial practice, representations of space, representational space) (Rössel, 2014, pp. 33f.; Schmid, 2008, pp. 28ff.). Lefebvre (1991b) refers to the formants also as aspects, elements (p. 285), and moments (p. 369).

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Space and place

mythical, pre-modern images of space that challenge given social circumstances” (p. 112).

Fig. 1: Triad of the production of space (own figure based on Lefebvre (1991b, pp. 33ff.))

The three formants – spatial practice, representation of space, and representational space – together produce social space. They determine, restrain, and influence each other, and only as a triad, they are able to produce space. However, the ways in which they contribute to the production of space varies “[…] according to their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in question, and according to the historical period” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 46). Thus, the [r]elations between the three moments of the perceived, the conceived and the lived are never either simple or stable, nor are they positive in the sense in which this term might be opposed to negative, to the indecipherable, the unsaid, the prohibited, or the unconscious. (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 46)

Hence, social “[…] space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 73) nor is there one social space; it is rather that unlimited and boundless social spaces overlap and “[n]o space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 86, emphasis in original) – a thought that is also pivotal in Massey’s global sense of place introduced below. Lefebvre (1991b) stresses the processual, dynamic and historical character of space: “Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social space has a history […]” (p. 110), and therefore, to analyze social space also means to consider its history. This shows the great importance that Lefebvre puts on time which he regards as inextricable from space: “[…] time is known and actualized in space, becoming a social reality

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by virtue of a spatial practice. Similarly, space is known only in and through time” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 219). Consequently, Lefebvre occasionally uses the term social time when discussing (social) space’s and (social) time’s entanglement: “Space is the envelope of time. […] Within and through space, a certain social time is produced and reproduced […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 339). Moreover, Lefebvre (1991b) describes the programmatic space of the urban as differential space in the sense that “[…] inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences” (p. 52). Just like urbanization emerges from industrialization, differential space emerges from abstract space49 (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 238). Here, abstract space is associated with capitalist forces leading towards commodification and homogenization of space (Merrifield, 1993, p. 524). What can prevent abstract space from completely taking over differential space is, according to Lefebvre (1991b), class struggle: “Only the class struggle has the capacity to differentiate, to generate differences which are not intrinsic to economic growth qua strategy, ‘logic’ or ‘system’ – that is to say, differences which are neither induced by nor acceptable to that growth” (p. 55, emphasis in original). This illustrates that Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space as well is concerned with capitalist modes of production and thus can be read as a critique of capitalism. Where this critique and its influence on the urban, as well as on modernist planning and the functional city becomes most evident though, is in his demand for a right to the city.

Right to the city Based on his observations of the urban developments in Paris in the 1960s, including the student protests in May 1968, Lefebvre published the essay Right to the City (1968), which is a proclamation of an urban crisis as well as a call for a right to the city. To Lefebvre (1996), […] the right to the city is like a cry and a demand. […] The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life. (p. 158, emphasis in original)

Here, urban life refers to the programmatic definition of urban given before, including themes such as simultaneity, encounter, gathering, difference, and access to resources (Lefebvre, 1996, pp. 131, 158). Rights, in this sense, are no legal rights, but “[…] political claims to possible rights that will require mobilization and struggle” (Purcell, 2014, p. 146). Similar to Lefebvre’s concept of urban, the right to the city is conceived as programmatic, as a utopian vision that has to be

49

Original: “Genau wie Urbanisierung aus der Industrialisierung hervorgeht, geht der differenzielle Raum aus dem abstrakten hervor” (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 238).

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claimed by the people50. The right to the city is thus a right to urban life (Gebhardt & Holm, 2011, p. 8; Schmid, 2005, p. 184). Lefebvre lists a variety of other rights – among them the right to freedom, to information, to individualization (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 173, 2003a, pp. 257ff.) –, but describes the right to the city “[…] as a superior form of rights […]” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 173) that contains of “[t]he right to oeuvre, to participation and appropriation […]” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 174, emphasis in original). The right to oeuvre can further be broken down into the right to centrality and the right to difference. The right to centrality is the right to not be excluded from the urban, to have access to places of social wealth, urban infrastructure, and knowledge. Centrality – not meant as a geographical center – thus stands for simultaneity, for the possibility of gathering and encounter (Gebhardt & Holm, 2011, p. 8; Lefebvre, 1996, p. 158, 2003b, pp. 150, 194; Schmid, 2005, p. 288, 2011b, p. 32). The right to difference is closely linked to the possibility of gathering and encounter, implying that urban space allows for the simultaneous presence, encounter, recognition, and confrontation of different social, cultural, and ethnic individuals, groups, and activities (Gebhardt & Holm, 2011, p. 8; Lefebvre, 1996, p. 179; Schmid, 2011b, p. 33). The right to participation “[…] represents the right to participate in [urban] society through everyday practices (e.g., work, housing, education, leisure)” (Gilbert & Dikeç, 2008, p. 259). It also includes inhabitant’s participation in decisions on urban space through which […] inhabitants experience an awakening. They come into consciousness of themselves as inhabitants, as embedded in a web of social connections, as dependent on and stewards of ‘the urban.’ As they become conscious in this way, they recognize the need to struggle against the industrial capitalist city and for the urban. They come to see participation not as speaking at a public hearing or serving on a citizens’ panel, but as the living struggle for a city that is controlled by its inhabitants. (Purcell, 2014, p. 150)

Thus, the right to participation is a call for direct and active urban citizen- and stewardship. The right to appropriation, lastly, calls for the right to access, occupy and use urban space. Thus, it has a two-fold connotation of the physical: On the one hand, it can stand for a physical (material) appropriation of urban space, and on the other hand, it speaks to the physical (bodily) presence of inhabitants in urban space (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 179; Purcell, 2002, p. 103). Moreover, Purcell (2002) identifies “[…] a much broader and more structural meaning” (p. 103) within the right to appropriation: To appropriate something is to take it to oneself, to make it one’s own. In claiming a right to the city, inhabitants take urban space as their own, they appropriate what is properly theirs. […] They take what properly belongs to inhabitants of a community and arrogate it to property owners, to those who bought land in the marketplace. […] Appropriation is thus a way to rethink the concept of rightful ownership, to radically transform our notions about who

50

Lefebvre (1996) further specifies that “[o]nly the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization” (p. 158).

The city, the urban, and space

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rightfully owns the city. Not only does it refuse a property rights conception of ownership, it affirms a radical alternative: the city belongs to those who inhabit it. (Purcell, 2014, p. 149)

Thus, this also challenges the neoliberal perception of urban property and land as commodities. The right to the city, as the collective right of those differentiated above, hence can be understood as the call – or cry and demand, as Lefebvre stated (1996, p. 158) – for a possible future of the urban society. Peter Marcuse (2011), stressing the collective moment of the right to the city, aptly summarizes that […] the right to the city is a unitary right, a single right that makes claim to a city in which all of the separate and individual rights so often cited in charters and agendas and platforms are implanted. It is The right to the city, not rights to the city. It is a right to social justice, which includes but far exceeds the right to individual justice. (p. 34, emphasis in original)

Challenges and criticism To conclude this discussion certain limitations and challenges of Lefebvre’s spatial theory will be briefly addressed in the following. I will, however, disregard the criticisms towards those publications that adapted, used, or discussed Lefebvre’s work (such as Harvey, 1973/1988; Soja, 1996), because this might lead to a seemingly endless loop of criticism. Hereinafter, I will address 1) the matter of comprehensibility of, 2) the question of actuality of, and 3) the vagueness and openness in Lefebvre’s works discussed before. The first point that needs to be discussed is as much a personal reflection as it is an observation from reading various secondary literature on Lefebvre’s work. In his 90-years long life, Lefebvre published an immense body of work concerned with rural sociology (1963), Marxism (1958), the everyday life (1991a, 2002, 2008), and numerous books and articles related to the city, the urban, and space (1991b, 1996, 2003b) – just to name a few. Based on, especially, the English translations, an additional amount of secondary literature needs to be considered. Many of Lefebvre’s works build onto each other. As I have shown in the preceding subchapters, for instance, Lefebvre’s spatial theory developed from his writings on cities first and then the urban; the same goes for the right to the city, first mentioned in 1968 and then taken up and specified in following publications. Thus, to grasp the complete oeuvre of Lefebvre’s work (and the secondary literature) could be a life’s work. Against this background, it is no surprise that there are disparate interpretations of his work. Moreover, Lefebvre is not short of references to philosophy, history, politics, and literature within his works, as Merrifield (2006) comments: The explorations in The Production of Space […] are explorations of an extraordinary protean, seventy-three-year-old French Marxist. Of course, there’s much more going on than plain old-fashioned Marxism: Hegel crops up often; Nietzsche’s spirit is palpable; and Lefebvre’s grasp of romantic poetry, modern art, and architecture is demonstrable. Meanwhile, he breezes through the history of Western philosophy as if it’s kids’ stuff, as if

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Space and place everybody understands his unreferenced allusions, his playful punning and pointed pillorying. (p. 103, emphasis in original)

I am not able to provide a solution to this dilemma of an abundance of fascinating work, except to repeat that from my understanding of critical urban research and thus within this study, too, I never claim comprehensiveness. Further, Schmid (2005, p. 332) points out that this seems to be impossible and would be in conflict with Lefebvre’s premise that totality cannot be captured51. So, what I can do, is to point out gaps and voids and reflect on them critically. Since most of Lefebvre’s publications cited here were originally published between the late 1960s and the end of the 1970s, the question of the current relevance and actuality of his work needs to be addressed. In his publications on cities, urbanization, and space, Lefebvre especially focuses on critically discussing the modernist planning of the functional city and the capitalist modes of production which lead to homogeneous, fragmented, and commodified urban spaces, where use value is replaced by exchange value. Even though these processes might have been modified in the past, they are still applicable to a variety of urban spaces52. This is also demonstrated by the fact that for at least ten years, the right to the city as a claim is experiencing a revival among various social movements that target issues of urban social justice (see for example Netzwerk Recht auf Stadt, 2019; Right To The City Alliance, 2019), and among academics for even longer (Brenner et al., 2011; Gilbert & Dikeç, 2008; Harvey, 2008, 2012; Holm & Gebhardt, 2011; Marcuse, 2009, 2011; Mayer, 2009; Novy & Colomb, 2013; Purcell, 2002, 2014). Further, without naming it globalization, Lefebvre already hints at this phenomenon, before the globalization debate started (Lefebvre, 2003b; Schmid, 2005, p. 157). Even though Harvey has been criticized for presenting an adaption of Lefebvre’s production of space that is (too) economic and not concerned enough with the social (Schmid, 2005, pp. 41ff.), Harvey’s work can be regarded as a profound and up-to-date criticism – and thus advancement of Lefebvre’s work – on the global circulation of capital and neoliberal urban development. Thus, although most of Lefebvre’s work germane to the present study is at least forty years old, it has not lost its relevance, especially when his thoughts are regarded as ‘the bigger picture’. Also, it offers numerous links and possibilities to re-read under the lens of current debates. Finally, the vagueness and openness that run through Lefebvre’s theories will be addressed. Within the production of space, for example, Schmid (2005, p. 231) identifies three major challenges that might lead to misinterpretation: Lefebvre doesn’t clarify every specific term he uses, terms and theory are not always well thought out, and he does not always disclose the theoretical principles of his work. Merrifield (2006) exemplifies this in regards to the spatial triad: “Yet

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Original: “Dies scheint unmöglich und würde Lefebvres eigenen Prämissen widersprechen, gemäss [sic] der sich die Totalität nicht erfassen und nicht ausschöpfen lässt” (Schmid, 2005, p. 332). Although here should be mentioned that Lefebvre’s work is biased towards a Western perspective, mostly stemming from his own observations in Paris and Europe.

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cohesiveness doesn’t necessarily imply coherence, and Lefebvre is vague about how spatial practices mediate between the conceived and the lived, about how spatial practices keep representations of space and spaces of representation together, yet apart” (pp. 110f.). What Lefebvre is also vague about – even though he stresses the importance of the interaction and relation of theory and practice – is how to operationalize his theory in doing urban research. Where this could lead to misinterpretation of his work on one side, I prefer a more prolific approach, suggested by Schmid (2005, p. 332): Taking the theory on the production of space as direction, as an indication. An appropriation that uses the openness of the analysis and the theoretical construction creatively, in the spirit of maieutic was highly appreciated by Lefebvre53. Purcell (2014), discussing if Lefebvre’s demand for the right to the city is too radical or too utopian, also comes up with an inspiring conclusion: It is utopian, but that is precisely its strength. [...] So it seems to me what Lefebvre is offering is not impractical at all. Rather it is a task that is quite practical, concrete, and achievable: seek and learn to recognize the urban that is all around us but hidden, and then nurture it in whatever way we can. […] But recognizing the urban requires a revolutionary imagination. It requires a habit of thinking in terms of urgent utopia. To see the present urban we must be willing to imagine and demand a possible world, even if that world is impossible under the conditions that exist now. (p. 151)

While on the preceding pages I focused on the city, the urban, and space, and especially their production, I will add another layer to this spatial approach and turn towards Massey’s theory of a global sense of place. Both, space as well as place, are the background against which the artistic practices that are introduced in chapter 7 will be discussed in chapter 8.

3.2

A global sense of place

The geographer Doreen Massey (1944-2016) decisively shaped feminist theory within and beyond geography. She published various books and articles on themes such as globalization, uneven development, gender, space, and place, guided by asking “[…] how and why ‘geography matters’ to understanding the operation of social, economic and political relations” (Meegan, 2017, p. 1286). Massey’s work emphasizes the importance of analyzing local phenomena – though not as self-contained entities, but with their relations to the global – and she thus developed the theory of a global sense of place. Before I discuss this theory, however, it is necessary to elucidate Massey’s concept of space which is closely linked to the concept of place.

53

Original: “Als […] Möglichkeit bleibt, dieses Werk als Richtung, als Anhaltspunkt zu nehmen. Eine Aneignung, die die Offenheit der Analyse und der theoretischen Konstruktionen kreativ einsetzt, im Sinne der von Lefebvre selbst so geschätzten Mäeutik” (Schmid, 2005, p. 332).

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From space to place Massey (2009) identifies three characteristics that conceptualize space: First, space is produced by relations. It is “[…] a complexity of networks, links, exchanges, [and] connections […]. Taking this opening proposition seriously immediately implies that space is a ‘product’: it is produced through the establishment or refusal of relations” (pp. 16f., emphasis in original). Second, space is the sphere or dimension of multiplicity (Massey, 1999, p. 279, 2009, p. 17). Characterizing space as a sphere or dimension allows “[…] the simultaneous coexistence of more than one thing” (Massey, 2009, p. 17) and “[…] the possibility of the existence of more than one voice” (Massey, 1999, p. 279) or one narrative. At the same time, space could not exist without multiplicity: “If space is the product of interrelations […] then it must be predicated upon the existence of plurality. The very fact of interrelation entails the notion of multiplicity. Multiplicity and space are co-constitutive” (Massey, 1999, p. 280). And third, space is always in a process of construction, of being made and unmade, and thus is never finished (Massey, 1999, pp. 283f.). This includes that space “[…] is also always open to the future” (Massey, 2009, p. 17), meaning that when space is constantly being made and remade, there is also a possibility of change. If space is conceptualized by these characteristics, then place can be regarded “[…] as a particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings […]” (Massey, 1994, p. 5). Massey’s concept of a global sense of place evolves from her critique on a reactionary definition of place where places are described as static, self-contained, and homogeneous (Massey, 1994, p. 5). According to her, places are also dynamic processes that have multiple identities and no boundaries (in the sense of enclosures) and are “[…] open and porous” (Massey, 1994, p. 5). They are constructed through powerful “[e]conomic, political and cultural social relations […] with internal structures of domination and subordination stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international” (Massey, 1994, p. 154). The specificity, or uniqueness, of a place is thus composed of the people, groups, and activities coming together at a particular locus at a particular moment (Massey, 1984, pp. 8f., 1994, pp. 5, 154). Hereby, Massey (1994) adds another important aspect to the spatial, time: The view, then, is of space-time as a configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity. Moreover, since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is as an ever shifting social geometry of power and signification. (p. 3)

This geometry of power is based on the concept of time-space-compression, articulated, among others, by Harvey (1989b) in The Condition of Postmodernity:

A global sense of place

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An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change54. For Massey (1994), “[t]imespace compression refers to movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this” (p. 147). She gives examples for this such as global flows of capital, the increase in travel as well as the distance of travel, international production chains, or telecommunication – all of which could also be summarized as processes of globalization (Massey, 1994, p. 146). However, there are differences among people’s mobility as well as sense of space and place: not everyone is experiencing timespace-compression the same way. Massey (1994) summarizes this under the concept of power geometry: This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it55. (p. 149)

Besides financial capital, other factors that influence and/ or restrict the timespace compression are race and gender.

Uniqueness and multiplicity of place So, there are two distinct and seemingly opposing characteristics of place: On the one hand there is the idea of uniqueness or specificity of place as well as people’s attachment to it, and on the other hand place is seen as an ephemeral social construct (Belina, 2013, pp. 116f.; Massey, 1984, pp. 8f., 1994, p. 151). Thus, Massey (1994) suggests thinking through a progressive sense of place, “[…] one which would fit in with the current global-local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and which would be useful in what are, after all, political struggles often inevitably based on place” (pp. 151f., emphasis in original). A progressive sense of place consists of four main assumptions: - Places, constituted through social relations, cannot be static. They are dynamic processes since social relations are dynamic themselves.

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Harvey discusses time-space compression especially with its relation to the organization of capitalism, building upon Marx’s concept of the annihilation of space through time (Harvey, 1989b, pp. 201ff.). Massey (1994) gives various examples such as the jet-setters who are “[…] in charge of timespace compression, who can really use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases” (p. 149) or, on the other side of the spectrum, refugees who are highly mobile, but “[…] not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all” (p. 149).

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Space and place

- Places don’t have boundaries in the sense of enclosures that create an inside versus outside, an ‘us versus them’56. Rather, a definition “[…] can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage to that ‘outside’ which is therefore itself part of what constitutes the place” (Massey, 1994, p. 155, emphasis in original). - Places don’t have a single, but multiple identities and are conflictual. - Places, however, are still unique constructs: “The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it is not a specificity which results from some long, internalized history. There are a number of sources of this specificity - the uniqueness of place” (Massey, 1994, p. 155). So instead of globalization producing enclosed, homogeneous, and singular places, it (re)produces uneven development and unique places. Massey (1994) concludes that [i]t is a sense of place, an understanding of ‘its character’, which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond. A progressive sense of place would recognize that, without being threatened by it. What we need […] is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place. (p. 156)

At this point, an important difference between Massey’s and Lefebvre’s spatial theories concerning time and especially history should be mentioned. While Lefebvre follows a more linear model of historical progress and periodization (Steets, 2008, p. 75) – also reflected in his rather generalizing and reductionistic description of ‘historical cities’ –, Massey’s view on history is more progressive: As described above, according to Massey (1994, p. 155) specificity of place does not result from its enclosed, internalized history, but “[…] is part of a process of social change – something which happens over time” (Massey & Jess, 1995, p. 222). Massey and Jess (1995) further suggest looking at history as “[…] ‘layers’ of social relations accumulating over time. Each new layer interacts with and ‘merges’ with previous layers in a process which adds new characteristics and changes existing ones, or may even suppress and obliterate aspects of the ‘old’” (p. 222). Thus, identities of a place are made, remade, and contested, and power plays a major role in this: power over who interprets the past, which stories of the past are told and by whom, and finally who decides on the future (meaning) of a place (Massey & Jess, 1995, pp. 231f.). Finally, three implications of Massey’s concept of the global sense of place need to be emphasized: First, place, as the dynamic simultaneity constituted out of social relations inevitably needs to be understood as social. Hence, the social and the spatial are indivisible in the way that the spatial is socially constructed, but at the same time, the social is spatially constructed, too; in this way, both, the spatial and the social, are outcome and explanation. Secondly, studying the

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Massey (1994, p. 155) acknowledges however that boundaries of counties and countries exist and that certain areas of study relay on (creating) boundaries. But, “[…] these lines do not embody eternal truth of places; rather they are lines drawn by society to serve particular purposes” (Massey, 1995b, p. 68, emphasis in original), and thus are socially (and politically) constructed.

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spatial means studying variation, difference as well as specificity and uniqueness. But analyzing the specificity of a place also involves linking it to places beyond, to “[…] the generality of events, and [to] wider processes lying behind” (Massey, 1984, p. 9), because “[w]hat is at issue […] is the articulation of the general with the local (the particular) to produce qualitatively different outcomes in different localities” (Massey, 1984, p. 9). Thirdly, the histories, identities, and meanings of place are contested and subject to power struggles and negotiations. Since places are never ‘finally produced’, histories, identities, and meanings are not engraved in stone either but might change as they are continuously made and remade.

4 4.1

Interim conclusion Interim conclusion

Before I proceed to the methodical approach of this study, I will summarize the crucial approaches and assumptions laid out in the previous two chapters in order to bring the theoretical strands of art, space, and place together to refine them for the analysis and in reference to the research questions. As pointed out, socially engaged art covers a spectrum of activities that have in common that social interaction is paramount. Social interaction can be the subject, aim, or material of socially engaged art (Hawkins, 2012, p. 56; Helguera, 2011, p. 2). However, this should not be understood as necessarily a direct dialog or interaction between artist and audience that requires the physical presence of both sides at the same time: It can take a variety of forms such as the interaction between material and audience with the artist being absent. Closely associated with this is also the assumption that art can be a possibility to design and test different realities and futures (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 13; Wright, 2010, p. 6). This goes along with Bishop’s (2012, pp. 26f.) suggestion of considering not only the visual or aesthetic aspect of art but also the social and political. It thereby calls for engaging with the contradiction of the simultaneous heteronomy and autonomy of art. When looking at this through a geographical perspective, though, another aspect becomes crucial: the relations of art and (its) site. Site-specific art often refers to commissioned work that has the objective of beautification or regeneration, and that is located in spaces that are accessible to ‘the public’ and/ or owned by the state (Hewitt & Jordan, 2016, p. 30; Lewitzky, 2005, p. 85). But site-specific art can also intervene, irritate, and stir up conversation in its site and beyond, it can annoy or be perceived as an eye-sore, and sometimes everything together at the same time (Deutsche, 1988, pp. 13ff.; J. Sharp et al., 2005, pp. 1016f.). Sitespecific art can, however, – and I will return to this in depth in chapters 7 and 8 –, be illegal or unauthorized work that is located at sites that in Detroit transgress the common binary of either public or private space. Especially in post-industrial cities of the ‘Global North’, strategies of cultureled regeneration, among them public art programs, have been adopted in the past decades. Frequently, these strategies are met with resistance and are associated

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with gentrification and displacement. Therefore, artists play a crucial role in these debates since they and their social and cultural capital may attract developers and/ or be used by them to gentrify an area. But eventually, it is mostly a party other than artists that has the financial means to buy, develop, and, at worst, displace residents (Markusen, 2006, p. 1937). Site-specificity is also reflected in Massey’s (1994, p. 146) concept of a global sense of place in which she points out the uniqueness of place which, however, need to be linked to places beyond to be understood. According to her, place is a process that is dynamic and shaped by social relations, has no boundaries in the sense of enclosures, and has multiple identities, meanings, and histories. At the same time, “[…] none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place” (Massey, 1994, p. 155). With this, Massey points out that general or global processes have different outcomes and manifestations in different places and thus stresses the importance of analyzing specific places: There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations interact with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world. (Massey, 1994, p. 156)

Referring to Detroit this implies that on the one hand, Detroit’s past and present developments need to be placed and discussed in the context of rather global and national developments (the general), such as deindustrialization or suburbanization. On the other hand, this allows close attention to be paid to how the general articulates in the particular (the local) and calls for the analysis of Detroit’s local circumstances, developments, and history. Going one step further and integrating visual art and artistic practices into the global sense of place, the question arises as to how far art and artistic practices are producing unique places and in how far unique places produce art and artistic practices – which I will come back to in chapters 7 and 8. Continuing with Lefebvre’s spatial theory, it can be summarized that much of his work is concerned with the urban: The urban as an aim, as a potential or as a possibility to overcome homogeneity, fragmentation, and hierarchy in the production of space (Schmid, 2005, p. 153; Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 236). Further, in Lefebvre’s (2003b, pp. 77ff.) concept of social order, the urban acts as the intermediate level (M) between the global level (G) and the private level (P). On all three of these levels, space is produced, and the levels influence the production. This is quite similar to Massey’s approach to considering how the general articulates with the local (the particular) (Massey, 1984, p. 9). Both, Massey and Lefebvre, suggest including processes of globalization (the ‘global level’ or ‘the general’) in the analysis of space and place. While Lefebvre focuses more on the relations of/ between the three levels, Massey’s emphasis lies on the “[…] qualitatively different outcomes in different localities” (Massey, 1984, p. 9) produced thereby.

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Interim conclusion

Further, the production of space is always an expression of social structures and conditions57 (Rössel, 2014, p. 32) and thus, social practice and spatial practice are indivisible. Taking this into account, Lefebvre introduces a two-fold triad of the production of space, consisting of three formants that together produce space: spatial practice (perceived space), representation of space (conceived space), and representational space (lived space) (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 33). Thus, space, which is not one but unlimited overlapping spaces, regarded as the outcome and process of production, is dynamic and thereby inseparable from time (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 219). Massey, too, works with the concept of space-time although she has a more progressive view on time and history. Massey rejects the idea that specificity of place results from an internalized, enclosed history and suggests that “[t]he identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant” (Massey, 1995a, p. 186, emphasis in original). She thus underscores not only the multiplicity of place (its identities, meanings, histories) but also the power and dominance that shape it. Time as well as power also play crucial roles when it comes to the right to the city. It describes a utopian vision and hints at a possible future of urban life, differentiated into the right to oeuvre, the right to participation, and the right to appropriation. The right to the city is based on the central assumption that space is highly contested: “Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies” (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 31). Thus, it is important to consider who is in power over space, who owns, controls and/ or dominates it, and who produces which meanings and significations (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 26). The right to the city is, therefore, a demand for “[…] recognition of the need to reassert the right of inhabitants and not merely the rights of those with power and capital, to produce, shape, and use space according to their needs, wants and desires” (Zieleniec, 2016, para. 22). For the present study, I combine the spatial theories of Massey and Lefebvre because they complement each other in a way that provides a suitable approach for the research question posed: While Massey emphasizes the characteristics of place, the dynamics and multiplicities as well as the identities, meanings, and histories that shape them, Lefebvre’s focus lies on the production process of space, on the relations in which space is produced and reproduced. That is not to say that Massey does not discuss relations or Lefebvre does not look at conflicting meanings, but rather that their main emphases differ – however, not to the extent that they are too conflicting to combine. Further, they both have their theoretical roots in Marxism which shapes their perspectives, and which articulates among others in discussions of power, control, and dominance over space and place. Therefore, combing these two approaches provides the appropriate perspective to analyze spaces, artistic practices as well as their relationships.

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Original: “Damit ist Raumproduktion immer auch Ausdruck gesellschaftlicher Strukturen und Verhältnisse” (Rössel, 2014, p. 32).

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Rightly, Stanek (2007) remarks that “[…] the broadness of Lefebvre’s concept of space inevitably means that his theory is provisional and it cannot provide universal categories applicable in every context in the same way” (p. 463); a similar statement can be made regarding the broadness of Massey’s approach to place, too. Therefore, it calls for “[…] analyses of urban spaces which combine a study of urban forms with historical, political, and sociological investigations” (Stanek, 2007, p. 464). Now, following Hawkins’ (2017) statement that “[…] the making of art and the making of space are entwined” (p. xvii) implies that artistic practices and spatial practices are entwined. Accordingly, space produces art and art produces space – the basic assumption of the present study. This in turn signifies that to analyze space means to analyze art and to analyze art means to analyze space. Now, since neither art nor space simply exist but are produced, the focus lies on how artistic practices produce spaces and how spaces produce artistic practices. Therefore, after the methodical approach is introduced in chapter 5, three subsequent steps together will form the analysis: First, Detroit’s history and recent urban developments are presented in chapter 6 to analyze the historical as well as the political and social form of the city, as suggested by Stanek (2007, p. 464). Second, chapter 7 presents the artistic practices identified in the material and thus focuses on how artists operate. And third, chapter 8 will bring together the theoretical strands of this study with the essential points made in chapter 6 as well as the findings of chapter 7 to analyze the ways that artistic practices produce spaces and how spaces produce the artistic practices. The theoretical approaches, especially the spatial theories, are thereby not applied as abstract models. Since this study is empirically based, the theoretical approaches are considered rather as foils to look through or perspectives to take in order to analyze artistic practices. Based on Massey’s and Lefebvre’s spatial theories set out above, the focus is on the characteristics, dynamics, and multiplicities as well as meanings, identities, and histories of space and place. And further, the process of the production of space and place and the relations in which they are produced and reproduced are at the center.

5

How to keep grip of the general and the local

In the introduction to the reader Geography matters! (Massey & Allen, 1984) Massey (1984), when discussing the uniqueness of places, states that “[t]he fundamental methodological question is how to keep a grip on the generality of events, the wider processes lying behind them, without losing sight of the individuality of the form of their occurrence” (p. 9). In the present study, in order ‘to keep grip’ of both, the generality and the individuality of (the production of) space as well as to unravel the complex relationships between artistic practices and space, I combined literature research and sources such as newspaper and art magazine articles as well as internet sources such as websites, blogs, and social media with ethnographic research ‘on the ground’. These different modes of research were not done consecutively but rather parallel and intertwined to also show particular gaps that another method might fill. Since the main focus of this study is on ethnographic research, I will discuss this approach in more depth in the following. Beginning with a general introduction to ethnography, I then focus on ethnography as a field-based practice as well as matters of reflexivity, positionality, and the situatedness of knowledge. In the second part of the chapter, I address the specific methods I applied for gathering data and explain why and how I used them. Before I move on to close the chapter with a methodological criticism, I will discuss how the gathered data were analyzed.

5.1

Ethnographic research

Ethnography has its roots in anthropological studies of the early 20th century, often conducted within a colonial framework as observations of ‘the other’. However, over the decades, ethnography developed into an umbrella term for various methods58, applied across diverse disciplines, and ethnographers also turned their

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Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) thus state that ethnography’s “[…] complex history is one of the reasons why [it] does not have a standard, well-defined meaning. Over the course of time, and in each of the various disciplinary contexts [...], its sense has been reinterpreted and recontextualized in various ways, in order to deal with particular circumstances” (p. 2).

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attention towards the societies they are a part of (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, pp. 1f.; Knoblauch, 2014, pp. 521f.). In the 1980s, heavily influenced by Clifford and Marcus publication Writing Culture (1986), the ‘crisis of representation’ changed the way ethnographers worked and wrote: One consequence of this moment of supposed crisis was the advocacy of more open and ‘messy’ texts. In other words, rather than having a single narrative or a single authorial viewpoint, ethnographic texts would have more variegated textures, combining different kinds of writing style, and shifting viewpoint. (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 203)

At the crisis’ core was the critique of ethnographers privileged gaze on ‘the other’, the authority over interpretation and text as well as the realization that ethnographies tell only partial, situated, and incomplete stories (Atkinson et al., 2014, p. 3; Clifford, 1986, p. 7; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, pp. 203f.; Katz, 1992, pp. 487ff.). While these challenges are not necessarily overcome per se, they are often considered now and actively addressed by the ethnographer. Especially feminist and post-colonial theorists have engaged with the related queries of positionality, reflexivity, and the situatedness of knowledge (e.g., Haraway, 1988; Katz, 1992; Rose, 1997), which I will return to below in more detail. Ethnography is usually field-based, focused on small groups and/ or scales, and can involve […] a range of methods and time-intensive techniques […] including: participant observation; participant action research; writing field notes and memos; sketching maps; gathering visual, material, and documentary materials; engaging in informal conversations; asking people to document and describe their everyday worlds; and conducting in-depth to semistructured interviews, focus group interviews, and/or surveys. (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 122)

It focuses on “[…] what people do as well as what they say” (Herbert, 2000, p. 552, emphasis in original), thus often combining methods, e.g., interviews and observations. Data collection is often unstructured and “[…] ethnographers typically enter the field more interested in generally exploring particular social phenomena than testing specific hypotheses […]” (Herbert, 2000, p. 552), which, however, can lead to theory building. Ethnography is process-oriented and non-linear, meaning that “[…] the initial interests and questions that motivated the research will be refined, and perhaps even transformed, over the course of the research; and that this may take a considerable amount of time” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 3). Thus, ethnographic research, from fieldwork to data analysis, is usually an iterative and time-consuming process. Herbert (2000) argues that ethnography is particularly suitable for geography since it “[…] uncover[s] the processes and meanings that undergird sociospatial life” (p. 550, emphasis in original). Watson and Till (2010) state similar when outlining that “[w]ithin geography, ethnography is […] used to understand how people create and experience their worlds through processes such as place making, inhabiting social spaces, forging local and transnational networks, and representing and decolonizing spatial imaginaries” (pp. 121f.). Hence, ethnography seems to be able to unfold the processes, dynamics, and meanings of spatial production which is one of the reasons the approach was chosen for this study.

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How to keep grip of the general and the local

It is obvious that there “[…] could be no ethnography without the ethnographer” (Katz, 1992, p. 496). But it also hints at the ethnographer’s personal engagement with the research and the (sensual, emotional) experiences made in the field (Clifford, 1986, p. 13; Herbert, 2000, pp. 552f.) as well as the power they hold over the research and its narration: “With very rare exceptions it is the researcher who narrates, who ‘authors’ the ethnography. In the last instance an ethnography is a written document structured primarily by a researcher’s purposes, offering a researcher’s interpretations, registered in a researcher’s voice” (Stacey, 1988, p. 23). At the same time, ethnographers do not enter the field with a tabula rasa. With displacing their bodies to the field, they also bring with them their character, personality, prior experiences and encounters influenced by their positionality “[…] in terms of race, nationality, age, gender, social and economic status, sexuality” (Rose, 1997, p. 308), educational background and other. Common criticisms expressed towards ethnography are therefore its lack of objectivity, its lack of scientificity, and its lack of reliability (Herbert, 2000, p. 558). While I do regard these as legitimate and important points of criticism that are worth engaging with, they are not exclusive to ethnography but apply – in different degrees – to all research activities; otherwise, it would mean that there is a way to do completely objective research (Herbert, 2000, pp. 558f.).

5.2

The field?

Defining ethnography as a field-based practice means by implication that the field is of decisive importance to ethnographic work. While doing my research as well as working and teaching in academia in general, I often stumbled upon a common sense of what the term field describes: a demarcated place where you go to in order to conduct your research and that you leave once that specific job is done (Nast, 1994, p. 56). While there might be some truths to this, I understand the field as more than just a physical space I visit and leave. The field can be regarded as a relational, situational, and dynamic network that is assembled by the researcher to construct and […] define a site of inquiry that is necessarily artificial in its separations from geographical space and the flow of time. In most cases it is the ethnographer who draws the lines, defining in and out. Each focus, of course, excludes as well as includes. (Katz, 1994, p. 67)

The field is dynamic in the sense that its construction and borders move and alter according to its context. It is not merely a spatial but also a social and political network. At the same time, the field “[…] is a place ‘in-between’ […]” (Nast, 1994, p. 60), between the (supposedly) known and unknown, and being inside(r) and outside(r). Herewith the separation of field and not-field, and the binary of inside and outside of the field vanishes. Latour (1997, p. 222), for example, describes in his essay Der Pedologenfaden von Boa Vista that the pedologists he observed at their work create a place in-between jungle and their home by taking specimens to a research facility. But it is more than just physical artifacts that contribute to the in-between and that connect the field with, e.g., the researcher’s home: The

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researcher carries their biography, experiences, emotions, knowledge, and findings to the field and back. Hyndman (2001) states accordingly: Despite the intellectual, sociocultural, and economic baggage that field-workers take along, they never return ‘home’ quite the same. The field-worker […] is changed by exposure to new places and insights, and [they] return to a changed place […]. The field, then, is both here and there, a continuum of time and place. (p. 265)

Similarly, Ngunjiri et al. (2010) describe research as “[…] an extension of researchers’ lives” (p. 2). Although to reach supposed objectivity researchers might try “[…] to separate self from research activities, it is an impossible task. Scholarship is inextricably connected to self-personal interest, experience, and familiarity” (Ngunjiri et al., 2010, p. 2). Without an ethnographer, after all, there would not be an ethnography. This also hints at the power relations connected to the field and field-work because the researcher does also affect the field in immediate and in indirect ways, as Katz (1994) notes: One goes to the field as a kind of ‘stranger,’ and draws on that status to see difference and ask questions that under other circumstances might seem (even more) intrusive, ignorant, or inane to those who answer them. The answers, and what one makes of them, have currency in other sites of enunciation-journals, classrooms, conference halls-that the ethnographer travels to with the scholarly equivalent of war stories. (p. 68)

The currency, Katz hints at, accentuates the successes and interesting findings of research and, at the same time, disguises the moments of failure, shortfall, or coincidence that shape research as well. However, even what appears to be non-data can be turned […] into data by paying systematic attention to unplanned or ‘accidental’ moments in the field. The importance of such observations lies not in what they tell us about the particular, but what they suggest about the larger political and social world in which they (and the researcher) are embedded. (Fujii, 2015, p. 526)

This not only shows the essential role of being in the field but also that the researcher continues to be a researcher, even when they are not applying specific methods to gather knowledge. I acknowledged that my ‘ethnographic antenna’ is always turned on when I am in Detroit (and beyond) and that my research was not only shaped by planned interviews or observations but also through mundane activities like my bike trips to the supermarket, the occasional use of public transportation, visiting and/ or volunteering at community events and the countless hours spent on my computer in coffee shops. So, in the present study, following Nast (1994) and Katz (1994), the field could be described as – on a broader level – the city of Detroit and its spatial, social, economic, and political networks and histories. Within this larger field, my focus is narrowed down to visual art, artistic practices, and their mutual interdependence with the urban space in the city of Detroit.

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In the field Between 2016 and 2019, I have spent four research stays in Detroit that lasted from several weeks to several months. During all these journeys, I traveled by myself and I stayed at the same accommodation (except for a few days of couch surfing upon arriving in Detroit in 2016), called Base Camp Detroit, located on the city’s east side. What is particularly interesting about Base Camp is that it is a century-old mansion that was turned into a hospital, then into a nursing home, and now into a hostel. When I stayed at Base Camp for the first time in September 2016 the owners, Alex and Jenny, had just bought the building a few months prior and were starting renovation while renting out a few rather improvised rooms to fund the renovation work. While it is not just a nice coincidence that the becoming of the hostel and the development of this study run parallel, Base Camp is also worth noting because of the larger circumstances of how it came to be: In 2013, Alex and Jenny were searching for a place to settle down somewhere in the US, when they learned about Detroit’s bankruptcy and the state of the city’s real estate market. After visiting the city, they quickly decided on moving to Detroit and have since bought several formerly abandoned houses, condos, and lots, doing most of the renovation work themselves while renting rooms and apartments for long and short periods. Their story apparently fits so well into the narratives of newcomers moving to and reviving Detroit that they were portrayed in a National Geographic feature about Detroit titled Tough, Cheap, and Real, Detroit Is Cool Again (Ager, 2015). I mention this because the place (which includes the two owners) is of importance to my research since it did not only provide for me a temporary home and a place to improve my renovating skills over several years, but it is a place that helped me connect with artists. Alex and Jenny themselves as well as another temporary resident at the Base Camp put me in touch with artists with whom they are acquainted. Thus, they, among a few other people, acted as important intermediaries59 to a field I frequently struggled to get access to when trying to reach someone via email (field notes April 28, 2017). Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) describe the process of achieving access to a field as also, but […] not merely a practical concern. Not only does its achievement depend upon theoretical understanding, often disguised as ‘native wit’, but also the discovery of obstacles to access, and perhaps of effective means of overcoming them, itself provides insights into the social organization of the setting or the orientations of the people being researched. (p. 41)

I quickly learned that often, either the personal contact, e.g., at an exhibition opening and/ or being introduced to someone by a mutual acquaintance, is more effective than writing an email. The former, however, is much more limited and does require me to be in the field which was only possible a few carefully planned and carved out weeks or months a year. This, however, hints at another challenge

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I prefer to use the term ‘intermediaries’ instead of ‘gatekeepers’ since the latter are usually closer connected to and hold a certain power over the research setting (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, pp. 49ff.), while ‘my’ intermediaries are characterized by simply knowing someone who fits into my research setting and putting me in touch with them.

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I faced and that shaped my research: With a linear distance of approximately 6.500 kilometers between Detroit and Hamburg (my hometown), there were long stretches of time that I was (bodily) absent from Detroit. Although frequently overcome by the feeling of being at the wrong time, in the wrong place when missing events or possible interview partners in Detroit, I used social media, newsletters, and local newspapers to stay connected to and to be up to date with Detroit. Here, too, the notion of the field as “[…] a continuum of time and place” (Hyndman, 2001, p. 265) becomes apparent.

Field notes From the beginning of my dissertation project in early 2016 until the end in 2021, I filled four, almost identical A5 notebooks, one sketch pad, and three digital text documents (field diaries from my research stays in 2017, 2018, and 2019). Since there is no common definition of what field notes are and it seems like every researcher taking them has their own (J. E. Jackson, 1990, pp. 6ff.; Walford, 2009, p. 127), I developed one that comprises mine. In the context of my work, I apply a broad definition: Field notes are written notes – from single words to whole phrases, in English and German, sometimes both languages in one sentence –, some complemented by photographs, drawings, or sketches, that capture thoughts and questions before, during or after fieldwork. They can comprise notes I took at events, conferences, and meetings or after interviews, as well as quotations of publications I read. I did not filter them beforehand, everything that seemed relevant at the given moment was captured. Following Taussig (2011), the notebooks traveled with me almost everywhere (that was or seemed work-related) in the past years: “Notebooks like to travel, first to new places, second to new ideas” (p. 8). It is not possible to thoroughly analyze my notebooks at this point, but browsing through them, I discovered that thoughts were shaped, and my focus narrowed down over time, but also that there are some thoughts I had early on in my research that became more relevant later. They also reflect emotions, experiences, and encounters – some words are more private and intimate, others are easy to share. With this in mind, I ask the reader to muse beyond the notebook as a necessary burden or a pile of paper and rather think about it “[…] like a magical object in a fairy tale. It is a lot more than an object, as it inhabits and fills out hallowed ground between meditation and production. Truly, writing is a strange business” (Taussig, 2011, p. 9). As magical as they might be, however, field notes also tell “[…] one selective story about what happened written from a particular point of view for a particular purpose” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 750).

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5.3

The situatedness of (my) knowledge

At the core of the crisis of representation, as mentioned above, is the “[…] recognition that one’s position affects one’s knowledge” (Herbert, 2000, p. 563) and therefore also the way research is done, data is interpreted, and texts are written. For several decades, feminist researchers have been stressing the importance of positionality and the situatedness of knowledges as well as the significance and challenges of (self-)reflexivity to explore how meanings are created (England, 1994; Haraway, 1988; Katz, 1992, 1994; Kobayashi, 1994; Nast, 1994; Rose, 1997). In her publication Situated Knowledges (1988), Donna Haraway argues […] for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. […] I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (p. 589)

Thus, understanding doing research as an embodied practice based on the researcher’s positionality and the situatedness of their knowledge also implies that the research(er) only tells a partial story and that further, the researcher can be held accountable for the stories they tell (Katz, 1992, p. 498). Since doing research involves navigating complex power relations (England, 1994, p. 82; Katz, 1994, pp. 68f.), I regard accountability as an important part of it. However, identities or the ‘knowing self’, as Haraway (1988, p. 586) puts it, are “[…] never finished, whole, simply there and original […]” (Haraway, 1988, p. 586); they are continuingly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed within relations. Katz (1992) therefore suggests that “[i]f we recognize the situatedness, and thus partiality, of all knowledges we can develop a politics that is empowering because it is not just about identity—a descriptive term—but about position” (p. 504). Herbert (2000) takes up the point of positioning and relation too, stating that [i]f some aspect of the social world of the studied group strikes the observer as exotic, it is essential to recognize that this says as much about the cultural milieu from which the ethnographer springs as it does the group under observation; ethnographies are as much about the culture of the student as they are of the studied. (p. 563)

While here, Herbert (2000) does not go into details of the terms ‘culture’ or ‘cultural milieu’, others have pointed out some of the elements that structure positions such as race, gender, social and economic status, educational background, nationality, age, dis/able-bodiedness, and sexual orientation as well as – and partially depending on them – biographies and lived experiences (England, 1994, p. 85; Haraway, 1988, p. 586; Katz, 1992, p. 496; Rose, 1997, p. 314). Now, to access and unveil positionality, England (1994), among others, suggest reflexivity which she describes as a “[…] self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher” (p. 82). But reflexivity – in the context of ethnography – does not only describe the looking “[…] ‘inward’ to the identity of the researcher, […] [but also] ‘outward’ to her relation to her research and what is described as ‘the wider world’” (Rose, 1997, p. 309). Further, Nencel (2014) describes reflexivity as both, “[…] epistemological — how we should learn about knowledge, as well as methodological — how we

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should do research to obtain this knowledge” (p. 76). Regarding research as a “[…] process not just a product” (England, 1994, p. 82, emphasis in original), then reflexivity, too, is a process that can accompany and have an impact on research and can be (part of) a product when put into (mostly) text form. I will return to the topic of process and product of reflexivity when introducing my approach to reflexivity in the form of autoethnography in a bit, but it is important to note the limitations of reflexivity here already. Katz (1992, pp. 504ff.) as well as Rose (1997, pp. 311ff.) both remark that it is impossible to fully know oneself and the research context. Rose (1997), arguing from the point of view that identities never exist isolated but are rather relational, uncertain, and performative constructs, states that […] there is no clear landscape of social positions to be charted by an all-seeing analyst; neither is there a conscious agent, whether researcher or researched, simply waiting to be reflected in a research project. Instead, researcher, researched and research make each other […]. (p. 316)

In ‘transparent reflexivity’60 Rose (1997) rather sees the risk of universalization: “[…] assuming that self and context are, even if in principle only, transparently understandable seems to me to be demanding an analytical certainty that is as insidious as the universalizing certainty that so many feminists have critiqued” (p. 318). I agree with the impossibility of ‘fully knowing’ as well as the trap of essentialization and universalization under the cover of situating knowledges. However, acknowledging that my knowledge is only partial, I side with Jensen and Glasmeier (2010) who quite simply state that “[…] if the researcher makes a sincere attempt to describe and explain to the audience what has led her into the topic and her relationship to it and to participants, the research will be more valuable than without such reflections” (p. 88). I, therefore, regard it as inevitable to engage with my own positionality and the situatedness of my knowledge that have shaped my research and myself. Of course, with all in mind discussed prior, I do not claim complete knowledge, neither about myself nor about my research context. I rather seek to open up about the position I speak (and write, think, analyze, research, and argument) from as much as possible and to also acknowledge the limits and ‘failings’ of my research – some of these topics have been touched upon already on the previous pages. Thus, I regard ethnography as “[…] a balancing act” (Vine et al., 2018, p. 8) in many respects, among them, balancing the self and the research context and, therefore, I will address the practice of reflexivity that I exercised for this study – namely, autoethnography – in the following.

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Rose (1997) uses the term ‘transparent reflexivity’ to describe the product of a reflexivity that offers a “[…] visible landscape of power, external to the researcher, transparently visible and spatially organized through scale and distribution […]. It [transparent reflexivity] depends on certain notions of agency (as conscious) and power (as context), and assumes that both are knowable. As a discourse, it produces feminist geographers who claim to know how power works, but who are also themselves powerful, able to see and know both themselves and the world in which they work” (p. 311).

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Autoethnography Autoethnography, according to Reed-Danahay (2017) is “[…] an umbrella term that can refer to autobiographical narratives about the doing of ethnography, or being an ethnographer, to the work of an anthropologist doing ethnography in their own society (the so-called ‘native anthropologist’), and to genres of fiction and memoir that incorporate an ethnographic […] sensibility about the author’s own cultural milieu” (p. 145). Usually written in the first-person narrative, the researcher’s very own emotions and experiences are brought to the fore, aiming to thereby reveal the subjectivity of knowledge and posing questions of positionality. “In other words, autoethnography is the representational outcome – the performance, in a sense – of a process of critical reflexivity […]” (Butz & Besio, 2009, p. 1662, emphasis in original). Thus, “[…] autoethnography is defined as a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context. It is both a method and a text […]” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 9). The texts, however, come in diverse forms and styles: “[…] short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 739). Autoethnography, therefore, blurs established boundaries – such as the alleged binary of science and art (Ellis et al., 2010, para. 40; Ellis & Bochner, 2000, pp. 747f.) – and can be described as open and fluid (Burnier, 2006, p. 414; Butz, 2010, p. 138). This in turn – autoethnography not being scientific enough – is one of the common criticisms expressed towards autoethnography. Other criticisms accuse autoethnography as being too evocative, too self-centered, and not objective (enough) (Lapadat, 2017, pp. 595ff.; Winkler, 2018, pp. 243f.), which, in part, is quite similar to the points of criticism concerning ethnography addressed before. Regarding the former, Ellis et al. (2010) respond that [t]hese criticisms erroneously position art and science at odds with each other, a condition that autoethnography seeks to correct. Autoethnography, as method, attempts to disrupt the binary of science and art. Autoethnographers believe research can be rigorous, theoretical, and analytical and emotional, therapeutic, and inclusive of personal and social phenomena. (para. 40, emphasis in original)

Besides, Winkler (2018) adds that the issues and challenges noted above “[…] should not be regarded as reflecting negatively on autoethnography but simply as necessary aspects that autoethnographers have to address during their journey” (p. 244). Thus, following Winkler (2018) and Ellis et al. (2010), among others, I regard these challenges as a call for more self-reflective knowledge production and an engagement with the situatedness of knowledge rather than a discouragement of autoethnography. Further, Butz (2010) considers the value of autoethnography to geographers in its ability to “[…] provide[] access to the affective qualities of place. […] In so doing, they offer insights into transculturation, hybridity and other deeply geographical phenomena from perspectives that are not often acknowledged in Geography” (p. 152). Therefore, autoethnography is often connected to fieldwork where it might raise “[…] questions about the nature of

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ethnographic knowledge by troubling the persistent dichotomies of insider versus outsider, distance versus familiarity, objective observer versus participant, and individual versus culture” (Reed-Danahay, 2017, p. 145). In this case, it is often written as a ‘personal experience narrative’ (Denzin, 1989, p. 43), where the autoethnographer focuses on themself and “[…] their own life circumstances as a way to understand larger social or cultural phenomena […]” (Butz & Besio, 2009, p. 1665). Opposed to field notes, autoethnography is a retrospective practice for which Ellis (1999) suggests the two practices of ‘emotional recall’ and ‘systematic sociological introspection’ (p. 671). They are based on imagining “[…] being back in the scene emotionally and physically. Revisiting the scene in that way leads to recalling other details, which produces deeper emotional remembering” (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, p. 168). Further, systematic sociological introspection […] means actively recalling thoughts and feelings from a social standpoint. Introspection emerges in and represents social interaction and occurs in response to bodily sensations, mental processes, and external stimuli, while it affects these same processes. As you introspect, you are not just listening to one voice arising alone in your head; usually, you access multiple interacting voices, which themselves are products of social forces and roles […]. (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, pp. 167f.)

Recalling and introspection can be based on one’s memory, “[…] diary entries and personal documents, letters, photographs, drawings” (Ploder & Stadlbauer, 2016, p. 754) and other (written) artifacts. As I have argued in Küttel (2021), however, the photographs used for retrospection are rarely visible in (published) autoethnographies as they are usually in written form only and the photographs are solely regarded as stimuli for writing. It is surprising to me that photographs themselves are not regarded as autoethnography because “[w]e may create images but, in doing so, we endow them with human characteristics, including the anthropomorphic power of agency” (Moxey, 2008, p. 135). I, therefore, propose the medium of a photo-essay, which is the combination of photographs and written word, as another autoethnographic practice. I will illustrate my approach to the photo-essay in the following.

Autoethnographic photo-essay Besides my notebook, laptop and senses, my camera and smartphone became important tools during my research stays in Detroit. Throughout the four visits to the city, I took over 1700 photographs. Many of these are directly connected to my research: they show exhibitions, sculptures, and museums. They are documentations as well as ways of visualizing and organizing my research. But there are many more photographs that show very different things and settings. They document my research stays – my everyday life, workplace, living space, and other activities and encounters in Detroit. At first, I did not take these photographs on purpose but rather incidentally. But once I realized their value, for me personally and for my research, I began taking these pictures more consciously

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and intentionally and paid closer attention to this kind of field-documentation. This also manifests in the fact that I shifted more and more from taking photographs with my – heavy and rather conspicuous – DSLR camera to taking them with my smartphone, which I carry with me most of the time in Detroit anyway and which allows a more discrete way of taking a photograph. In the next step, I wrote a text for each of these photographs, describing my thoughts, emotions, and sensations connected to them using Ellis’ (1999, p. 671) approaches of ‘emotional recall’ and ‘systematic sociological introspection’. The photographs then are both a stimulus for retrospection as well as visual and emotional representations and reconstructions of situations. They further illustrate that the boundaries between field and not-field are blurry since the photographs were taken in Detroit and the words were added afterward, usually when I was back home. This also refers back to fieldwork as an intimate endeavor that is impossible to separate from the researcher’s self (Hyndman, 2001, p. 265; Ngunjiri et al., 2010, p. 2). An extract from the photo-essay is shown below. I took the photograph in September 2016, at the end of my first visit to Detroit.

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Fig. 2: Extract from photo-essay (photo and text by author)

Two main themes can be discerned from this extract. First, it raises the question of how to enter a field and how to navigate its ‘messiness’ (Hyndman, 2001, p. 265). It hints at the researcher as a ‘stranger’ (Katz, 1994, p. 68) and the lack of objectivity as well as reflects on how to prepare for fieldwork. And second, it illustrates the impact that the narratives about Detroit had on me. During the first few days when I started to explore the city (mostly by foot), I felt very insecure: The combination of just starting to develop a sense of place for the city and carrying the negative, apocalypse-like stories about Detroit in the back of my head, led me to expect danger everywhere I went during these first days. However, it also shows the shift that happened in my perception after spending time in the

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city and becoming more familiar with it (it does not mean that I always felt safe hereafter, but that I developed a more nuanced view on the urban setting and potentially dangerous situations). I regard this as an important reason for fieldbased research as it allows for a deeper and more intensive perception of a place. I regard the photo-essay as both a method to approach my positionality as far and as well as possible, and as a visual and textual product capturing fieldexperiences. Following the former, I now use the photo-essay as a starting point to outline my positionality. Thus, following Streule (2018, p. 21), I will take a look at biographical dispositions as well as my ‘theoretical background’ and ‘methodological apparatus’61. I started to develop a strong interest in Detroit around the time of the city’s bankruptcy case in 2013/ 2014. Watching the documentary Geisterstädte, Detroit – Wiederbelebung einer toten Stadt (Weinert, 2014) probably gave the initial spark that drove me to want to learn more about Detroit and eventually do research on and in the city. The documentary mostly focuses on the often-repeated negative aspects of Detroit: abandonment, ruins, exodus, crime, violence, decline, despair, and loss. I was curious how this could have happened to a city I mostly associated with a rich music culture, and I doubted that the negative image of Detroit is the only truth. So, I began to read every book about Detroit I could get a hold of. At the same time, I just finished my Master’s in urban design at the HafenCity University in Hamburg where I was introduced to urban ethnography and urban anthropology and read texts from Welz (1991), de Certeau (2002), Lynch (1960/2005), and others that educated and stuck with me; and I especially enjoyed the fieldwork we had to carry out. Since I had written my bachelor thesis in geography in 2012 about urban gardening and the right to the city in Hamburg, I intended to write a doctoral thesis – not only because I liked writing (and, fortunately, I still do), but I enjoyed the whole research process. Having been raised in a tranquil rural area in Northern Germany and then moving to Hamburg as a young adult, I was used to being in urban settings that seem orderly and organized. While doing an internship at a firm that works at the intersection of urban development and culture management in Berlin, I was introduced to places in Eastern Germany that were shaped by the loss of population and the resulting vacancy, but also to people who are invested in repurposing and redeveloping abandoned buildings and areas. This further contributed to my interest in bottom-up urbanism and the way people shape urban spaces on an everyday basis. However, when I traveled to Detroit the first time in 2016, I arrived at a place that was nothing like I have ever seen before. I was simultaneously fascinated with and devasted by the number of ruins and overgrown vacant lots that sometimes sit on the same block as well-kept houses

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Original: “Meine diesbezügliche Selbstverortung [bezüglich subjektiver Wissensproduktion] versucht demnach eine Bewusstmachung und gleichzeitig eine Offenlegung sowohl der biografischen Disposition als auch meiner ‚theoretischen Herkunft‘ und des ‚methodologischen Apparats‘, auf den ich für meine empirische Studie zurückgreife” (Streule, 2018, p. 21).

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with neatly trimmed gardens or the impressive Art Deco buildings in Detroit’s downtown. The fact that I have never been to a place like Detroit before (at least not in the ‘Global North’) made it difficult to figure it out at the beginning, but also allowed me to have an outside perspective. Being used to relying on public transport, for example, turned out to be almost impossible in Detroit. I quickly realized that the Motor City lives up to its name: You need a car to get around the city (at least more safely and for a greater reach) – which I was not able to afford. This, and the fact that every time I visited, I lived on the east side, shaped my view of the city. Further, being a White, European female in a majority Black US-American city positions me as being different in at least two ways. First, English is my second language and although I have known the language for almost two decades now and feel comfortable speaking and listening to it, there are always subtle details, nuances, or colloquial expressions I do not understand; the same goes for cultural references I might not get. Thus, during my interviews but also during other encounters and observations there are probably things I overlooked or that lacked depth because my interview partner and I did not share the same first language. However, this position of being an outsider, as Streule (2018, p. 22) notes, also offers a certain degree of ‘Vogelfreiheit’ where some social rules might not apply: For example, it is more accepted for an outsider (and researcher) to ask certain questions which, under other circumstances, might be regarded as inappropriate (Katz, 1994, p. 68). Second, my privileged position of being White in a society that is still shaped by structural, institutional as well as individual racism, prevented me for a long time to engage with race: In contrast to BIPoC, I am not constantly reminded of and reduced to my race; I am and was aware of my White skin, but it was not necessarily part of my self-description. This is not only common for White people in White dominance cultures (Tißberger, 2017, pp. 13ff.) but also highly problematic because [a]s long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that – they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race. (Dyer, 1997, pp. 1f.)

Thus, realizing that Whiteness does not only describe the color of my skin but is rather a powerful historical and social construct as well as position (Dietrich, 2007, pp. 40ff.; Tißberger, 2017, p. 16) influenced the way I navigated my field. On the one side, I tried to be aware of my Whiteness while being in the field which sometimes led to a balancing act between feeling like an intruder in a ‘Black space’ and feeling like a separatist in a ‘White space’62. On the other side, I engaged more

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Although Detroit has a particular racial segregation between the inner city and the suburbs, there are patterns of racial segregation within the city, too. More on this topic can be found in chapters 6 and 8.1.

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with the topic of race and its role in Detroit’s history and present, acknowledging that it needs to be included in my research, too – even though this study does not explicitly focus on race (which leads me to wonder if it would if I was not White). Besides the above-mentioned positions such as race, nationality, or educational background, there are far more points that could be discussed here – e.g., lived experiences, encounters, biographical information, character – and that have shaped my research in ways that I might not always be able to trace. Therefore, I will leave it at that and acknowledge that this study is as much a relational process as it is a product.

5.4

Moving, observing, asking, and listening

For the present study, I combine multiple methods to collect data. My focus of this triangulation63 is not so much on validating data, but rather on “[…] further enriching and completing knowledge and towards transgressing the (always limited) epistemological potentials of the individual method” (Flick, 2009, p. 444). I follow Denzin’s (1978, pp. 302ff.) idea of a between-method triangulation which combines two or more (qualitative) methods, aiming towards gaining new perspectives and broader knowledge: […] each method implies a different line of action toward reality—and hence each will reveal different aspects of it, much as a kaleidoscope, depending on the angle at which it is held, will reveal different colors and configurations of objects to the viewer. Methods are like the kaleidoscope: depending on how they are approached, held, and acted toward, different observations will be revealed. (Denzin, 1978, pp. 292f.)

Further, Flick (2018) stresses that triangulation includes more than simply combining different methods: Rather the use of triangulation includes the combination of several theoretical perspectives (as backgrounds of methods) and of several target groups (those of the various methods). Triangulation can also mean the use of several methodological approaches for questioning methods and what is taken for granted for their use. (p. 543)

Therefore, in the following, I will discuss the methods and how I applied them as well as their benefits, challenges, and limits.

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For further information on triangulation, its challenges, applicability, and distinct types see e.g., Denzin (1978, pp. 291ff.) and Flick (2009, pp. 444ff., 2018, pp. 525ff.).

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Ethnography on the move: walking, cycling, and driving Moving through the city – by foot, bike, sometimes by car and, rarely, by public transport – enabled me to get to know the urban fabric of Detroit better. However, I did not only use these dérive-inspired64 movements to become familiar with the city on my first visit but continued these practices throughout every stay. They were, combined with the other methods, approaches to narrow down the research focus and research questions over time as well as an attempt to use my sensory perception as open-minded as possible; although, as with the other approaches, objectivity cannot be obtained and never was the aim (Haraway, 1988, pp. 581, 586f.). Walking and cycling allow slow, direct, and on-the-ground encounters with urban space. The researcher’s bodily involvement enables the sensory experience of the surroundings and direct interactions with others (de Certeau, 2002, pp. 91ff.; Massey, 2004, p. 8), as well as their effects: Place thus impresses itself upon the pedestrian body, for its affordances are inevitably created out of the relationship between its physical and material qualities on the one hand and the social and subjective experience of walking on the other, along with the cultural precepts through which the practice is interpreted. (Edensor, 2008, p. 131)

Interestingly, walking in Detroit is “[…] simultaneously perceived as the transit mode of the urban poor, and the urban ideal sought by gentrifying incomers seeking walkable, green neighbourhoods” (Fraser, 2018, p. 442). Although I can only assume how I was perceived by others while walking and cycling in the city, I was probably most associated with the latter group. Especially in the neighborhoods (the areas outside of Greater Downtown), quite often I was the only White and the only female person moving through the streets in this way. However, it also increased my awareness of the daily struggles people have to undergo in the city if they do not have access to a car or public transport. Further, walking offers a direct encounter with urban decay, as Fraser (2018) describes in the context of her research on imaginaries of regeneration and ruins in Detroit: Critically intercepting Detroit’s real and abstract ruin necessitates a method grounded in material decay – encounters with places that have become precarious as they are left to fall apart, and which simultaneously reflect the precarity of local residents who live ‘the reality of decline’, alongside the threat of demolition for redevelopment facilitated by renewal imaginaries. (p. 443)

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Dérive (Engl. drift) is a practice proposed and exercised by the Situationist International. It describes “[…] the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiences […]” (Debord, 1981a, p. 40). What differentiates a dérive from a stroll or a journey is that “[i]n a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord, 1981b, p. 62).

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Walking in Detroit then often means walking past and, if one chooses to, inside ruins, which differs significantly from ‘regular’ walking and reminds of the concept of the dérive mentioned before: Rather than following a sign posted route, a map or the guidance offered by linear arrangements of space, we might repeatedly cover the same circuit, go up and down stairs, walk on the roof or in a cellar, chart an enjoyable obstacle course between fallen fixtures, successively explore the rooms adjacent to a large shop floor area, walk in criss-cross fashion inside and outside the remaining standing walls, or according to all sorts of other ad hoc procedures. A path evolves as the walker is called forth by curiosities, potential channels of movement, tempting surfaces and gradients, and peculiar impulses. (Edensor, 2008, p. 127)

The unfamiliar, obscure, and disruptive character of ruins – smells, sounds, textures, structures, etc. – not only activates the senses (field notes April 09, 2019), but can offer insights into what Edensor (2008) calls “[…] temporal disorder […]” (p. 137): In ruins, there are moments of reverie and recollection, an awareness of the cyclical characteristics of capitalist production, innumerable and obscure traces of the past, shocking reminders of long-forgotten phrases and popular cultural icons, abrupt alarms or surprises, a sudden grasp of the demise of a particular industrial future, pangs of hunger, temporal rates of decay and natural growth which continually alter the characteristics of the site, the different routines of animal inhabitants, and the fragmented rhythms of corporeal experience. (Edensor, 2008, p. 137)

What Edensor describes here already hints at what will be picked up when discussing artistic practices of seeking, finding, and recycling material. Thus, walking in Detroit not only helped me to get to know the city better but to fathom certain artistic practices. However, to grasp larger pieces of the city, their links and fusions, and contrasts and oppositions, driving is an adequate choice since “[…] driving in contemporary Detroit also intersects with the inherently automobile centred culture of the city, from the history of car manufacture, to the proliferation of urban highways” (Fraser, 2018, p. 442), and the city’s public transport system is still relatively underdeveloped (Runyan, 2017). Further, referring back to ruins, “[d]riving, as a method, provides an overall sense of the phenomena of urban ruination in Detroit […]” (Fraser, 2018, p. 442). Most of the time when I traveled by car, however, I was not the one driving: I frequently used ridesharing or got a ride from friends, housemates, and even interviewees on occasion. This allowed me not only to look, photograph and film out of the car, but also to engage the driver in a conversation about Detroit. To some extent, this is linked to Fujii’s (2015) idea of accidental ethnography mentioned previously, where “[…] moments of insight arise by happenstance or chance. The researcher cannot control their content or timing; she can only learn to observe and record her observations in more systematic fashion” (p. 527). Eventually, accepting and regarding these accidental moments as data too could foster a deeper understanding of the local research setting (Fujii, 2015, pp. 536f.). A challenge that these moving methods pose, however, is how to document and interpret these observations systematically. Whenever possible and I felt comfortable, I took pictures in the moment and wrote down notes in retrospect.

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Participant observations The moving approaches of walking, cycling, and driving in Detroit to continually develop a sense of place and narrow down the focus of this study overlap with the method of participant observation. According to Watson and Till (2010) “[…] observation entails description of and reflection upon embodied and emotional experiences, intersubjective and material exchanges, and social and nonhuman interactions. Observing and writing fieldnotes […] is more a practice of discovery than an ‘objective’ form of reporting” (p. 126). The aim of observation is thus to help “[…] understand how people make worlds, places, and meanings, and how the minutiae of buildings, animals, trees, people, movements, sounds, smells, tastes, and lights constitutes the lived experiences of these environments” (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 126). With participant observation more specifically, the researcher “[…] pay[s] close attention to, and sometimes partake[s] in, everyday geographies […]” (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 129). Observations can be recorded for example as notes, sketches, maps, or photographs and may include the researcher’s “[…] emotional responses and frames of mind when experiencing events, interactions, and movements […]” (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 126). Denzin (1978, pp. 186ff.) identifies four types of observer roles that vary in their degree of participation and the disclosure of the researcher’s identity. The ‘complete participant’ is located on one end of the spectrum, describing a completely concealed researcher whose “[…] scientific intents are not made known, and they attempt to become full-fledged members of the group under investigation” (Denzin, 1978, p. 186). On the other end of the spectrum is the ‘complete observer’ who merely observes but who does not interact “[…] and [which] is best seen in experiments where observations are recorded mechanically or conducted through one-way mirrors in the laboratory” (Denzin, 1978, p. 190). Depending on the settings I observed, I mostly took the role of the ‘complete participant’ or the ‘participant as observer’ when I disclosed my identity as a researcher. Besides the moving ethnography described above, I partook in exhibition openings, workshops, public talks, and tours, and visited art environments/ outdoor installations. The observations aimed at helping to understand the variety of intersections and negotiations of art, artistic practices, and artists and urban space in Detroit. To record the observations, I used field notes as well as photographs, and both were later included in the coding process I will return to below. At the end of this book, you find a list of events I attended. Only a small part of these events is referred to or mentioned in the course of this study. Since all of them, however, in their specific ways, informed my research, I still regard it as necessary to disclose them. In addition to these methods – which might be described as rather self-referred –, I conducted interviews to gain deeper access and insights into topics that were otherwise out of reach, and it allowed me to pose pointed questions.

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Interviews and ride-along In practice, I experienced and observed that the interviews I conducted have a variety of characteristics and do not fit into common research binaries, even within ethnography, where often something is either/or. They might have been with an expert in their field – but then, who is/ isn’t an expert in their field? –, some were more narrative, some more dialogically – but none of this was necessarily intentional –, and even though every interview was prepared by me beforehand and loosely based on an interview guide, there was never a particular order in which questions had to be asked nor did every question have to be asked to every interviewee since I did not seek comparability. As with the research design, then, which was dynamic, open, and process-oriented, the interviews were conducted similarly. However, this does not imply that they were conducted in an unplanned or arbitrary way, nor were the interviewees chosen randomly. So, in the following, I will concretize 1) who I interviewed and why, and 2) outline what questions I asked for what purpose. All 13 interviews I conducted between 2017 and 2019 are semi-structured, were in-person, and all but one are individual interviews65. Semi-structured interviews, compared to relatively structured interviews, allow […] much more leeway for following up on whatever angles are deemed important by the interviewee, and the interviewer has a greater chance of becoming visible as a knowledgeproducing participant in the process itself, rather than hiding behind a preset interview guide. (Brinkmann, 2018, pp. 990f.)

At the same time, the interviewer usually has a greater authority over the focus of the interview compared to more unstructured interviews. According to Misoch (2019, pp. 66f.), there are three principles that interview guides should follow: openness, referring to the flexible use of the interview guide as well as openness towards gaining new insights as opposed to testing a hypothesis, processuality, saying that meaning is constructed and negotiated through social interactions, and communication, referring to the fact that in an interview, information is gained by (verbal) communication. The structure of an interview guide varies from completely formulated questions to simply topics that should be brought up during an interview.

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One interview was conducted with two artists at the same time who are a married couple (Mariuca and Carl). Since this interview was only slightly different than the others, I will not discuss it separately or as a group interview. However, two points should be made here: First, there was a stronger focus in the interview on Carl’s work and lesser on Mariuca’s. That is, however, because he is a full-time artist while she also holds down a job as a president of an art organization. And second, during the interview there were some moments when they started asking each other questions. Since these questions were still within the scope of my research, I rather benefited from them playing into each other’s hands than feeling like I lost control over the interview. However, I am not able to assess if the presence of the other might have made them feel more comfortable during the interview or if it maybe led them to not making statements they would have otherwise.

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The interview guides I applied are at different ends of this spectrum and were prepared in accordance with the interviewee and the aim/ focus of the interview. For example, while the guide for an interview with Claudia Mayer, a city official, included topics rather than questions (field notes April 16, 2019), the guide for an interview with the journalist Michael Hodges included more specific questions that I sought answers for (‘Looking at Detroit’s art scene(s), what has changed over the past years or decades?’ (field notes May 03, 2019). Even though the interviews were mostly of dialogical and interactive form and “[…] more of a collaboration than an interrogation […]” (McDowell, 2010, p. 162), they are still purposely constructed social interactions that are affected by power relations: Rather than being a transparent, straightforward exchange of information, the interview is a complex and contested social encounter riven with power relations. To a large degree, the social researcher is a supplicant, dependent upon the cooperation of interviewees, who must both agree to participate and feel willing and able to share with the interviewer the sorts of information on which the success of the work will depend. (McDowell, 2010, p. 161)

While power relations may not be dismantled, it is the researcher’s responsibility to be transparent about their own work for which the interview is conducted and to try to make the interviewee feel comfortable and appreciated while following ethical codes (McDowell, 2010, p. 162; Misoch, 2019, p. 229). This also includes the researcher being aware of the power they hold over “[…] both the interpretation and the reception of other people’s lives” (McDowell, 2010, p. 157). However, it usually – and this applies for the present study, too – remains a one-sided relationship where the researcher gains insights into other people’s lives and activities which are then used for interpretation and eventually for the researcher’s academic development, while the interviewees do not necessarily receive equivalent in return. I will return to the topic of analysis and interpretation of data below, but it should be mentioned here that the intention of interviews is not to look for the ‘reality’ which is “[…] waiting to be discovered, named and described by social researchers but [‘reality’] is itself constituted in and by discourse, and embodied interactions, as are the representations that we chose to construct from fieldwork and interviewing” (McDowell, 2010, p. 160). With the focus lying on the intertwining of space and artistic practice, I conducted 13 interviews with 14 people66 that can be loosely grouped into three overlapping categories: 1) artists whose artistic practices involve the city of Detroit: mixed-media artist in residence Mirka Sulander, Olayami Dabls of the MBAD African Bead Museum, photographer Mariuca Rofick, linoleum cut printmaker Carl Wilson, sculptor and photographer Scott Hocking, and mixed-media artist and activist Jen Reyes, 2) initiators/ founders of art organizations that are concerned with the city of Detroit: John Anderson of Creativity Detroit, Karah Shaffer of

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Some interviewees requested to anonymize the interview, so they, their organizations and other personally identifiable information were pseudonymized and/ or left out.

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Documenting Detroit, and Mary Smith of Photo Booth Detroit; all three of them are also artists themselves, and 3) cultural critics, journalists as well as researchers interested in (visual) art in Detroit: writer and cultural luminary Marsha Music, cultural critic and Dean Emeritus of Undergraduate Studies at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) Vince Carducci, founder of and writer for the magazine Detroit Cultural Danny VanZandt, Claudia Mayer of the Planning and Development Department of the City of Detroit, and journalist Michael Hodges who writes for The Detroit News. The interviewees were chosen either for their artistic practice and/ or engagement that intersects with spatial practice and involves the city of Detroit in different ways and/ or because of their expertise in visual art in Detroit67. The interviews aimed at exploring and understanding how and why artistic practices and space in Detroit influence and produce each other, seeking “[…] depth and detailed understanding rather than breadth and coverage” (McDowell, 2010, p. 158). As mentioned before, I frequently struggled to get access to the field and potential interviewees. More than a dozen emails I sent were never replied or, when I received an answer, the timing was unfortunate (e.g., potential interviewees were not in town when I was) or potential interviewees did no longer reply when we were about to set a date for the interview. With the help of intermediaries, follow-up emails, and phone calls after in-person conversations at events, and some people who were willing to meet although we had not met before or had no mutual acquaintances, I was still able to conduct the interviews. They were conducted at interviewees’ homes, studios, temporary residences, and offices, as well as several public spaces, mostly coffee shops (for a detailed list of when and where which interview was conducted, see ‘list of obtained data’). The shortest interview took a little over 42 minutes, the longest is about one hour and forty minutes long. The rest of the interviews are somewhere in between, most about an hour in length. All interviews were recorded with my phone and with the agreement of the interviewees. It allowed me to focus on the interview itself and to transcribe it afterward rather than taking notes. However, it discloses even more that the interview is not a ‘natural setting’ and might lead to unease on the side of the interviewee as well as the interviewer frequently checking if the recording is still running (McDowell, 2010, p. 165). Despite these challenges, recording the interviews was still the best choice to capture them for this study. Besides, several other factors can influence interviews (see e.g., Misoch, 2019, pp. 213ff. for a detailed discussion of possible influencing factors). I will discuss three of these briefly in the following, since I assume that they had an impact on the interviewees and myself, though in often subtle and unconscious ways. First, visibly noticeable characteristics such as my gender, age, and race might have had impacts on my counterparts in various ways. Although I can only assume the effects of my appearance, I for example observed that White interviewees, especially White females often talked about issues of race and their

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A detailed introduction and description of the interviewees is presented in chapter 6.4.

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positionality more open and from a more personal point of view than other interviewees. This fits with Misoch (2019, p. 219) stating that experiences of discrimination are rather reported in settings where the interviewee and interviewer are of the same ethnicity than when they are of different ethnicities. Second, interaction effects – effects that are based on shared or opposing characteristics and features of interviewee and interviewer such as political opinions or dialects – can arouse sympathy or dismissal (Misoch, 2019, p. 221). In several interviews, for example, the interviewees and I bonded over the shared criticism of Donald J. Trump leading to – or at least I assume – mutual sympathy. Finally, the place and setting of the interview can shape the outcome of the interview. Misoch (2019, p. 222) suggests that the place for an interview should be familiar and comfortable to the interviewee and offer an undisturbed procedure. I usually let the interviewees suggest the place for the interview. Although this might have supported them feeling comfortable and allowed them to open up more, it sometimes led to conducting interviews in public places that were rather noisy and less intimate. I can only speak for myself but in crowded public places I felt less comfortable interviewing because it took me a while to block out and ignore the fact that other people might be listening (and judging). Also, some interviews in public places were interrupted by other people. This was usually not a great problem and interviews were resumed immediately, but in one case the interview (with John Anderson) was interrupted several times for longer periods. Unfortunately, this prevented that some thoughts were explained and discussed in more detail, and it was difficult as well as uncomfortable to resume the conversation repeatedly. To be able to analyze the interviews, the recordings were transcribed with the qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA 2018. Since transcription is the transformation of spoken word into text, it is always a reduction: Besides what is said, interviews consist also of non-verbal aspects such as gestures and facial expressions that cannot be fully captured in a transcript (Dresing & Pehl, 2017, pp. 17f.; Misoch, 2019, p. 263). To capture the interviews as close as possible to the actual interview situations and to not distort statements when turned into written word, I used a true verbatim transcription. Specifically, this means that the transcripts include longer pauses (…), laughter and nonverbal expressions or gestures, vocal expressions like ‘mhm’ and ‘um’ as well as interruptions. Also, grammatically incorrect sentences as well as words and sentences that were cut off are included. Besides the interviews described above, I met one of the interviewees (Scott Hocking) again for a second interview, however this time it was a moving interview. Since I have discussed the approach as well as obstacles of interviewing and interviews before, I will focus solely on the aspect of ‘moving’ in the moving interview. In this case, the moving interview was a ride-along in Scott’s car. It took about two and a half hours and we traveled about 38 miles (about 61 km). The route was GPS tracked and two-thirds of the ride-along were audio-recorded and later transcribed with a gap of about 50 minutes in the middle where the recording accidentally stopped which I was unaware of at the time (however, these minutes were mostly spent outside of the car exploring areas by ourselves, so not

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a lot of conversation was missed). As discussed before, driving in automobilecentered Detroit offers a good overall perception of the city, its ruination, uneven development, and flows of movement (Fraser, 2018, pp. 442f.). Therefore, inspired by the go-along method introduced by Kusenbach (2003) where “[…] fieldworkers accompany individual informants on their ‘natural’ outings, and – through asking questions, listening and observing – actively explore their subjects’ stream of experiences and practices as they move through, and interact with, their physical and social environment” (p. 463), I accompanied Scott on a ride to and through the neighborhood of Delray which he has been photographing for years as the neighborhood changed. However, it was less of a ‘natural outing’ suggested by Kusenbach (2003, p. 463) since the ride-along was framed by a more specific task: I asked Scott, who often works site-specific, to take me to places that he either worked at or in, where he gathered material for his practice or that have another specific meaning or purpose for his work (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017). From giving him the task at the beginning of our ride-along onwards, though, it was up to him to decide where he would take me and which route we would take. For the present study, there are two strong points of the ride-along. For one thing, ride-alongs “[…] bring to the foreground the stream of associations that occupy informants while moving through physical and social space, including their memories and anticipations” (Kusenbach, 2003, p. 472). In this case, driving past particular buildings or landmarks “[…] resembles going through the pages of a personal photo album or diary” (Kusenbach, 2003, p. 472) and can therefore foster deeper conversations about spatial practices and experiences. I observed this in the ride-along with Scott, too: Since he often works site-specific, I gained deeper insight into his practice through being on-site with him. It allowed me to ask more detailed questions about the specific sites because we were looking at them together and it provided an opportunity for him to remember and elaborate on his (spatial) practices and experiences. Also, because the ride-along took place after I interviewed Scott, we were able to revisit topics and discuss them in greater detail. And for another thing, the ride-along was “[…] a more modest, but also a more systematic and outcome-oriented version of ‘hanging out’ […]” (Kusenbach, 2003, p. 463). Hanging out, as a research strategy aims at a better understanding of the lived experiences of the interviewee and enables a situation that might feel less engineered and formal than a regular interview. This in turn might lead to information that otherwise would not be accessed. Thus, during our ridealong, Scott and I were able to engage in conversations that had not enough room and/ or were not addressed in the interview before, such as Detroit’s car-centrism (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017). However, as Kusenbach (2003) insists, “[…] the strengths and advantages of participant observation, interviewing and go-alongs68 accumulate when they are pursued in combination” (p. 465).

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According to Kusenbach (2003, p. 464) the term ‘go-along’ subsumes different modes of going along such as the ‘walk-along’, the ‘ride-along’ and others not defined further.

Analyzing, evaluating, and reflecting

5.5

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Analyzing, evaluating, and reflecting

To systematically analyze the gathered material – newspaper and magazine articles, internet resources (websites, blog posts, social media posts), field notes, interview transcripts, and photographs – I used coding. The iterative process of coding started in February 2018 and ended in July 2020. It is thus intertwined with other steps of the research process such as data collection and further helped narrowing down the research focus. According to Watson and Till (2010), “[…] coding allows the ethnographer to break apart, relate, and recombine the materials generated in the research process” (p. 128). This way of proceeding has its roots in grounded theory, introduced by Glaser and Strauss (1967/2009) as “[…] the discovery of theory from data” (p. 1). In compliance with the ethnographic framework of the present study which includes (initially) unstructured data collection, non-linearity, and process orientation, an inductive and data-driven approach to coding was applied. Generally, “[…] codes can be regarded as condensed descriptions of the phenomena discovered in the data” (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2019, p. 67). As a side note, “[…] the process of coding is also a process of digitally organizing […]” (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 129) the abundance of material – while, inevitably, also reducing it. The inductive and explorative coding process began with an open coding in MAXQDA where no codes were “[….] defined in advance of analyzing the available data and discovered phenomena and facts are coded with new codes that are closely related to the material” (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2019, p. 68). Throughout the process of open coding and with the addition of new material, the hierarchical structure of codes was adjusted by creating ‘parent codes’ and establishing ‘subcodes’ e.g., for overarching concepts (parent code) and various characteristics (subcodes). Also, codes created during open coding of one material could then be applied to other material when coded initially. Consequently, the iterative coding process gradually developed from an open to a more focused coding where codes are renamed, merged, hierarchized, and/ or became obsolete. The coded text passages (also called ‘coding’ in MAXQDA) are differing in lengths and subject to the codes in question; they can be several sentences but also only a few words long (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2019, pp. 69ff.). Going through the material again and again allowed me “[…] to discern emerging patterns and repetitions, or cross-out topics that seem either too abstract or too narrow” (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 129). At the end of the coding process, as the last step, I decided to switch from digital coding to coding by hand. This allowed working through and looking at the material and codes simultaneously as opposed to consecutively when coding digitally, as well as allowed a tactile engagement with the coding process. Finally, the coding process resulted in five artistic practices described in chapter 7 which are 1) seeking, finding, and recycling material, 2) working site-specific, 3) making and/ or displaying art outside, 4) focusing on community, and 5) documenting and creating stories about Detroit. I will now close this chapter by reflecting on my methodical approach as well as with some more general remarks. Some challenges were already discussed

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above such as gaining access to the field and recruiting interviewees, how I as the researcher might have affected the interview situation and the interviewees, and the role that language played. On another more general note, the ethnographic approach applied here was very time-consuming because of its open-ended, exploratory, and iterative character. It also bears the risk of being unable to see the forest for the trees because of the abundance of data. This is quite common in ethnography and not necessarily problematic (if the researcher is not pressed for time), although it can be, amongst others, challenging to stick to the process (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 3; Watson & Till, 2010, p. 122). At the same time, doing ethnography remains a selective process. It is, in the present case, limited by access or the lack of access to the field and by the time that could or could not be spent in the field. But it is also limited because “[…] interpretation and subjectivity are inherent in any scientific practice […]. Data are never naïve, and are only apprehended through specific social processes” (Herbert, 2000, p. 559). With the researcher navigating the research, they play a central role in the evolution of the research process: From the choice of method to evaluating if data are ir/relevant or un/interesting, doing research is shaped by multiple steps of selection, reduction, and abstraction. Acknowledging this, I side with Herbert (2000) who claims that [i]f knowledges are always positioned and partial, it follows that our claims for them should be moderate. […] The best ethnography improves our understanding of a specific group and enhances our ability to think with concepts, but it always reflects a particular perspective and a particular historical moment. […] But even the best such efforts are partial accounts and thus explanatory claims are best kept modest. (p. 563)

Turning to the methods I used, there are a few other points that need to be highlighted. First, concerning the moving approaches and observations, I frequently had difficulties recording them, being unsure “[…] what to write down, how to write it down, and when to write it down” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 142, emphasis in original). In situations where I could not take notes, I tried to write them down as soon as possible afterward, but still, “[…] the detail is quickly lost, and whole episodes can be forgotten or become irreparably muddled” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 142). Further, the field notes are equally as selective as other steps of the research process and never able to cover everything. In retrospect, some of my field notes were also quite cryptic and unstructured, making it difficult to reconstruct the content, especially with more time passed. It could have been useful to summarize them on a meta-level soon after they were written down which could also have helped to distinguish whether these notes are of further significance or not. Second, since the method of the ride-along turned out to be very fruitful for the research focus, it would have been desirable to conduct more. The ride-along allowed not only to gain deeper access to the interviewee’s spatial practices, but the setting of hanging-out in the car for several hours enabled further, less formal conversations (Kusenbach, 2003, p. 463). However, I did not find the respective person to do a ride-along, and/ or I did not consider at the time that this could also be a useful method for artists who I did interview, but whose practices are less spread out over the city. I assume that through this

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method, I could have gained deeper insights into spatial practices than I did by interviewing – proceeding on the assumption that interviewees would have agreed to take several hours to drive or walk with me through the city. I conclude this chapter with an outlook on a few more methodical and methodological points. As stated above, I used photographs as documentation of artworks, as recordings of observations, and as part of my autoethnography. I developed a strong interest in the use of photography and photographs within research but since photography could only be partially employed as well as engaged with in this study, it leaves room for further elaboration elsewhere. I already continue discussing the role of photography in autoethnography in Küttel (2021), where I engage with the medium of the photo-essay mentioned before. But it is certainly not a concluded discussion but rather the beginning. For example, the role of photographs as field notes, within autoethnography as well as ethnography, has only received marginal considerations, such as in Pink (2007, pp. 120ff.). Also, the prevalence of technical gadgets such as smartphones provides an opportunity to use photography simply and discreetly (as well as video- and audiorecording) and provokes further discussions. Besides, while I was able to address autoethnography in this study as well as share an extract from the photo-essay, it was still reduced to a minimum – partially for the limited number of pages but also for reasons of self-protection. Accordingly, Beurskens et al. (2018, p. 2) state that within the scientific communication and publication process usually a clear distinction is made between what accounts for or should account for the official narrative and the residuum of one’s emotions, fears, the bizarre, the failed, mistakes or disappointments69. As a result, the stories told are usually those of success where feelings of failure and doubt are left out to fit the narrative (Beurskens et al., 2018, p. 3) and where research mostly goes according to plan (or handbook): Field research is generally depicted, particular by methodological ‘bibles’ or guides, as an organized enterprise, marked by phases of involvement and withdrawal from ‘critical’ data, as well as phases of ‘rethinking’ the ‘knowledge’ acquired after a (more or less) intense field experience. (Papageorgiou, 2007, p. 221)

Silencing these residues, however, erases part of the research processes too, whereas on the other hand we could “[…] learn[] from research which intentionally lingers on the spaces we traditionally pass over, skip, want to ‘fix,’ and make ‘pretty’ again” (Spencer Schultz, 2017, p. 2). Driven by this, Melike Peterson and I (2020) started to engage with how unplanned encounters and ‘failed’ situations have shaped our research processes and “[…] argue that careful analysis of these often silent/ced (inter)actions is crucial to consider what constitutes data, and how scholars understand, analyse and report on research” (2020, p. 49). We

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Original: “Offensichtlich wird im wissenschaftlichen Kommunikations- und Publikationsprozess zumeist recht klar unterschieden zwischen dem, was die offizielle Erzählung ausmacht beziehungsweise auszumachen hat, und einem Residuum aus eigenen Gefühlen, Ängsten, Skurrilem, Missratenem, Fehlern oder Enttäuschungen” (Beurskens et al., 2018, p. 2).

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suggest that “[…] fieldwork can represent a daunting and demanding experience, bringing with it a myriad of observations, emotions and expectations, where more can be gained from re-thinking the ‘failed’ and the ‘accidental’ as moments of opportunity” (Peterson & Küttel, 2020, p. 49) when regarded as detours rather than dead ends (Meier et al., 2018, p. 3). As an open and recent discussion, this leaves room for further engagement e.g., on how to identify, acknowledge, and integrate the detours of research into (published) outcomes

6

The city of Detroit

When arriving at the airport in Boston, a stopover for a conference right before my second trip to Detroit, the Border Patrol Agent did his usual business and asked me where I was going after my trip to Boston. ‘Detroit’, I replied proudly. He looked at me, as astonished as a Border Patrol Agent can look, and asked: ‘What do you wanna do there? There’s nothing there!’ – ‘That’s why I’m going!’ – [silence]. We realized quickly that we were not coming to terms, and he let me pass without any further questions. I was not only pleased, because I entered the country without any further inquiry, but also because he perfectly re-enacted the common narrative about Detroit: a city you don’t visit, a place you don’t want to go to, empty, nothing there to do or see, maybe except for crime and violence. To understand where this widespread narrative emerged from, Detroit’s history – mostly the developments from the 20th century to the present – will be addressed in the following. This look back allows to understand the paths the city took and the condition it is in today70. This is also based on the aforementioned assumption that space is dynamic and processual, and “[…] that every society […] produces a space, its own space” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 31). Hence, space cannot be understood without considering the time that produces it and that arises from space. Accordingly, the key to understanding space is the historic analysis71 (Schmid, 2005, p. 30).

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But this does by no means claim completeness. On the contrary, historical events, such as the war of 1812 for example, are left out of this work. Not because they are not regarded as important historical events and facts, but because I have to limit the historical context to those that are necessary to discuss for understanding path dependencies and narratives about today’s city of Detroit. For an in-depth look into the history of Detroit, I suggest Woodford (2001) for an insight into the city’s early years of founding, Sugrue (1996) for a detailed analysis of post-war Detroit, Kurashige (2017) for thoughts on how the rebellion of 1967 still continues to have an effect today, and Boyd (2017), Darden et al. (1987), and Thompson (2004) for a focus on African-American history and race relations in Detroit. Original: “‘Raum’ kann nicht ohne die Zeit begriffen werden, die ihn hervorbringt und die aus ihm hervorgeht. Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis des Raumes ist damit die historische Analyse” (Schmid, 2005, p. 30).

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6.1

Detroit’s historical context

Founded in 1701 by the French commander Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Caddilac (formerly known as Antoine Laument) in the midst of ongoing “[…] geopolitical shenanigans of late seventeenth-century North America” (Galster, 2012, p. 46), the city of Detroit embarked as a strategically located fort, the Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit72 (Galster, 2012, p. 47). Détroit, the French word for strait, hints at the city’s location on the Detroit River which connects Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie which then ultimately connect with several more waterways in today’s Northeastern US and Southeast Canada. The New French’s outpost Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit had two functions, “[…] to control the rich fur trade in what is now Michigan and the Northwest Territory (the region between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and around the Great Lakes) and to prevent the British from encroaching upon the region” (Woodford, 2001, p. 15). But not only geopolitical and economic interests furthered Detroit’s early settlements and development, but also physiographic factors: Glaciers of the Wisconsin Glacial Stage flatten Detroit’s topography and left behind “[…] an extensive, navigable, freshwater lake and river system to the east, and a temperate, moist, fertile, featureless plain spreading seemingly endlessly to the north and west” (Galster, 2012, p. 47). Thus, working the soil was relatively easy and “[w]ood, brick, and limestone were plentiful, and the topography permitted building practically everywhere. Construction was cheap and geographically ubiquitous” (Galster, 2012, p. 48), and there was almost no risk of natural disasters. Also, the waterways presented profitable trade routes, mostly used to export fur which was traded off Native Americans (Woodford, 2001, pp. 25f.). Fast-forward to the end of the 18th century, Detroit’s rule changed from French to British and then finally to US-American on July 11, 1796, with a village population estimated between 300 (Binelli, 2012, p. 44) and 500 (Woodford, 2001, p. 25). The village grew slowly and on June 11, 1805, it was hit by one of its first crises affecting the – not yet urban but – rural fabric: a fire that destroyed almost all settlements in the village (Binelli, 2012, pp. 44ff.; Woodford, 2001, pp. 37ff.). The fire also led to Detroit’s motto that to this day is written on the city’s flag: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus73 – judging from today’s perspective, a motto so full of hope almost seems cynical considering the centuries that followed and the myriad of houses that have burnt down since74. To rebuild

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Although it is not central to the present study, I need to emphasize that Cadillac’s arrival to Detroit is obviously not the beginning of the area’s history – it is simply the founding of the city that came to be today’s city of Detroit. Long before that, probably since 6000 B.C., Native Americans were living in this area (Woodford, 2001, pp. 5ff.). Engl.: We hope for better Days; it shall rise from the ashes. Galster (2012, p. 233) summarizes the following about fires and arsons in Detroit in the past 40 years: “Burners set fires to properties for fun and profit. The most infamous example is

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Detroit after the fire, Judge Augustus Woodward was appointed. Inspired by Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s urban plan for Washington, D.C., he developed the Woodward Plan. Although never fully implemented, it lay the foundation of the sprawled-out city that Detroit is today: “Lots of no less than five thousand square feet each would provide for spaciousness. These large lots established a traditional characteristic of Detroit; with plenty of land available, it became a city of single-family homes” (Woodford, 2001, p. 39). With the Erie Canal opening in 1825, the implementation of more and more railroad tracks connecting Detroit with other cities and the prospect of buying cheap land, Detroit’s population grew to 21,019 in 1850 (Gibson & Jung, 2006, p. 93; Michigan Department of Transportation, 2015, p. 6; Woodford, 2001, p. 51). During the same period, Detroit was an important location on the Underground Railroad due to its border to Canada: “[…] the Detroit River represented […] the final leg on the long journey of self-liberation. Detroit became the major port of exit for runaway slaves from the United States before and especially after Great Britain abolished slavery in its Canadian territories and the rest of the Empire in 1833” (T. Miles, 2011, para. 2).

First steps of globalization After the American Civil War a period set in that, according to Apel (2015a), lasted from 1870 to 1914 and can be described as “[…] the ‘first globalization’ of finance and trade, which saw the invention of the electric light, film, radio, and the ocean liner as well as international investment and the automobile” (p. 6). At the beginning of this early phase of industrialization, it was the area’s natural resources – lumber, copper, iron, and lead – that led to the establishment of several manufacturers in the area, like the Michigan Car Company which was building wooden railroad cars. At the turn of the century, Detroit had a diverse industrial production, ranging from tobacco to pharmaceuticals to radiators (Binelli, 2012, pp. 47f.; Galster, 2012, p. 48; Martelle, 2014, p. 57; Woodford, 2001, pp. 75ff.) and had developed “[…] from trading center to industrial engine […]” (Martelle, 2014, p. 58). In 1903, the industrial development took another turn when Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company which, alongside other automobile companies, would profoundly influence and change the city of Detroit – from urban design to economy. Experimenting with constructing a quadricycle in a shed first, Ford moved to a factory on Mack Avenue on Detroit’s east side in 1903 where he began to build cars. Envisioning “[…] a mass-produced, low-priced automobile

‘Devil's Night,’ a Detroit Halloween tradition from the early 1980s to mid-1990s. Each Devil’s Night, hundreds of vacant homes across the city were set ablaze by arsonists, so overwhelming the fire department’s capacity that many would burn to the ground before any response was forthcoming. Today the number of fires on Halloween is not much higher than the normal rate of structure fires, calculated in 2007 as an average of 33 daily. On average, 18 fires a day are of suspicious origin. So ‘Little Devils’ Night’ is every night”.

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so simple in construction that any handyman could repair it” (Woodford, 2001, p. 92), the Ford Motor Company moved to the larger Piquette Avenue Plant in 1906. Two years later, the renowned Ford Model T started to be produced. Facing a strong demand for the Model T, the Company moved again in 1910 to the Highland Park plant – designed by industrial architect Albert Kahn and, at that time, larger than any other auto factory plant worldwide – where Ford revolutionized the production process by introducing the moving assembly line in 1913. This new efficiency led to the amount of Model Ts produced in an hour increase twenty-fold compared to 1908 and concomitantly, the price for the car almost halved. The foundation for mass production was laid (Galster, 2012, p. 4; Woodford, 2001, pp. 91ff.). But it was not only the Ford Motor Company that was active in Detroit. Cadillac, General Motors, Chevrolet, Packard, Rickenbacker, and others produced cars and car parts in Detroit in the first two decades of the 20th century75: There were dozens of other specialized firms manufacturing engines, transmissions, wheels, brakes, springs, radiators, belts and hoses, gears, frames, lights, and electrical systems. By 1917 Detroit had twenty-three automobile companies providing jobs for almost 93.000, and 132 parts firms employed an additional 44.000 workers. (Woodford, 2001, p. 97)

To compete in this growing market, Ford offered his production workers a then relatively high wage (5$ per 8-hour shift) and simultaneously boosted his sales by increasing the purchase power of his workers. While in 1920, Ford employed 56,000 workers, nine years later, at the new River Rouge Plant76 in Detroit’s suburb Dearborn, the number increased to 102,811 (Galster, 2012, p. 4; Woodford, 2001, p. 94).

The growing auto industry With the automobile beginning to proliferate, the first pieces of paved roads and concrete highways were built, and thus the influence of the automobile on the urban design and urban fabric grew continually. The growing auto industry attracted people nationally and internationally who moved to Detroit hoping to find work. Among those migrating to Detroit was a large proportion of African Americans who moved to the more liberal north from the southern US – a movement which is known as the great migration. But even if they were able to find a job in a plant and were not rejected because of their skin color, they were still left with the jobs that were the most demanding or dangerous (Darden et al., 1987, pp. 67f.; Galster, 2012, pp. 100f.; Thompson, 2004, p. 59).

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Chrysler, the third of the so-called Big Three (in addition to Ford and General Motors), wasn’t founded until 1925 (Woodford, 2001, p. 96). The River Rouge Plant, also designed by Albert Kahn, still exists and is in use today. What differentiates it from its predecessors is that it is a vertically integrated plant: “In this wondrous complex, iron ore, coke, limestone, and glass were gulped in at one end and belched out as an automobile a few days later […]” (Galster, 2012, p. 4).

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Within just 20 years, Detroit’s population tripled: from 285,704 in 1900 to 993,678 in 1920 (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, 2020), which again resulted in housing demand. Also, during World War I, the automobile manufacturers added the production of war material to their plants while continuing to produce cars. Responding to the demand for housing, new structures were erected, some of them on newly incorporated land, which in 1926 led to the city of Detroit covering a total area of 139 mi2 (≙360 km2) – the size it still is today. Discriminatory practices, however, were not restrained to the workplace but ran through the society, economy, and politics and thus were especially apparent on the housing market in the forms of redlining77, racialized mortgage lending as well as private choices based on discriminatory beliefs (Rothstein, 2017, p. 215; K.-Y. Taylor, 2019, pp. 29ff.). The consequences of these practices are continuing to have an effect today e.g., concerning (the possibility of) intergenerational wealth transfer when looking at housing value: Even though African Americans had been largely excluded from the FHA’s78 innovative economic tools that made homeownership cheap and easy for millions of Americans, that did not mean that Black people did not buy homes. But racism and exclusion made the costs

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Redlining was introduced by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), for risk assessment in mortgage lending. It was based on the following: “HOLC mortgages had low interest rates, but the borrowers still were obligated to make regular payments. The HOLC, therefore, had to exercise prudence about its borrowers’ abilities to avoid default. To assess risk, the HOLC wanted to know something about the condition of the house and of surrounding houses in the neighborhood to see whether the property would likely maintain its value. The HOLC hired local real estate agents to make the appraisals on which refinancing decisions could be based. With these agents required by their national ethics code to maintain segregation, it’s not surprising that in gauging risk HOLC considered the racial composition of neighborhoods. The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the saftest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. […] Although the HOLC did not always decline to rescue homeowners in neighborhoods colored red on its map (i.e., redlined neighborhoods), the maps had a huge impact and put the federal government on record as judging that African Americans, simply because of their race, were poor risks” (Rothstein, 2017, p. 64). FHA stands for the Federal Housing Administration which, in 1934, “[…] revolutionized homebuying in the United States, primarily by guaranteeing mortgages and amortizing the payments over decades, thereby making monthly mortgage payments more manageable. […] Federal policies that encouraged suburban development anchored to suburban homeowners spurred the uneven development of the American metropolis for the next decades. The essence of this ‘uneven development’ was investment and development for suburbs, compared with extraction and deterioration in urban core communities” (K.-Y. Taylor, 2019, pp. 31f.). The urban core, however, was “[…] the heart of the African American migration out of rural and southern outposts […]. Not only did FHA policies discourage homeownership among African Americans or those living in proximity to them, but these policies even prohibited the disbursement of small home improvement loans available to white homeowners” (K.-Y. Taylor, 2019, p. 32). For more details on Black homeownership as well as racialized zoning and the segregation of cities and metropolitan areas in the US, I recommend Taylor’s Race for Profit (2019) and Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017), who both take up Detroit as an example in their books quite frequently.

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The city of Detroit higher while the quality was lower, and the result rendered homeownership differently for African Americans in comparison with their white peers. Black housing was valued differently from white housing, thus stripping its supposed asset-like quality away. The average value of a single-family home in an urban community [in 1952] was $8,400, but the average value of a Black-owned home in an urban area was $3,700. (K.-Y. Taylor, 2019, p. 31)

The Great Depression, following the stock market crash in 1929, hit Detroit extremely hard with more than two-hundred-thousand workers being laid off by winter 1931-32 (Woodford, 2001, p. 121). However, World War II changed the picture for Detroit again: In the early 1940s, Detroit was at its industrial zenith, leading the nation in economic escape from the Great Depression. […] Demand for heavy industrial goods skyrocketed during World War II, and Detroit’s industrialists positioned themselves to take advantage of the defense boom. Detroit’s automobile manufacturers, led by Ford, quickly converted their assembly lines to the mass production of military hardware, airplanes, tanks, and other vehicles, making metropolitan Detroit one of the birthplaces of the military-industrial complex. Observers christened the city ‘Detroit the Dynamic,’ the ‘arsenal of democracy’ for a wartorn world. (Sugrue, 1996, p. 19)

With the US entering World War II after the military strike on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a high demand for workforce arose to cover for those who joined the military. This allowed women to enter the job market which was previously reserved for men. But it also further attracted people from other states, especially the Appalachian region and the southern states (Woodford, 2001, pp. 155f.). Thus, Detroit’s population continued to grow from 1,568,662 in 1930 to 1,623,452 in 1940 and again to 1,849,568 in 1950. Also, the demographic makeup of the city slowly started to change: While in 1930 the Black population made up 7.7%, it was 16.2% in 1950 (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, 2020; Sugrue, 1996, p. 23). In 1943, the growing tensions between Blacks and Whites in the city climaxed, leading to a three-day-long ‘race riot’. The trouble began when nearly one hundred thousand Detroiters gathered on Belle Isle, Detroit’s largest park, on a hot summer Sunday. Brawls between young blacks and whites broke out throughout the afternoon, and fights erupted on the bridge connecting Belle Isle to southeast Detroit in the evening. […] Rumors of race war galvanized whites and blacks alike, who took to the streets near Belle Isle and in the downtown area, and launched fierce attacks against passersby, streetcars, and property. […] Many Detroit police openly sympathized with the white rioters, and were especially brutal with blacks; 17 blacks were shot to death by the police, no whites were. Over the course of three days, 34 people were killed, 25 of them blacks. 675 suffered serious injuries, and 1,893 were arrested before federal troops subdued the disorder. (Sugrue, 1996, p. 29)

Darden (1987, p. 119) views conflicts over housing as one crucial cause that indirectly led to the uprising: Racial conflict continued as blacks resisted whites’ efforts to racially segregate them. As residential segregation emerged as the dominant issue of race relations in Detroit, contributing to the already uneven distribution of the black population, racial cooperation in the struggle for racial justice became more essential. (Darden et al., 1987, p. 119)

However, the underlying conflicts of the uprising were not addressed, and everyday life returned quickly.

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The post-war era World War II was followed by a period of prosperity with a booming auto industry and a population peak of 1.85 million in 1952 (Darden et al., 1987, p. 19). Yet, the one’s benefiting from the city’s prosperity were mostly Whites. The post-war decade was also one of many changes within and around the city. The increase in car ownership was accompanied by a drastic restructuring of Detroit’s urban fabric to build freeways that also connect the inner-city with its metro region. The increasing dominance of the automobile led to the abolishment of the streetcar in 1956 – the same year the Federal Highway Act passed, authorizing further expansions of freeways (Hahn, 2014, p. 23; Woodford, 2001, pp. 107, 163f.). But the construction of freeways also fueled already existing tensions, as Sugrue (1996) notes: Detroit’s city planners promised that the proposed system of cross-city expressways would dramatically improve the city’s residential areas, as well as bolster the city’s economy. For the thousands of blacks who lived in the path of Detroit’s first expressways, both promises were false. Detroit’s highway planners were careful to ensure that construction of the new high-speed expressways would only minimally disrupt middle-class residential areas, but they had little such concern for black neighborhoods, especially those closest to downtown. (p. 47)

Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, two predominantly Black neighborhoods that were home to many Black businesses and cultural institutions were among those which had to give way to the freeways (Sugrue, 1996, p. 47; Woodford, 2001, p. 164). But not only within the city relocation was in process. Even before the passage of the Federal Highway Act factories relocated to the suburbs or even further outside of the city where land could be acquired much cheaper: “Between 1947 and 1955 the Big Three […] constructed some 20 new plants in suburban Detroit. As in the past, complementary metal and machinery industries clustered around the new factories, and residential growth and services followed industrial expansion” (Darden et al., 1987, p. 16). Thus, the suburban population grew from 1,166,629 in 1950 to 2,092,216 in 1960, while the city’s population decreased by nearly 180,000 at the same time. Since mostly Whites moved to the suburbs, the percentage of Blacks rose to 28.9% in 1960 in Detroit (Woodford, 2001, p. 164). With residents, industry, and businesses (and thus not only jobs but also wealth and taxes) moving to the suburbs and a new road network being built, the city underwent an urban renewal program that tried to restructure the urban fabric. These processes were not only “[…] long, complicated, and bureaucratic […]” (Woodford, 2001, p. 169), but also rarely involved residents. But the city’s economy was not only affected by the massive efflux to the suburbs: “The 1950s marked a decisive turning point in the development of the city – a systematic restructuring of the local economy from which the city never fully recovered. […] Between 1949 and 1960, the city suffered four major recessions. Because the auto industry was tremendously sensitive to shifts in consumer demand it weathered recessions badly. The unpredictability of demand for automobiles, especially in times of economic uncertainty, had serious ramifications for Detroit’s working class. […] What was new in the 1950s was that

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The city of Detroit auto manufacturers and suppliers permanently reduced their Detroit-area work forces, closed plants, and relocated to other parts of the country. […] More important than the periodic downswings that plagued the city’s economy was the beginning of a long-term and steady decline in manufacturing employment that affected Detroit and almost all other major northeastern and midwestern industrial cities. Between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs, while its population of working-aged men and women actually increased”. (Sugrue, 1996, p. 126)

Abandoned plants, empty storefronts, and vacant houses were not an unusual image – and one that would accompany the city until today. In the summer of 196779, Detroit erupted again, beginning with a police raid in a ‘blind pig’, an illegal bar, in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Arrests for illegal drinking were common in Detroit, but usually the police dispersed the crowd and arrested a handful of owners and patrons, taking the names of the remainder. On the steamy July night, they decided to arrest all eighty-five people present and detained them – hot, drunk, and angry – outside the saloon until reinforcements could arrive. By four in the morning, an hour after the bust, nearly two hundred people, attracted by the commotion behind the blind pig, had gathered to watch the proceedings. As the arrestees shouted allegations of police brutality, tempers rose. The crowd began to jeer and to throw bottles, beer cans, and rocks at the police. […] By 8:00 a.m., a crowd of over three thousand had gathered on Twelfth Street. (Sugrue, 1996, p. 259)

After five days, forty-three people were dead (thirty-three Blacks and ten Whites), and [c]lose to 5,000 people were left homeless, most of them black. More than 1,000 buildings had been burned to the ground. When the total damage was tallied, it soared to $50 million. During the riot, or ‘rebellion,’ as most black radicals called it, several white police officers deliberately shot three unarmed black men to death in the Algiers Motel80. (Darden & Thomas, 2013, p. 1).

The causes for the rebellion were a combination of “[…] white institutional racism in the form of urban renewal, expressways, and white suburban resistance” (Darden & Thomas, 2013, p. 3) – leading to a city even more segregated by race and class –, as well as discriminatory practices in the job market, leading to higher rates in unemployment and poverty among Black residents which all had culminated in an atmosphere of anger, frustration, and devastation (Darden & Thomas, 2013, p. 4; Sugrue, 1996, p. 261).

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For further insight and discussion of the events of 1967, I can recommend, among others, the books Violence in the Model City (Fine, 2007), Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide (Darden & Thomas, 2013), Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies (Stone & Sugrue, 2017), and Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-determination (Boyd, 2017). Also, the Detroit Historical Society (2019) has an online oral and written history archive with more than 400 collected stories that commemorate the events of 1967. The events in the Algiers Motel are also the subject for the motion picture Detroit, which brings fiction and facts together. It was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and released in 2017 (Bigelow, 2017).

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The post-1967 era Following the rebellion, “[…] there were a variety of laudable if largely ineffective public and private efforts to reknit the shredded civic fabric. Racial polarization was beyond repairing through rhetoric and tokenism, however” (Galster, 2012, p. 186). In 1973, the city’s first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young was elected – and he would be reelected five consecutive times, serving as the city’s mayor for 20 years total. Under Young, hundreds of millions were spent to renew and revitalize Detroit’s downtown riverfront, hoping it would be a catalyst for a wider urban change. One result, completed in 1977, was a complex of five high-rise buildings with offices, retail, and a hotel, named the Renaissance Center (RenCen). In 1996, the RenCen was bought by GM and is now their headquarter (Thompson, 2004, p. 205; Woodford, 2001, pp. 217f., 248). However, the scope of these actions was marginal and Detroit was facing “[…] a rising crime rate, the loss of its white middle class to the suburbs, the loss of thousands of jobs within its automotive and manufacturing industries, and the closing of its last major department store […]” (Woodford, 2001, p. 228). The city’s population decreased from 1,670,144 in 1960 to 1,203,368 in 1980 which in total is a population loss of more than 460,000 in just twenty years, whereas the suburban population increased in the same period (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, 2020; Sugrue, 1996, p. 269). As Whites continued to move out of the city, Detroit became a majorityminority city in the 1980s: the percentage of White population declined from 70.83% in 1960 to 34,38% in 1980, whereas the share of Black population increased from 28.87% to 63.07% in the same time (Galster, 2017, p. 45). Concomitant with the outward migration to the suburbs is a loss in value of inner-city dwellings due to an excess supply “[…] of inferior dwellings located in the most dangerous and deteriorated neighborhoods […]” (Galster, 2017, p. 39). During the 1970s and early 1980s the whole country, and especially the industrial cities, went into recession and Detroit was hit particularly hard through the auto industry. Competition on the international market, especially with Japanese auto manufacturers, new regulations, and the oil embargo beginning in 1973 consequently led to more than 200,000 people losing their jobs in the 1970s (Thompson, 2004, pp. 207ff.; Woodford, 2001, pp. 221ff.). Also, racial polarization was far from being dissolved in the post-1967 era: “As the city grew poorer, its social deterioration escalated, setting in motion a vicious cycle of greater white antipathy toward the inner city and, in turn, greater social malaise” (Thompson, 2004, p. 209). So, in 1989, when […] Young began his final four years in office, the city was still plagued with a declining population (in 1990 just over a million at 1,027,974, a drop of nearly 15 percent since 1980), widespread poverty (one-third of Detroiters lived below the federal government-determined poverty level), an extremely high unemployment rate (between 1974 and 1991 the rate in Detroit rose from about 9 percent to more than 20 percent, and the number of jobs had fallen by about one-third), glaring deficiencies in the public school system, block after block of burned-out or boarded-up houses, and a still substantial crime rate (the most prominent crimes involving the sale and use of drugs). (Woodford, 2001, p. 234, emphasis added)

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Besides the government not able to address the city’s problems, Boyle (2001) further stresses the role corporations played in the city’s downward spiral: But twentieth-century Detroit was, at heart, a product of industrial capitalism. Auto manufacturers made Detroit into one of the world’s greatest industrial centers in the first decades of the twentieth century. And their decisions made Detroit into the nation’s premier example of urban decay at that century’s end. The ruins of Detroit […] thus stand as symbols not of decay but of power, the power of corporations to shape the rise and fall of a great American city. (pp. 125f.)

Shift towards an entrepreneurial urban governance Even though Detroit experienced a phase of prosperity during the 1990s, the city’s population kept on declining, however with decreased speed (Galster, 2012, p. 220; Woodford, 2001). During this time, several cultural institutions, like The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, financially benefited from the economy’s high. Other downtown revitalization strategies involved the construction of two stadiums – Comerica Park and Ford Field – as well as three casinos (Eisinger, 2003, p. 95; Woodford, 2001, pp. 240ff.). Harvey (1990, pp. 255f.) contextualizes these sorts of culture- and consumer-focused strategies as part of a shift towards an entrepreneurial city81, beginning in the 1970s in the US. These pro-growth and entertainment-led regeneration attempts in Detroit also have been (and their successors still are) criticized for being […] fundamentally flawed as a mechanism of bringing about broadly-based regeneration, as indicated by the resulting uneven spread of benefits in terms of the wider city. It may therefore be concluded that the use of entertainment and sports-based schemes may increase problems of social injustice and exclusion. Consequently, the justification of public subsidy of such schemes may be called into question. (McCarthy, 2002, p. 110)

After a relatively low decline in the 1990s, the city lost more than 200,000 citizens between 2000 and 2010, resulting in a population of 713,862 (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, 2020). From 2002 until 2008, Kwame Kilpatrick was the mayor of Detroit and became mostly known for his entanglements in corruption, bribery, and fraud – including defalcating money from Detroit’s pension fund – for which he served in prison (Apel, 2015a, p. 47; Farley, 2017, p. 55). Apel (2015a) also assumes that “[t]he unrestrained corruption and lax oversight that allowed these actions suggest that corruption had been the norm through many administrations” (p. 47). Hence, although a crass example, Kilpatrick’s way of operating might have benefited from structures embedded in the city’s politics. The end of the 2000s, Detroit was further shaped by the global financial crisis in 2007-2008 and the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009, although both

81

For further discussion of the shift to entrepreneurial urban governance, see e.g., Harvey (1989a).

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companies were saved by bailouts (Apel, 2015a, p. 39). However, the city itself did not profit from the bailouts offered to corporations. On the contrary: In 2013 Detroit itself declared bankruptcy.

The Bankruptcy In 2012, Governor Rick Snyder was informed that the city of Detroit was on the way towards insolvency. The recession that began in 2008 explains the timing. Between 2007 and 2013, per capita income in Detroit dropped by 13% in constant dollars, the number of employed residents fell by 18%, the assessed value of residential property by 47%, while the poverty rate of residents increased from 34% to 41%. (Farley, 2017, p. 54)

In consequence, city services were reduced, wages cut, workers laid off, and taxes were raised in an attempt to increase revenue (Farley, 2015, p. 119). When the city did not make enough progress, in early 2013, the governor appointed Kevyn Orr as Emergency Manager82. After assessing Detroit’s financial debts – more than $18 billion83 in obligations in 2013 –, Orr “[…] concluded that the only feasible solution required reducing payments to all who were owed monies” (Farley, 2017, p. 56). To make this possible, Orr filed for bankruptcy which would allow Detroit to be “[…] freed from its legal obligations, including those to bond-holders and pensioners” (Farley, 2017, p. 56). In summer 2013, federal Judge Rhodes confirmed Detroit’s bankruptcy under chapter 9 of the federal bankruptcy law. The purpose of chapter 9 is to provide a financially-distressed municipality protection from its creditors while it develops and negotiates a plan for adjusting its debts. Reorganization of the debts of a municipality is typically accomplished either by extending debt maturities, reducing the amount of principal or interest, or refinancing the debt by obtaining a new loan. (United States Courts, n.d., para. 2)

Thus, chapter 9 bankruptcy allowed Detroit to maintain sovereignty and prevented it from forced sales. As part of the insolvency proceedings, Detroit had to devise a plan for adjustment. First released on February 21, 2014, the Plan for the Adjustment of Debts of the City of Detroit was modified several times until the

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“Michigan’s legislature enacted an Emergency Financial Manager law in 1988 to mitigate the financial problems of troubled cities and school districts. Should they be approaching insolvency, the state treasurer was to alert the governor. If the governor agreed, the treasurer was to work out a consent agreement in which the local government would promise to balance its books, primarily by reducing wages, firing workers, and deferring payments of its debts. If little progress were made, the treasurer again alerted the governor, who had the authority to appoint an Emergency Manager. This person would have almost total control of a local government. He or she could abrogate contracts, reduce employment, cut wages, sell municipal assets, and eliminate expenditures but was obligated to pay bond holders and could recommend but not impose new taxes” (Farley, 2015, p. 119). For a thorough review of Detroit’s fiscal and economic history until 2013, see McDonald (2014).

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eighth amended plan was confirmed as part of the settlement trial in Court in the fall of 2014 (Heiman et al., 2014a, 2014b; Rhodes, 2014, p. 1). Part of the plan was what came to be known as the Grand Bargain84: When Kevyn Orr requested bankruptcy, many assumed that Detroit had numerous valuable assets that could be sold to pay bond-holders, pensioners, and other debts: a water and sewerage system that served almost all of Southeast Michigan, a system for distributing electricity, more than 100 parks, a share of the tunnel that linked Detroit to Canada, many revenuegenerating parking lots, and three museums, in addition to the Detroit Institute of Arts and a large zoo. It soon became clear that the only assets that could be sold quickly for cash were the masterpieces in the Detroit Institute of Arts. (Farley, 2017, p. 57)

However, the idea of monetizing parts of the collection of the museum – which includes works from Degas, Picasso, van Gogh, and the like – was met with much opposition from inside and outside of the city. To protect the pensions that must be paid under Michigan’s constitution as well as the art, an agreement, the Grand Bargain, was made […] whereby prosperous foundations linked to Detroit […] provided $366 million, the state of Michigan provided $350 million, while the Detroit Institute of Arts agreed to raise $100 million over 20 years. These monies were placed into the pension funds, while the art and the Gallery were transferred to a private non-profit organization. (Farley, 2017, p. 57)

Several assets of the city (including parks and parking lots) were sold, rented out, or transferred to public-private management, the city government was restructured and improved, and funds were established for blight removal85. On December 10, 2014, it was announced that Detroit had officially exited bankruptcy. This also included the resignation of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and the resumption of governance by Mayor Mike Duggan who was elected in 2013 (Farley, 2017, pp. 58f.). Although the bankruptcy case was thereby settled, the distress “[…] still permeated the city’s fabric, resulting in widespread vacancy, emptiness, abandonment and ruin” (Avdoulos, 2018, p. 205). Although not a new phenomenon86, it was reinforced by a population decline of more than 300,000 from 2000 until 201987 (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, 2020; United States Census Bureau, 2018a). Figure 3 visualizes the growth and decline of Detroit’s total population as well as the growth of the suburban total population. Interestingly,

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For further information on settlements, see the final Plan for the Adjustment (Heiman et al., 2014b) as well as the approval by Judge Rhodes (Rhodes, 2014). For a thorough discussion of the city’s demolition and blight removal efforts, see Akers (2015, pp. 1849ff., 2017) and Hackworth (2019, pp. 160ff.). According to Caverly (2019), vacant lots and buildings have been a part of Detroit’s appearance for decades: “Between 1954 and 1966, the municipality issued construction permits for 8458 housing units and 22,841 demolitions without replacement. A 1989 survey found 15,000 vacant single-family homes, alongside countless empty commercial and industrial facilities. By 2014, despite tens of thousands of demolitions in the intervening decades, more than 40,000 buildings were unused” (p. 4) According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit has a population of 670,052 in 2019. However, these are estimated data and the next decennial census is currently (2020) conducted.

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Detroit’s Black population only started to decline after 2000 while at the same time, the suburban Black population grew significantly compared to the decades prior (Binelli, 2012, pp. 133f.).

Fig. 3: Changes of Black and total population in Detroit and its suburbs since 1900 (own figure based on Galster (2017, p. 45))

Further, it is difficult to obtain accurate and recent information on vacant land and vacant buildings, but a survey done by the city in 2009 on residential parcels within city limits at least gives an idea of the situation: The results quantified what was obvious to the casual observer: 27 percent (over 90,000) of the residential parcels in the city are vacant land; another 3 percent (over 10,000 parcels) have houses vacant and open for trespass. Thus, nearly a third of Detroit’s residential parcels have been wiped out by the game of reverse musical chairs; another 10 percent (33,000) have dwellings that are vacant and may soon be abandoned. (Galster, 2012, p. 221)

Recent data suggests a vacancy rate between 20 and 30% for residential addresses (Drawing Detroit, 2019). What should also be kept in mind when discussing the city’s vacant parcels is that most of the city was built as low-density and singleor multi-family (duplex) housing in the first place (Galster, 2012, p. 60; Hackworth, 2019, p. 29). Further, “[u]nlike many other cities, where abandoned houses occur in pockets, Detroit’s never seem to end. The abandonment, despite being very uneven across the city, reaches all the way out to the edges of the

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The city of Detroit

suburbs, eight miles from downtown” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 154). This is also reflected in figure 4 which shows the housing vacancy rate88 in Detroit in 2010. Royal Oak

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Fig. 4: Housing vacancy rate in Detroit in 2010 (Data Driven Detroit, 2012)

Vacant buildings (residential, commercial, industrial, and others) are often – if not properly boarded up and/ or observed by security systems or staff – left to nature, scrappers, squatters, homeless persons, drug dealers, ruin porn-enthusiast and artists, among others (Apel, 2015a, p. 58). Thus, vacancy here only hints at official and legal terms, not the (unofficial or illegal) use of buildings and their interior. The following four photographs, taken in Detroit in 2016 and 2017, show a small fraction of the different kinds of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and ruins.

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The vacancy rate (vacant housing units as percentage of total housing units) is depicted by census block groups which are “[…] statistical divisions of census tracts, [that] are generally defined to contain between 600 and 3,000 people, and are used to present data and control block numbering” (United States Census Bureau, 2019).

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Fig. 5: Abandoned shop, East Side (photo by author, September 2016)

Fig. 6: Overgrown lot, East Side (photo by author, May 2017)

Fig. 7: Abandoned factory, East Side (photo by author, April 2017)

Fig. 8: Ruin of a house, East Side (photo by author, April 2017)

The causes of Detroit’s bankruptcy are embedded in the developments over decades described above. Almost two decades before the bankruptcy, Sugrue (1996) already identified two major causes for Detroit’s postwar urban crisis, namely “[…] that capitalism generates economic inequality and that African Americans have disproportionately borne the impact of that inequality” (p. 5). In the case of the bankruptcy, which is not more and not less than the peak of the iceberg in a lengthy downward spiral, the erosion of the city’s tax base due to the massive losses of population, occupied homes, jobs, and businesses can be identified as a crucial factor. What adds to the declined tax base are independently governed regional and local entities that compete against one another, as well as city leaders in Detroit that not only misjudged situations and made controversial decisions but some also engaged in corruption (Farley, 2015, pp. 121ff.). Peck and Whiteside (2016), however, add another perspective to this discussion by describing Detroit’s bankruptcy not as “[…] an isolated, unique, or indeed local phenomenon. Rather, the city has been a notable pressure point in a historic process of financial intensification, unevenly experienced and realized” (p. 261). Hence, the bankruptcy should not only be discussed in its own right but also as part of a general shift within the US towards an entrepreneurial and neoliberal urban governance that favors privatization of city services and assets, as well as austerity (Harvey, 1989a, 1990; Kurashige, 2017, pp. 72f.; Peck, 2014, 2015). Thus, for many, the bankruptcy came as no surprise and was in the making for decades. This raises the questions of why it had to come this far at all, as well as in how far the declaration of bankruptcy was even strategically planned. Although I am not

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able to answer this question here, I would like to add Kurashige’s (2017) perspective, where he describes the bankruptcy of Detroit […] as a hostile municipal takeover by financiers commissioned by the governor and emergency manager to reinvent Detroit on the basis of corporate restructuring principles. Their goal was to reinvest in revenue-generating sectors of the city by advancing gentrification, while ridding the balance sheet of the people and places deemed economic liabilities. […] This was an extreme version of the neoliberal restructuring taking place in cities, schools, hospitals, museums, and other formerly noncommercial entities nationwide. (p. 11)

This reminds of Naomi Klein’s (2007, 2017) concept of disaster capitalism, where, in the aftermath of a disaster or crisis, a window of opportunity opens for neoliberal restructuring and corporatization (Kurashige, 2017, p. 53).

6.2

Recent developments in Detroit

Narratives about a dying or dead Detroit (Eisinger, 2013; LeDuff, 2014; Okrent, 2009; Sands, 2015; Tabb, 2015) are as common as those about a rebirth, revitalization, regeneration, or resurgence of the city (Arnaud, 2017; Bachelor, 1998; Briller & Sankar, 2013; McCarthy, 1997, 2002; Trendafilova et al., 2012). Interestingly, these contradictory narratives tend to overlap timewise and are even accompanied by another narrative that fits with the other two: Detroit as a blank slate (Kurashige, 2017, p. 94). Akers (2018) describes Detroit as “[…] a site of rhetorical renaissance” (p. 7), where this rhetoric has been constructed and reproduced since the 1950s. Taking a look at Detroit now, he further identifies that [f]or boosters and residents in the tranquil islands of focused development, Detroit is experiencing a new revival, one that leaders and officials are optimistic will hold, unlike the one many of them championed in 2002, or 1994, or 1987, or any time during the city’s post-war contradiction. The city is 139 square miles (360 km2). The current areas of redevelopment that have featured in popular press accounts and local political campaigns encompass less than 10 square miles (25.8 km2) and account for millions in public subsidies. The current story of revival and renaissance is one that requires the suspension of disbelief, denial of broader citywide trends, a fixation on micro-geographies and the spectacle of redevelopment projects, and an inability to recognize the tension between the mass dispossession and displacement of city residents over the past 15 years on the one hand and, on the other, the public subsidies that make places like Downtown and Midtown grow. (p. 7)

What Akers hints at is the focus of urban development in the Greater Downtown area, while the rest – and major part of the city, measured in geographical size as well as by the number of residents – has not (yet) experienced the revival promised after exiting bankruptcy. There are especially two people who are noteworthy in the downtown redevelopment: Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert. Mike Ilitch, founder of the pizza chain Little Caesars, was the owner of the National Hockey League team Detroit Red Wings and the Major League Baseball team Detroit Tigers as well as several entertainment venues in downtown and Midtown. Deceased in 2017, his wife Marian Ilitch is now the chairperson of their company Ilitch Holdings, Inc. which serves as the umbrella for their various holdings. In 2017, they opened the Little Caesars Arena in Midtown which is now home to the

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Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Pistons who play in the National Basketball Association. While construction did not begin until 2014, the Ilitches started to buy property and land in this area from 2000 onwards (Kurashige, 2017, pp. 98ff.). While some of the properties were vacant, in multiple cases they bought up apartment buildings and evicted low-income and disabled tenants. The Ilitches admitted they kept the properties vacant and in states of disrepair in order to depress surrounding property values while they move to acquire more parcels. (Kurashige, 2017, pp. 98f.)

Further, the Ilitches did not only profit from public subsidies used for the construction, but the city sold them 39 parcels for $1 – apparently without assessing their value: “By comparison, Ilitch paid nearly $50 million to private landowners within the arena district for just 11 more parcels” (Perkins, 2017, para. 15). Besides, the economic effect of the arena and the developments connected to it remain to be seen, especially in the long run. The other prominent figure in the redevelopment process, Dan Gilbert, is the owner of the mortgage company Quicken Loans whose headquarter he moved to Downtown Detroit in 2010. Besides Quicken Loans, several other companies are part of Gilbert’s holding Rock Ventures. Another one of these companies is Bedrock, a real estate firm founded in 2011 that owns, develops, and manages more than 100 properties in Downtown Detroit (Bedrock Detroit, 2019). However, Gilbert’s efforts in real estate development are not limited to the buildings themselves but are also targeted towards public spaces which are increasingly monitored and curated (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 85). The tremendous amount of property ownership as well as broader influence downtown framed the term Gilbertville (Counts, 2014; Kurashige, 2017, p. 103). While Gilbert might be responsible for saving and renovating several historic buildings downtown, he is also highly criticized for single-handedly forcing downtown redevelopment according to his vision (Apel, 2015a, pp. 34f.; Kreichauf, 2017, pp. 85f.; Kurashige, 2017, pp. 106ff.). The strongest criticism focuses on demographics: Gilbert is not only bringing companies to downtown, he is intent on bringing people to downtown. Gilbert said in an interview that part of building Detroit is attracting the type of ‘new Detroiter’89 that he wants as part of his corporate developments: ‘If you want to attract the kind of brains to grow your business [...] you need a strong urban core. It’s no secret that people in their 20s and 30s want to be in a vibrant, exciting, urban core. We’re not going to get those people if we’re in a nice building in the suburbs.’ This idea, however, is that the strategy of growth, both for Gilbert’s business and real estate holdings, is dependent on attracting a particular type of demographic. He is looking to bring in a young and educated workforce and to do so he is investing heavily in building a city to attract this population. Implicitly, then, this suggests that there is not a young and educated workforce already in Detroit. (Kinney, 2016, p. 129)

Further, Gilbert has been accused of “[…] ethnic cleansing and cultural whitewashing” (Kurashige, 2017, p. 107) through evicting low-income, elderly, and

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The source of the interview mentioned is Muller (2012).

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disabled tenants before redeveloping apartment buildings. Accordingly, Kinney (2016) summarizes that “[t]he narrative of Detroit’s rise relies on the symbolic economy – the cultural symbols that innovative and creative people bring to any city and entrepreneurial capital” (p. 128). Further, this is underlined by the fact that only half of all city residents who are employed work within the city, and at the same time, more than 70% of those working within the city live in the suburbs (Eisinger, 2015, p. 115; United States Census Bureau, 2018b). The Ilitches and Dan Gilbert are not the only, but probably the prime examples “[…] of investors abusing Detroit’s situation for their own profit-making” (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 85), using the window of opportunity and thus mutually influencing the narrative of Detroit as a blank slate. The effects of their actions are particularly problematic when put into a city-wide context: While investment and regeneration concentrate on Downtown and Midtown, many neighborhoods – and thus, the areas where most people live – have been neglected and don’t profit from the developments (in a direct way): The case of Detroit exemplifies an urban regeneration process that is one-sided, led by austerity urbanism, and features the unequal spatial distribution of investment. This focuses on central areas and is led by a handful of private investors (single-interest-led urban regeneration). […] The concentration of investment in these central areas, combined with the city’s low land costs, land speculation, and privatization of public services and properties, have resulted in the intensification of socio-spatial disparities between Downtown’s and Midtown’s new urban elites and Detroit’s deprived population. (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 92, emphasis in original)

Thus, often excluded from visions of Detroit’s future are the “[…] working-class and poor Detroiters, who account for the vast bulk of the city’s population […]” (Eisinger, 2015, p. 114), and who are also predominantly Black. Kurashige (2017) calls this “[…] a ‘data-driven’ and ‘impact-based’ rather than ‘need-based’ approach to urban investment” (p. 111). However, being a city with a history of strong civic and community organizations, these developments are met with opposition. There are various individuals, groups, and initiatives that focus on community organizing and DIY-strategies, among them, for example, several hundred community gardens and farms in the city that fill the void of the lack of grocery stores with fresh produce (for further information see Binelli, 2012, pp. 53ff.; Boggs, 2012, 2013; Kinder, 2016; Kurashige, 2017, pp. 114ff.). It remains to be seen how Detroit develops in the coming years, especially regarding social and racial, as well as political and economic issues. Nevertheless, a turnaround towards a more need-based approach does not seem feasible without a broader change in urban governance away from neoliberal and austerity politics and towards social concerns and a stronger welfare orientation. This, in turn, might not be possible on a municipal level only but asks for change on a regional or even national – if not international – level. The two preceding subchapters not only described Detroit’s history but also unveiled the conflicts and power struggles that happen over space. This is especially the case with the recent urban developments, which I explained by taking the examples of the entrepreneurs Ilitch and Gilbert, which show that these conflicts often have roots in the past.

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The power struggles over space as well as the issues of race and the recent urban changes in Detroit were also reoccurring topics in many on the interviews I conducted. In the following, I therefore make a slight change of perspective and look at these topics once again. Now, I will look at them from the perspective of the interviewees to add this more subjective and nuanced perception to the historic and recent developments that I described before.

Race and racism As pointed out before, institutional, structural, and individual racism pervade Detroit’s history. Thus, their consequences are still visible and affecting the present city. Among them are, for instance, the racial and economic segregation of the city and its suburbs, differing intergenerational wealth transfers between Black and White families, or the freeways that not only cut through neighborhoods but are built on the ground of former Black neighborhoods that had important economic and cultural meaning for Black residents, and thus, for some, act as constant reminders of what has been lost due to urban renewal and the restructuring of the urban fabric (Darden & Thomas, 2013, p. 3; Sugrue, 1996, pp. 47f.; K.-Y. Taylor, 2019, p. 258) (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017; Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019). However, also within the city, racial and economic segregation and re-segregation, respectively, can be observed. The city’s core – especially Greater Downtown – is perceived as becoming “(…) more affluent, better educated and more white” (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018). At the same time, this alleged dualism of Black and White90 runs through many more spheres and narratives than the White core and the Black neighborhoods, such as White newcomers and Black locals, White places and Black places (e.g., restaurants, coffee shops, galleries, etc.) or a White ‘art bubble’ and a Black ‘art bubble’ (Music, 2015, para. 1ff.) (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018; Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019). Connected with this are two further issues: racial stereotypes and a changing image of Detroit. For the former, Detroit’s decline and its effects (poverty, crime, urban decay, etc.) are sometimes ascribed to its Black residents who are held responsible for it (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017; Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019): And there’s always a great deal of venom and shock elevated and a, and a blaming of the city as if it, in some kind of way, has failed its, its morality, you know, and its competence, and its intelligence in some way. um … ‘Look at how this happens in Detroit!’, you know, ‘Look at how they just leave this stuff right here like that’. (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017)

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It is also worth noting that this not only creates a false dualism of Black and White and the idea of self-contained, homogenous groups, but it excludes and hides ethnicities such as Asian and Hispanic – though the latter make up about 8% of the city’s population – or people who self-define as mixed race (United States Census Bureau, 2018a).

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Needless to state that this is a false conclusion. It is even more astonishing that this overlaps with a shift of perception of Detroit where it became “[…] not merely acceptable, but desirable to be associated with the city” (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017): And then, you know, there was that shift in sort of perception of Detroit where it went from being the shittiest place on planet earth to being super cool because it’s the shittiest place on planet earth. […] And I, I still think that started happening around 2005. But I think the economic crisis in ‘08 somehow accelerate it. um ... In part because nationwide the judgment on Detroit seem to get gentler after the stock crash, you know, when everyone else briefly caught up with us in the loser department. (Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019)

Urban change When recent urban developments in Detroit are discussed, there is often a strong focus on private investors and developers, downtown redevelopment, unequal spatial development, and gentrification. These interwoven topics are further accompanied by two questions in particular: Are there two (or more) cities emerging within Detroit? And who is included in the (re)development of Detroit and the stories told alongside? As noted before, Detroit’s bankruptcy was the climax of decades of the city spiraling downward (Farley, 2015, pp. 121ff.). But it also drew a line and to some extent created a new time counting: There is now a pre- and a post-bankruptcy Detroit. Part of post-bankruptcy Detroit is, according to Vince Carducci, the city reasserting control through political and administrative restructuring: Coming out of the, the bankruptcy, there has been … a … reassertion of the state. And in particular with the … I mean the urban planning department in the city of Detroit was dysfunctional for decades. […] I’m not sure how well they understand the environment of Detroit and its unique aspect. Especially as it relates to questions of race and class. But … so now … this, like I said, the city is reasserting control over the urban space. (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018)

However, he notes two resulting consequences: On the one hand, it does foreclose certain alternatives to a very, kind of mainstream idea of space and how we interact with it. Essentially as a commodity. um … On the other hand, if you’re living in that neighborhood, it’s good that you have your garbage picked up and the lights turned on and the police come when you call them. (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018)

This also raises the question what consequences this might have in the long run for art that relies on alternative use of urban (public) space. This goes hand in hand with the uneven development and (re)production of inequality and segregation (Kreichauf, 2017, pp. 87ff.) that leads to the perception of Detroit as “[…] a tale of two cities” (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018). On the one hand, there are the “[…] hotbed areas, primarily along the

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QLine91 and out, you know, in the kind of historical core […]” (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018); the “[…] small little yuppie core […] of sort of middle, upper middle class mostly white people, not exclusively, but mostly” (Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019) that “[…] in the last few years has changed very, very quickly” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). Buildings owned by Gilbert are being power washed (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017), international and national chain stores and restaurants are opening downtown instead of local businesses (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018) and to some, it even seems like “[…] a playground for … twenty-, thirty-something … the creative class” (Danny VanZandt, interview April 13, 2019). On the other hand, “[…] the revitalization of Greater Downtown exists simultaneously with the neglect of peripheral neighborhoods” (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 87). This ‘other’ area of the city has “[…] tons of open space, it’s part ghetto […] you know. I mean, there are areas in the city in the summertime where the grass grows up this high [raises his hand to the height of his shoulders]” (Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019). In these neighborhoods, there seems to be an ongoing cycle of disinvestment, foreclosures, and eventually blight removal (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). However, there are not only disparities between the Greater Downtown and the neighborhoods, but also on a much smaller level: Yeah, when I take people around I, I often say it’s a city of juxtaposition. One street to the next, it just can change abruptly, economically … um … you can go from a street where it’s all abandoned houses and the next street, all occupied. There’s roads, there’s railways, and there’s freeways that act almost like a moat between neighborhoods, like a dividing line between neighborhoods. And on one side there is this and on the other side there’s this. um … It’s a reoccurring pattern all throughout the city and it’s a city of islands. There’s just this island, and then almost like the sea in between. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

What Scott refers to are, among others, the freeways that were superimposed on existing neighborhoods which then were either erased or divided by the barrier of the freeway. However, this should not disguise the overall structural issue of vast speculations and investments targeted towards the Greater Downtown area while at the same time, the neighborhoods suffer from disinvestment and neglect (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 91). With the change and redevelopment of Greater Downtown and some neighboring areas, gentrification and displacement are much-discussed topics, including at events in the art sector (e.g., Driggins at ‘Public Art & the Urban Landscape’, April 30, 2019; Vergara at ‘Picturing Detroit’, November 16, 2016; Arnaud, N’Namdi at ‘Detroit – The Dream is now’, April 26, 2017). There is still a lack of in-depth and long-term research on gentrification in Detroit and most statements are based on personal observations or experiences, but some trends

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The QLine is a streetcar that runs 3.3 mi on Woodward Avenue from Downtown to New Center.

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can be identified, nonetheless92. Among them is the disposal and conversion of formerly “[…] federally subsidized buildings […] to market-rate apartments […] and the conversion of a low-income senior housing center […] into market-rate units” (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 89) leading to the displacement of mostly poorer senior residents who are replaced by a younger, better educated and Whiter population (Kreichauf, 2017, pp. 88ff. Kurashige, 2017, pp. 107f.). Besides the actual physical displacement, a cultural or psychological gentrification (N’Namdi at ‘Detroit – The Dream is now’, April 26, 2017) adds to the perception of two emerging Detroits. Here, cultural gentrification results in “[…] particular groups not feeling welcome to visit and live in Downtown anymore” (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 89) due to a change in urban design, stores, restaurants, events, and/ or demographics but without necessarily being physically displaced because of terminated leases or increased rents. Spaces, their meanings as well as identities, do not simply exist but they are produced. Therefore, this example shows that not only control and dominance over space are contested, but also that the identities and meanings of space are subject to struggles and/ or processes of negotiation. This also involves questions concerning inclusion and participation, such as who is included in/ excluded from recent urban developments in Detroit and who shapes and directs them – questions that also run through chapters 7-9.

6.3

Art and/ in Detroit

In recent years, several journalists and researchers from different backgrounds have put thoughts into the role of art and artists in Detroit. Among others, Carducci (2011a, 2011b, 2012) and Herscher (2012a, 2012b, 2013) offer prolific theoretical approaches through the lens of critiques of capitalism. Sharp (2014, 2016, 2017a, 2017c) approaches the topic through art criticism, Apel (2001, 2015a, 2015b) has a stronger focus on art history and today’s ruins, but also picks up current debates on art in Detroit, and Stone-Richards (2014c, 2014a, 2014b) combines critical theory, philosophy and art history in his texts on artistic practices in Detroit. Lastly, Darroch (2015) and Rodney (2014), both associate professors at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor, Canada, look at Detroit and art from a perspective of being a border city. What most of these writings share is that they focus especially on artistic practices that are rather disconnected from the art market and are described as interventionist and sometimes socially engaged, confronting urban space in its physical and social form. These

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A report by the real estate advisory firm RCLCO (Willett & Dunlavey, 2019) identifies rapid gentrification over the past decades in Detroit’s core, “[…] illustrating the impact of substantial real estate investment, most notably by Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans and Bedrock” (Willett & Dunlavey, 2019, p. 3). RCLO measures gentrification using an index that consists of “[…] changes in real estate investment, household income levels, and associated demographic characteristics” (Willett & Dunlavey, 2019, p. 2).

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publications are especially worth mentioning here because they lay strong foundations for my work to build on with a more space-specific focus, as will be seen below and especially in chapters 7 and 8. While some newspaper articles published in the 2010s frame artists living and working in Detroit as a recent development (Conlin, 2015; Montenegro, 2014), the city has been attracting (international) artists for at least one and a half centuries. Among those are the architects Albert Kahn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Minoru Yamasaki, the painter Diego Rivera whose famous Detroit Industry frescoes of Ford Motor Company workers still exist in the Detroit Institute of Art, and ceramic artist Mary Chase Perry Stratton, co-founder of Pewabic Pottery (Cummings, 1980, p. 5; Sugrue, 1996, p. 17). However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that a visual art movement – the Cass Corridor Movement – put Detroit on the national art map with “[…] art being made in Detroit that was truly of Detroit” (Cummings, 1980, p. 5, emphasis in original). What Cummings might mean by art that is truly of Detroit will become clear in the following where I will take a brief look at the Cass Corridor Movement93. Lasting from the mid-1960s until the late-1970s, the Cass Corridor Movement – named after the Cass Corridor, now rebranded as Midtown (Kurashige, 2017, p. 101), an area located in Detroit’s core along Cass Avenue where many artists lived and worked – emerged from an urban situation that was already shaped by decline on one side and characterized by times of social and political movements on the other (Apel, 2001, p. 16; Jacob, 1980, pp. 17f.). The protagonists of the movement were mostly […] white college students, products of the post-war baby boom, they had for the most part grown up in middle-class suburban comfort. Not faced with the same financial stress as their parents’ generation had been, they were able to step back from contemporary America – with its economic and social inequities, materialism, military-industrial interest […] – and embrace rebellion and radicalism. (Jacob, 1980, p. 18)

These visual, performing and literary artists, some of which have become nationally and internationally respected, “[…] salvag[ed] beauty from the fractured material remains of a city in post-industrial decline and racial turmoil” (S. R. Sharp, 2017b, para. 1). Further, Belloli (1980) describes the works of these artists as a reflection of “[…] the complex, troubled, but spirited Detroit they lived in […]” (p. 56). Crossing established boundaries and experimenting with materials and tools, the emerged aesthetic is often described as rough, raw, or rugged with an emphasis on the process of construction and deconstruction while at a closer look, it is described as vulnerable and soft, too (Apel, 2001, p. 19; Belloli, 1980, pp. 44ff.). These different (and partially ambivalent) practices and aesthetics were inspired by the urban, social, and political circumstances of Detroit already in a

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For a thorough and broad discussion of the Cass Corridor Movement – which is not possible within this study – I recommended looking into the DIA’s catalogue Kick out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor 1963-1977 (1980) and the catalogue Up from the streets: Detroit art from the Duffy Warehouse collection (2001) by Abt et al.

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state of post-industrial decline, described by Cummings (1980, p. 5) as art not just from, but of Detroit. But art practices engaging with the city did of course continue in Detroit beyond the Cass Corridor Movement, as Rosler (2011b) summarizes exemplary regarding photography and movie making: People have been making art about Detroit’s troubles for a long time, especially through the media of photography and film: see for example, Newsreel’s Finally Got the News (1970)94 and Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989)95. Camilo José Vergara, sociologist, photographer, and cogent chronicler of the ills of US cities from the 1980s on, photographed and wrote about Detroit. (p. 12)

Since Vergara (1995, 1999, 2016) started photographing Detroit’s ruins, many others have followed in what is sometimes derogatory called ‘ruin porn’96 (see for example Y. Marchand & Meffre, 2013; A. Moore, 2010). While Richard Florida stated in 2012 that “[…] Detroit is already turning the corner […]” and attracting “[…] young people, or interesting people, or engaged people, artists, innovators, musicians, designers, city builders, place makers […]” (Florida, 2012), the statewide organization Creative Many came to a slightly different result in 2016 in regards to creative industries9798: Despite notable improvements and dedicated investment from foundations and private ventures, Detroit still lags other American cities of equivalent size in terms of the overall financial and employment impact of creative industries. In an era when population decline continues and average household income remains low, still more time and input is needed to build the vigorous diverse economy needed. (Creative Many Michigan, 2016, p. 16)

94 95

96

97

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Finally Got the News is a documentary about Black workers in auto factories (Bird et al., 1970). Roger & Me is Michael Moore’s first film. It documents his attempts to interview Roger Smith, then chairman of GM, about plants closings in Flint, MI (Edsforth, 1991; M. Moore, 1989). Rodney (2014) summarizes ruin porn in Detroit as follows: “Locally, people dismiss the attention, referring to the upswing in popularity of collections of photography documenting Detroit’s iconic remains as ‘ruin porn,’ a body of urban photography that circulates on blogs and coffee table books [...]. But, like all pornography, ruin porn simultaneously offends and appeals as we see something of ourselves in the theatricalized, extreme scenarios pictured in the glossy, large format photographs” (p. 263). For further discussion of the term in the context of Detroit, see Apel (2015a, pp. 20ff.). According to Creative Many Michigan (2016), creative industries represent “[…] a broader range of industries than the cultural industries […], they may often include advertising, architecture, design, culture and heritage and literary arts and publishing” (p. 10). Cultural industries are those “[…] that are involved in the production of cultural goods, services and experiences. Often recognized as including the arts (visual or performing arts), publishing (newspaper, book and magazine), music recording and publishing, radio, television and filmmaking” (Creative Many Michigan, 2016, p. 10). For a list of cultural industries in Detroit, composed by the market research consultancy Millier Dickinson Blais and commissioned by the Kresge Foundation, see The Kresge Foundation & Millier Dickinson Blais (2012, Appendix, pp. 1ff.).

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It seems not to be possible to determine whether there has been an influx of artists and creatives or an increase in artistic practice in Detroit in recent years, at least not by numbers. But several writers did observe an increased interest in the city, along with the new “[…] reputation as a bohemian paradise […]” (Binelli, 2012, p. 257) or descriptions of the city as “[…] a blank slate waiting to be written on with niche market and artisanal entrepreneurial projects that will save the city and create the next Brooklyn or Berlin by attracting young urban pioneers […]” (Apel, 2015a, p. 35). Moskowitz (2017) notes that “[u]rban planners and other Florida followers seem to believe Detroit proves that attracting the creative class works” (p. 81). He then goes on to criticize this single-sided view where “[a]ll you have to do is ignore the rest of the city and its (mostly black) residents, who keep slipping further and further off the grid” (p. 81). For Rosler (2011b), the interest “[…] stems from an analysis of the city as both the model failure of (urban) capitalism and a fertile ground for the seeds of the future” (p. 12). Hodges (2018b), slightly exaggerating, ascribes it to more structural causes which, on the other hand, might also fuel the blank slate narrative: The real estate is famously cheap, and with its stately, abandoned architecture, the city echoes with mystery, romance and drama. Even cooler for artists, there are no adults in the room. City hall is ineffective at best and overwhelmed at worst, with the result that Detroit is perhaps the least-governed city in the western industrial world. (p. 9)

What these observations have in common, though, is that they hint at a relationship of artists and Detroit in a way that they assume that the city’s urban spaces influence artists and artistic practices. Rodney (2009) comes to a similar conclusion when stating that “[…] a number of people are looking at Detroit as a challenging and complex urban experiment, one that attempts to chart a different course than the repeat cycles of business development and demolition […]” (pp. 7f.) that shaped the cities past. Sharp (2017a) also sees a similarity between the Cass Corridor movement and today: In fact, it is in dealing with space and the intersection of art and daily life that Detroit stands out in pushing the global conversation about where art belongs, what function it serves, and to whom it belongs. Much like the Cass Corridor movement of the 1970s, which featured a diverse and diffuse population of sculptors, muralists, painters, poets, and musicians that broke out of the city through the efforts of influential curator Sam Wagstaff, the real Detroit art movement is happening at the lunatic fringe, in houses, in reclaimed ex-industrial spaces, and in homegrown festivals and is always in motion. (para. 9)

Here, three common questions regarding art are taken up: Where does art belong? What is art’s function? And to whom does art belong? A variety of approaches to these questions in theory have been addressed in chapter 2. Now, concerning Detroit – and this is presumably what Sharp (2017a, para. 9) hints at with ‘the real Detroit art movement’ –, there is an abundance of art that “[…] is decentralized and takes place within a thousand little hidey-holes” (S. R. Sharp, 2017a, para. 9), often shaped by DIY-ethos and -aesthetics. Further, Rosler (2011b) identifies several projects in Detroit – among them the Heidelberg Project – that “[…] represent a movement within art, and architecture, to institute projects in the larger community, in the built environment or in reference to

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it […]” (p. 14). Darroch (2015) states something similar: “Detroit is different [form the international art world] […] because a wide range of art-makers and cultural creators live and work outside conventional notions of private or public property and, moreover, are civically engaged in ways specific to Detroit, which resist easy exportation” (pp. 299f.). Carducci (2012) has looked closer into the notion of public and private property, using a perspective he describes as the art of the commons: This lens reveals a significant (though certainly not exclusive) tendency within contemporary Detroit art that has emerged in those spaces where the distinctions between public and private seems to have dissipated as part of the process of demassification of the city’s core, which has taken place over the last four decades. […] The resulting abandonment of commercial and residential property, its subsequent neglect, and its reclamation in many quarters by nature has figuratively and in not a few cases quite literally opened up a new field of cultural production. Referring back to the medieval commons […] the art of the commons trespasses the boundaries of conventional property relations of modern capitalism. (para. 2)

Thus, art of the commons refers to “[…] art that is neither public nor private but that exists in a space in between” (Carducci, 2011a, para. 5). This space in between, as indicated, results from past developments which are still visible and affecting the city to this day: the abundance of buildings of which many are in some state of ruination, vacant lots, and not only the abandonment of buildings themselves but also their interior. This does not only offer a variety of material used in artistic practices but also blurs the line of the binary distinction of private and public space. This could be the case for example when ownership rights are in fact not clear or when they are clear, but the owner is not interested in the structure and its maintenance anymore, or the owner, especially if they are an artist, intentionally tries to open private spaces and make them (more) accessible to the public. Herscher (2012a) points in a similar direction in his publication The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit where he examines if, despite the loss of property value in Detroit, “[…] other sorts of values have reciprocally increased, use values that lack salience or even existence in that economy” (p. 8). He challenges the common view where a shrinking city is solemnly characterized by loss – of population, property value, taxes, etc. –, by working with the Marxist terms of exchange value and use value. Thus, he discusses projects, actions, and formations that reverse Lefebvre’s (1996, p. 66) observation that within the capitalist system, use value is replaced by exchange value. This does not imply that he contradicts Lefebvre’s assumptions. Rather, he identifies niches of urban development that work different from, but also because of and along with the capitalist and neoliberal city: Unreal estate emerges when the exchange value of property falls to a point when that property can assume use values unrecognized by the market economy. The extraction of capital from Detroit, then, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has been amply documented but also, and concurrently, an explosive production of unreal estate, of valueless, abandoned or vacant urban property serving as site of and instrument for the imagination and practice of an informal and sometimes alternative urbanism. (Herscher, 2012a, p. 9)

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The practices and projects documented in the guide are divided among four overlapping categories: unprofessional practices, unwarranted techniques, unsanctioned collectives, and unsolicited constructions (Herscher, 2012a, p. 17). As different as the categories and their respective examples might be, they have in common that they are mostly improvised, unplanned, open-ended, and/ or ephemeral; sometimes subsumed under the terms everyday urbanism or DIY urbanism99, describing “[…] an informal production of urban space that is posed as an alternative urbanism, opposed or resistant to hegemonic urban culture” (Herscher, 2012a, p. 292). The examples in the guide reach from farms and community gardens to community centers as well as art installations such as the Hamtramck Disneyland, the Heidelberg Project, and the MBAD African Bead Museum (which I will pick up in chapters 7 and 8, too). The latter three are grouped under the sub-category Patrimony of the Unlost which Herscher (2012a) defines as follows: With their caretakers frequently preoccupied with immediate tasks of survival, objects in the city of unreal estate are often left behind, disowned or abandoned. Precisely as such, however, these objects offer themselves for repossession, for becoming strange in new hands. Yet it’s not only objects that are lost in the city of unreal estate, but also identities, ambitions and plans of action; the city alienates both objects from subjects and subjects from themselves. Thus, the finders of lost objects can also, as it is said, ‘find themselves.’ Accumulating and arranging castoffs and discards, they become caretakers, curators, or outsider artists, claiming unreal estate to archive and arrange unreal estate’s particular material culture. (p. 272)

Herscher’s description is reminiscent of the practices that also largely defined the Cass Corridor Movement: working with lost, left behind, and leftover objects. This is not a new practice or one that is unique to Detroit but the city’s material condition, as pointed out before, seem to foster this particular practice, especially since in Detroit, leftover objects do include structures as large as a whole building (Sharp, 2017a, para. 11). Further, Carducci (2012) stresses the immaterial part of these artistic practices: “There is the sense data of course, that is, the material artifacts, spatial constructions, and interpersonal connections, but more important is the dialectical relationship of the acknowledgment of what is coupled with the vision of what could be” (para. 4). He identifies a visionary momentum, one which he explains through the perspective of Wright’s (2010) real utopias: “Real utopias are ways of envisioning conditions of social and political justice that are at once desirable, viable, and achievable. In keeping with this, real utopias are thus models of emancipatory social transformation, alternative ways of providing for human well-being” (Carducci, 2012, para. 5). Looking at art through the lens of real utopias in Detroit accredits art the ability to experiment with and envision other urban realities and regimes, and simultaneously intervening and critiquing the present ones; similar to the examples described in Herscher’s (2012a) The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit. However, “[t]he unvalues of unreal estate […] are constantly at

99

For further insight and discussion of the terms ‘everyday urbanism’ and ‘DIY urbanism’ see Chase et al. (2008) and Iveson (2013).

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risk or even in the process of being recuperated as values—a recuperation that could become part of a process of gentrification, redevelopment or urban renewal” (Herscher, 2012a, p. 10). As pointed out before, artists can be part of urban transformation, regeneration, and ultimately gentrification, “[…] but they are not the architects or chief supporters of private property and land-use practices that favor single-site transformations of land use against community wishes” (Markusen, 2006, p. 1937). It is rather their social and especially cultural capital that attracts economic investment. Nevertheless, Yezbick (2014) points out that artists in Detroit are, as in many other places, too, “[…] overly dependent upon private interests to sustain their practice” (para. 4) due to the lack of public funding. This, in turn, often obliges the artists to work community oriented which might restrict their mode of practice: In Detroit, artists are supported only in as much as they carry and tout a tag line of community engagement and/or public artwork. This paradigm limits freedom of expression and the types of intellectual conversations we can have surrounding artists’ lives in Detroit. (Yezbick, 2014, para. 5)

Besides, public art might be capitalized as an urban development tool, enhancing and embellishing Detroit’s image in the process of regeneration. As artistic practice in Detroit is so closely aligned with a narrative of the city, artists simultaneously forfeit artistic merit in national and international art scenes, often valued not for the work they create but for the insight and voyeurism they provide into a highly mythologized and misunderstood city. I personally feel the confines of artistic conversation in this city and am weary of the many ways in which artists are being mobilized to rebrand and rebuild the city of Detroit. In this paradigm, there is no support for taking artistic risks but rather a neoliberal model of individual and collective exploitation in the name of progress – progress that will attempt to increase the wealth of a few at the expense of many. (Yezbick, 2014, para. 6f.)

Aside from the structural challenges, the subtext of this statement also hints at the artist’s responsibility and reflexivity concerning the work they do. With Detroit still being in a phase of recovery from bankruptcy, it is important to critically observe how this area of potential tension and conflict develops, especially concerning measures taken by the city so far. For instance, in 2015 Detroit was recognized a Design City100 as part of the UNESCO’s creative cities network (UCCN). To become a member, cities must go through an application process and need to meet certain criteria for the field they apply for. According to the UCCN’s (n.d.) mission statement, the network “[…] aims to strengthen cooperation with and among cities that have recognized creativity as a strategic factor of sustainable development as regards economic, social, cultural and environmental aspects” (p. 1). However, it is difficult to yet evaluate if the membership is more than a label and/ or a growth-oriented

100 For more information on Detroit’s plans and endeavors as part of the UCCN membership, see Design Core Detroit (2018, 2019).

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network strategy that works according to the creativity script101. Another example is the city’s approach to graffiti and street art. Besides the annual mural festival Murals In The Market102 which started in 2015 in the Eastern Market neighborhood, the City implemented the City Walls program in 2017, “[…] where property owners who have received a blight violation ticket could choose to have a mural painted to satisfy the remediation portion of the ticket” (City of Detroit, n.d.-a, para. 2). The City’s official website further states that “[i]n recognizing that the number one goal is to highlight the values and the identity of the community, the program puts an emphasis on a reversed engineered approach to content development insuring that the art develops organically and holistically within the community by the community” (City of Detroit, n.d.-a, para. 3). So, while administering a zero-tolerance policy on graffiti that is created without the property owner’s permission103 – and therefore claiming it as blight –, the City highlights the role of authorized murals to beautify public space and to strengthen the community (City of Detroit, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Here, power is exercised over the visual appearance of walls, which might be private property, but also shape the public space as they are publicly visible. This also leads to the question of whether only authorized and legitimized art has a raison d’être. Even though this cannot be discussed here further, it should be noted that even the initially subversive practice of graffiti painting has found an obedient sibling in the neoliberal city.

6.4

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According to Luger (2017a, p. 6), “[t]he ways in which art-making, class, race, sexuality, policy, and space intersect are crucial to understanding the way that artistic identity is forged and the way that art should and can be understood and portrayed”104. So, in the following, I introduce the interviewees and an additional artist105 in more detail. As mentioned before, they are artists, initiators of art organizations as well as cultural critics, journalists, and researchers interested in

101 According to Peck (2011), “[t]he creativity script arrives with ready-made rationales, remits, and rhetorics, functioning as a carrier of trendy policy norms, yet requiring only minimal adaption to local circumstances” (pp. 64f.). 102 For maps, photographs and further information of the murals produced during Murals In The Market in the past four years, see Murals In The Market (2019). 103 Property owners are advised to register artworks on their property through an online Public Art Registry (City of Detroit, n.d.-c) to avoid ticketing by the city inspectors. 104 In view of Luger’s quote above, I regard it as necessary to briefly address and disclose the topic of race for the reader since this might also affect the positioning from which the interviewees and artists act and speak. Dabls, Carl, Mariuca, Marsha and Tyree are BIPoC, and Jen describes herself as Filipinx. Danny, Claudia, John, Karah, Mary, Michael, Mirka, Scott and Vince are White. 105 The additional person is Tyree Guyton, artist and creator of the Heidelberg Project who I did not interview but could draw from already existing material (several scientific publications, news articles, and the project’s website).

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(visual) art in Detroit. The portraits differ in length as well as in detail because the amount of information that were available to me varies depending on how much they were willing to share in the interview as well as on how widely they are known. And finally, as mentioned before, some interviews were anonymized in so far as the interviewees, their organizations, and other personally identifiable information such as the specific location of the organization were pseudonymized and/ or left out.

Scott Hocking “Detroit-based artist Scott Hocking has been a life-long observer of a city in flux. His work explores the physical and psychological thresholds between crumbling infrastructure and flourishing nature. Through tactics that are technically illegal and certifiably insane, Hocking traverses vacant sites in forgotten corners of the world that are on the verge of collapse. His practice involves site-specific installation and documentary photography, where industrial debris becomes the backdrop for monumental sculpture. Beyond being the Andy Goldsworthy of urban detritus, Hocking’s work arrests the ephemeral, and reminds us that decay is an equal cause for celebration within the journey we call progress” (Margolis-Pineo, 2011, para. 3).

Scott Hocking (b. 1975) grew up in Redford, a township bordering the city of Detroit, which he describes as “[…] a white trash buffer zone between the innercity black Detroit and the more affluent white suburbs […] [with a] wildly racist environment where the thought of going into Detroit was really met with the idea of instant crime, instant problems […]” (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017). After years of unrest and being on the move, a car accident in 1996 was the decisive experience that made Scott not just stay and live in Detroit, but also try being an artist: I was always good at art. I … when I was a kid, I was very musical. […] And I was also really good at drawing and they put me in those classes, so …. My teachers were very aware, when I was young, that I had these talents. But my family background [smirk], that just wasn’t the kind of thing you focused on. When you come from a really working-class background, I think it’s pretty common that people think of that as … not a way that you could survive in life. So, it becomes kind of a … a thing that you don’t believe in, you don’t think much about. […] And really, honestly, it wasn’t until that car accident where I had something happen to me that really … I hit … the expression would be I hit rock bottom, and my whole life felt like … just a series of futility. And in that low, low, low point, I had a kind of moment of clarity. And that clarity was that: ‘Hey, I was born with something that I’m good at, why don’t I just do that?’. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

He enrolled at the College for Creative Studies where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2000. During this time, Scott started seeking vacant buildings to collect material for his practice (Avalon International Breads, 2018b, para. 13) (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017). “In the 90’s there was just an abundance of waste, you can’t even imagine. Some of these buildings were left abandoned with everything in them and then busted open by the scrappers, and then the scrappers would just make paths through all the debris to get all the things

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they wanted, which were things I usually didn’t want. They wanted metal, and I wanted the random old thing that was in my mind a beautiful artifact. So the amount of material and the fact that I had no money, it was just a really useful way for me to recycle waste for me back then. I still feel that way. If you look at the threads in my work, I’m interested in using wasted space” (Hocking in VanZandt, 2019, para. 62).

Over time, this practice developed into not just entering buildings to get material but to work inside buildings with the material found on-site: But it took a long time for me to have another light bulb moment and realize that I wasn’t satisfied taking material out and making sculptures out of it, I really wanted to be in there, I wanted to work with the space. And that the space was what was inspiring to me, not just the material. […] But after some early attempts, I started to feel like ‘No, this is what I wanna do. I wanna make work that responds to the site and that incorporates the site and that there’s a collaboration that happens with the site, the history, the materials, everything’. um … And now, after starting that way of working, now, I, this is the way I love to work. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

Since then, Scott has created numerous on-site installations in vacant buildings in Detroit and beyond, among them Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 (2007-9) in the Fisher Body Plant 21106, The Egg (2007-13) in the Michigan Central Station107, and Garden of the Gods (2009-11) on the roof of the Packard Plant108. Ziggurat “[…] is a site-specific sculptural installation made from 6,201 wooden floor-blocks […]“ (Hocking, n.d.-d) found inside the Fisher Body Plant 21. Over the course of about eight months, Scott assembled the wooden blocks into a step pyramid – hence the name Ziggurat – which has “[…] since [been] destroyed and returned to the pile of rubble from which it came” (Carducci, 2014a, para. 9). As with most of his work, Scott photo-documented the process of Ziggurat from construction to deconstruction which eventually leads to two artworks: the actual installation and the photographs, both perceived in disparate environments and by different recipients. Scott describes it as the following:

106 Located in the northern part of Greater Downtown, the Fisher Body Plant 21, designed by architect Albert Kahn as a body stamping press, has been vacant for almost three decades (Klier & Rubenstein, 2008, p. 88; Stone-Richards, 2014c, p. 35). 107 According to Apel (2015a), the Michigan Central Station (MCS), located just outside Detroit’s downtown “[…] has become the iconic image and is de rigueur for all photographers of Detroit ruins […]. For Detroit, the MCS became the single most awe-inspiring civic structure, a Beaux Arts building that opened in 1913 as the tallest railroad station in the world. It consists of a three-story train depot with a lavish waiting room of terrazzo floors and fiftyfour foot ceilings modeled on the Roman Baths of Caracalla as well as an eighteen-story office tower” (p. 82, emphasis in original); the last train left the station in 1988 (Pohl, 2019, p. 3). 108 The Packard Plant is “[…] the largest ruin in the country […]. Designed by Albert Kahn and built by the Packard brothers in 1903, it was the first modern automobile factory and includes forty-seven buildings spread over more than forty acres on Detroit’s east side” (Apel, 2015a, pp. 84f.). Packard stopped producing automobiles in the plant in 1956 and although parts of it were used for storage and other small businesses, the greater part of the building has been vacant for decades and fallen into ruins (Apel, 2015a, p. 85).

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The Egg was built over 18 months and “[…] is made from thousands of sheet marble fragments that litter most of the 17-story structure’s upper floors – remnants of the once marble-lined corridor walls” (Hocking, n.d.-c) of the Michigan Central Station. The Garden of Gods, named after the ancient Greek Pantheon of the gods and goddesses, was built over several months as well and is of even greater dimension: It consists of twelve (by that time still standing) columns that were exposed by the collapsed roof of the Packard Plant and on which Scott put television sets found inside the plant (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017). All three of these installations were built over several months, sometimes even years “[…] of solitary labor […] [and] with full knowledge of the likelihood of their eventual destruction either by human intervention or exposure to the elements” (Carducci, 2014a, para. 8). While Scott is working site-specifically, using discarded material and debris that some would regard as waste, he not only sees beauty and possibility in this but even calmness and solace in a city many associate with crime and fear (Crawford, 2011, para. 1ff.) (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017).

Tyree Guyton and the Heidelberg Project “Detroit is as elusive now as it ever was. What remains of Heidelberg embodies a stubbornness that is Detroit, unable to completely disassemble or make itself whole. The Project, both broken and rebuilding itself, lingers as the city waits for another ‘new’ vision of Detroit to appear” (Walters, 2001, p. 84).

Tyree Guyton (b. 1955) started the Heidelberg Project more than 30 years ago. He studied at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and in 1986 […] returned to Heidelberg, the street where he grew up on Detroit’s East Side, and found it in shambles, riddled with drugs and deepening poverty. Bruised by the loss of three brothers to the streets, Guyton was encouraged by his grandfather [artist Sam Mackey] to pick up a paintbrush instead of a weapon and look for a solution. (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-b, para. 1)

Guyton built an art environment that today encompasses a whole block of houses and lots (3600 Block of Heidelberg) in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood and spills over to other parts of the city, too. The Heidelberg Project consists of several (occupied as well as vacant) decorated houses, sculptures and displays of various discarded objects (stuffed animals, dolls, trophies, shoes, clocks, and numerous others), and paintings – all outside on vacant lots and between the few remaining houses. There are two major reoccurring themes at the Heidelberg Project and beyond: polka dots and clocks (see fig. 9 and 10). The dot is

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[…] a symbolic reminder of how little effort it actually takes to start transforming a living environment. As there are numerous abandoned homes around the city, a lavender polka dot reclaims the structure from invisibility. Whether on a burnt-out building, an old car, or broken playground equipment, the polka dot draws attention to the wasted object. […] As you drive through Detroit, you can connect the dots. The borders of the community grow larger. Suddenly, there is evidence of a shared history in disparate parts of the city. Heidelberg Street appears to have stretched its boundaries to embrace other areas that also have been neglected. (Walters, 2001, p. 83)

The clocks on the other hand “[…] pose questions of: What time is it? What is your reality? What time is it for you in the world today?” (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-a, para. 8) and thus hint at time as a process rather than at a specific time; the clocks at the Heidelberg Project show various times.

Fig. 9: Clocks at the Heidelberg Project (photo by author, March 2018)

Fig. 10: Dots on Heidelberg Street (photo by author, May 2017)

But the most impressive as well as most debated parts of the Heidelberg Project are the sculptures of discarded and abandoned objects, from household items to toys, and larger objects like cars and a motorcycle (see fig. 11).

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Fig. 11: Arranged objects on a lot on Heidelberg Street, part of the Heidelberg Project (photo by author, September 2016)

Since the beginning of the Heidelberg Project, however, parts have been stolen or destroyed: In 2013, six installations (including houses) were lost in several acts of arson by unknowns (Dewyer, 2014, para. 1; The Heidelberg Project, 2018, p. 24). Apart from this, multiple times in the 1990s installations – houses and sculptures – were demolished by the City of Detroit109, “[…] claiming it produced its own form of urban blight, but undoubtedly motivated more by embarrassment at the attention the project drew to the declining neighborhoods of the city” (Apel, 2015a, p. 107). Sheridan (1999) comes to a similar conclusion suggesting that [p]erhaps some [residents] feel that Heidelberg is already an anachronism, a fossil left over from a painful period in Detroit’s history, in which the city, as a strategy for survival, attempted to become accustomed to its sores. As a better future dawns, many feel it’s best to erase the signs of past sickness. (n. p.)

Walters (2001) on the other hand, sees the criticism towards the Heidelberg Project based on Tyree Guyton’s style described as “[…] abstract, roughly defined, and highly symbolic […]. The most vocal opposition to the Project has come from people who believe it is not art” (p. 75). Looking at it from a different perspective, the “[…] work embraces traditions within African American art” (p. 75), with a style that Walters (2001, p. 75) compares to the works of artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence110 – both prominent African-American artists of the 20th century who had strong ties with the civil rights movement and

109 For more information on and discussion of the demolitions, see Walters (2001). 110 For further information on Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and other prominent AfricanAmerican artists from the late 1800s until the 1980s, see Bearden and Henderson (1993).

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whose works are characterized by bold colors and the (re)presentation of Black people (Smithsonian American Art Museum, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Despite the controversies over the Heidelberg Project, it has become a tourist destination, visited by several ten thousand nonlocals yearly (Apel, 2015a, p. 107) and presented in travel guides such as the Lonely Planet (Zimmerman et al., 2016, p. 566).

Olayami Dabls and the MBAD African Bead Museum “[…] I knew that Africa had metaphors, story tellers, proverbs, so I’m gonna create a metaphor and that metaphor will have four characters: iron, rocks, wood and mirrors. […] So, all the installations out there are dealing with specific events that occurred in that history. And also, I noted from other cultures on the planet, the more abstract you keep something, the more people will get the message” (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017).

Olayami Dabls (usually referred to as Dabls) was born and raised in Mississippi and moved to Detroit in 1965 when he was 17. After studying engineering, he worked as a draftsman for General Motors until a severe car accident in 1975 hospitalized him for a longer time which eventually made him turn to art: “Part of my therapy after the accident involved taking art classes, and because the brain can’t focus on two things at one, my pain went away whenever I was making art. That’s when I decided to become an artist” (Dabls in Avalon International Breads, 2018a, para. 4). After the recovery, Dabls worked as a curator and artistin-residence for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History for about a decade before he opened his own art and fashion store with his wife at the time in Downtown Detroit (Avalon International Breads, 2018a, para. 5f.) (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). About two decades ago, Dabls took the next step and started the MBAD African Bead Museum on 6559 Grand River Avenue – just outside the Greater Downtown area and in the same neighborhood as the Motown Museum – on a block of vacant land and buildings which were donated to him by the owner to realize the museum. Without the help of the city but from neighbors, he cleaned up the area which was covered in trash and started building outdoor installations and creating murals on the buildings (Avalon International Breads, 2018a, para. 12f.) (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). Today, the museum consists of the sculpture garden with 18 outdoor installations and three building structures as well as the African Bead Gallery and Store (Dabls MBAD African Bead Museum, n.d.) (see fig. 12).

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Fig. 12: Installations in the sculpture garden, part of the MBAD African Bead Museum (photo by author, May 2017)

Inspired by African material culture, the museum focuses on African heritage and on “[…] what happened prior to […] colonization and enslavement […]” and is thus “[…] connecting back with that culture with symbolism, artifacts, textiles, beads, etc., and information” (Dabls in VanZandt, 2019c, para. 2). Apart from the bead collection111, the four primary materials used for the installations are iron, rock, wood, and mirrors which were found as discarded materials or donated. The materials are used “[…] as metaphorical tools or memorable characters to create stories about big ideas like assimilation, colonization, the importance of knowing your cultural history, conservationism and more” (Germain, 2019, para. 26). The installations Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust and Iron Teaching Rocks Table Manners, for example, illustrate processes of forced assimilation, cultural domination and […] European culture’s mission to reproduce itself through institutional control. […] Ultimately Dabls is asking us to investigate how historical processes such as colonization and slavery have led us to what we consider normal. Academics might see parallels to

111 According to Dabls, his collection includes beads that are a couple of centuries old (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017) and, whereas in Western culture, beads are worn “[…] for someone to look good or feel good [… ,] traditionally the beads communicated information about the wearer, his status, rite of passage, and no words were ever exchanged” (Dabls in VanZandt, 2019c, para. 8).

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postmodern historiography, and even to Paolo [sic] Freire’s radical pedagogy112, but by constructing such a creatively overwhelming installation, and using it for the educational purpose of unmasking the totalitarian impulses of western culture, he manages to both question how we’ve arrived at this point, and imagine a world free of that death-drive. (Panton, 2015b, para. 4f.)

With this in mind, it is not surprising that Dabls uses the term storyteller instead of artist to describe himself: So, people just began to leave me alone when I say that I’m not an artist, I’m a storyteller. And once that occurred, I’m in a position where I can tell my stories … at least fifty people, fifty percent of the people come here, they are clueless about the story. But one thing about art that we seem to forget as people is that they don’t need to know the story. The art itself is the best conveyer of information without using knowledge. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

The stories, then, are not just visual – the installations – but also oral: “Rather than installing plaques or captions of information, Dabls prefers to share the history orally, in some ways mimicking the griots and oral storytellers that he learned played pivotal roles in ancient African cultures and societies” (Germain, 2019, para. 25).

Carl Wilson “Yeah, I’m a Detroiter” (Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017).

Carl Wilson (b. 1956), born in Detroit to a native Detroit father and a mother who migrated to Detroit from North Carolina, “[…] never even thought much about going any place else” (Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017). He is a graduate from Cass Technical High School and worked in the auto industry until he retired at the age of 50 to become a full-time artist who specializes in black and white linoleum cut printmaking (Kresge Arts in Detroit, 2015a; Wilson, n.d.-a). His work is heavily informed by the ups and downs of his own life, […] raised in humble and difficult circumstances on Detroit’s east side, falling prey early in his life to a manipulative religious organization he calls ‘the cult,’ spending years breaking his health in automotive assembly plants, and then finally, after emerging from all these tribulations into a new phase of his life, suffering cancer and two years of total deafness. […] It also explains the apparently fearless way in which he opens himself up through his work— for after all these experiences, what more is there to worry about? (Panton, 2014, para. 1)

Carl describes himself as a documentarian and “[…] storyteller carving tales of family, friends and the neighborhoods of Detroit into blocks, thus creating small, stark, black and white novels” (Kresge Arts in Detroit, 2015a) that often show the everyday of the protagonists. One example of this are the Parkhurst Papers,

112 The concept of radical pedagogy “[…] is rooted in the idea that not only classroom content, but also teaching methods must undergo a fundamental transformation if pedagogy is to become truly empowering” (Sholette, 2019, p. 129).

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completed in 2012, a series of prints that document the neighborhood Parkhurst located on the north side of the city, “[…] an area that is home to much crime, especially prostitution, and a small community of artists […]” (Panton, 2014, para. 3). The print John R Girls, for example, deals with sex workers in the Parkhurst neighborhood who work in an unofficial red-light district and who, according to the artist, are “[…] women and transgender prostitutes […] [who] live desperate and dangerous lives” (Wilson, n.d.-c). O Pioneers! on the other hand portraits two newcomers to the same community (Panton, 2014, para. 3; Wilson, n.d.-d). Another series, created in 2014 is Her Purse Smelled Like Juicy Fruit which combines prints and written text and recalls the life of his mother and reflects on his upbringing (Panton, 2014, para. 4; Wilson, 2014).

Mariuca Rofick “My work is nearly always about the emotional undercurrents that exist within and between us. I like to capture organic scenes, buildings or landscapes in their natural states, people in contemplative moments when they are unaware of being observed. I am most inspired by the beauty found in architectural details, artistry, designs found in nature and in the human form” (Rofick, n.d.).

Mariuca Rofick (b. 1965), who is married to Carl Wilson, is a photographer and currently the President of the Scarab Club113. Mariuca, as well as her parents, was born in Detroit. Two of her grandparents migrated to Detroit from the South during the era of the Great Migration, another grandparent is an immigrant from Bangladesh and the fourth has roots in Detroit that date back to the late 1700s (Mariuca Rofick, interview May 08, 2017). Except for ten years that she lived in New York, Mariuca spent all her life living in Detroit or just outside of the city limits. She started shooting in 2008 and all her work is digital, mainly exhibited in black and white (Rofick, n.d.). Most of her work shows (city) landscapes and built structures but she is interested in more than just their aesthetics: And um in shooting I would also look at the history of the building, who built this and why and what is this style. And I was, have been curious, I’ve always had an interest in Detroit history. Especially because our family history goes so far back in Detroit and so I kinda like to know what was going on at the time that this one was alive or that one was alive and so um … so anyway I think um that was kind of feeding my desire to want to shoot Detroit. (Mariuca Rofick, interview May 08, 2017)

However, even though Mariuca sometimes shoots ruins, too, she does not see her work as ruin porn:

113 The Scarab Club – founded in 1907 – is one of the oldest art organizations in Detroit. It is an exhibition, studio, and event space for visual, performing, and literary arts located in Detroit’s Midtown (The Scarab Club, n.d., para. 1ff.) (Mariuca Rofick and Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017).

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And um … when I was growing up here, the city was not … there weren’t all these vacant houses, there weren’t … you know, it wasn’t this bad. And so, when I moved back from New York and um then kind of observed how things have gotten worse, I did become fascinated with the … with the ruins. And I know, you know, there’s a lot of backlash about the ruins and ruin porn and … um … and I get that, I understand that. But um … the ruins meant something to me and so I wasn’t, it wasn’t porn to me [laugh], you know, it was like, it’s like the city was alive and it was suffering, and this was the suffering. And it was, it was, it had an emotional component for me, so … so I didn’t care, I still shot it [laugh]. (Mariuca Rofick, interview May 08, 2017)

So, Mariuca distinguished her work from ruin porn by addressing growing up in the city as well as describing her emotional engagement with the city, its history and present. Although she describes a fascination with the ruins – like ruin porn enthusiasts would –, her fascination seems to be grounded in the change of the urban fabric and not only the ruins as the result.

Jen Reyes “So, for instance so aside from being an artist I also do activism in the city […]” (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017).

Jen Reyes is a mixed-media artist and community activist. She grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and studied Fine Arts. She has been living in Detroit since early 2016. In Detroit, Jen has been active in different organizations and community outreach programs – a reason why she moved to Detroit in the first place. She also worked as an instructor for an afterschool art program of a nonprofit human rights organization in Detroit (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017).

Mirka Sulander “Well, I feel like I … but I have in my work like this approach that it’s not just about Detroit, it’s about like seeing myself connected to space. Because I know that I can’t make a presentation about Detroit, because I’m staying just one month. I won’t get like the bigger picture, so it’s more about like myself connected to the place. […] I talk not about the horrible things that happened in the city or like … they are there, I think I can sense them … but it’s … I cannot like make a Manifesto like ‘Oh, bring people back’ or … I don’t want to make this political statement either. Because … one month … that’s really short time” (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017).

Mirka is a Finish mixed-media artist with a Bachelor of Fine Art from Novia University of Applied Sciences, Finland. She visited Detroit for an artist residency at Spread Art, a community, art, and event space in 2017. It was not specifically her plan to do a residency in Detroit but while looking up residencies in the US, she stumbled upon Spread Art that had a simple application process (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017). Thus, when applying she only knew Detroit through what she read on the internet: “[…] I was thinking about, I was looking at

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Wikipedia how is Detroit and I was like ‘Okay, it’s some kind of like … the capital for auto industry and for soul music’ and then I was doing this big plans like what am I going to do and then I came here and it’s like … really different […]” (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017). After arriving in Detroit, she soon abandoned her proposal to do work on the auto industry and soul music and started working with found objects she collected while walking and cycling in the city: At first, I was like walking like a zombie [Mirka was very jet-legged], taking the bike […]. I didn’t feel my body at all … not attached to anything. A really weird feeling. That was actually the starting point, that I wrote a poem about it the first days. And then it somehow started to accumulate. Like I saw these different objects. I was, at first, fixed to my ideas of this car industry, trying to find just car parts and nothing else. But then I let more like space for the city to really show what it is. Like gather stuff that interests me in the like space or places that I went to. But I think … yeah … mostly it first came from the poems. Writing a poem and then somehow … yeah … collecting objects, putting them on the wall, putting them on the floor and then I found this basketball piece and that was like bringing everything together. (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017)

At the end of her residency in Detroit, Mirka exhibited two installations, Pebble Bubble Wrap and Rebound made out of found objects – a basketball backboard, book covers, bubble wrap, etc. – combined with poems (Sulander, n.d.-b, n.d.-a).

Marsha Music “There has been a very active arts community in the city for … all the time. And then um … you have the generation after the auto industry, you had um … the development of the black arts movement that developed in the mid-century, mid-last-century, which was very significant. So, you had a very strong arts community and arts life and arts culture here. Even when it existed to serve the needs of industry. Even when it existed um … sublimated by work itself. There is a strong … um … creative impulse here. People feel it when they come here. um … It’s very odd, you know, like people would come here and they just feel making stuff [laugh] when they’re here for a while, you know” (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017).

Marsha Music (b. 1954) was born in Detroit and grew up in Highland Park, a city within the city of Detroit. Marsha is a writer, former labor activist, and “[…] cultural luminary […]” (Music, n.d., para. 8). Her poems and essays are about the city as well as its music. Marsha is the daughter of Joe von Battle, a pre-Motown record producer who had a record shop and recording studio114, originally opened on Hastings Street – one of the main commercial streets in Black Bottom – in the 1940s but later moved to 12th Street because of the city’s urban renewal

114 Joe von Battle came to be known “[…] for not only selling records but for establishing several record labels and national distribution deals with Chess, Savoy, King, and other companies and for launching the recording career of the Rev. C. L. Franklin and his daughter Aretha. […] It is believed that he was the first independent black record producer in post-war America” (Music, 2017, p. 76).

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program that erased Paradise Valley and Black Bottom in favor of freeway constructions. The shop and studio were eventually destroyed during the rebellion in 1967 (Music, n.d. para. 1ff.). Marsha has written essays and poems on her father and his record shop (Music, 2017), on the Lafayette Park neighborhood (Music, 2012) designed by the German-American architect Mies van der Rohe where she resides since 2007, and on the city’s past and present like “The Kidnapped Children of Detroit” (Music, 2018) or “Just Say Hi! (The Gentrification Blues)” (Music, 2015). In the former, Marsha describes her experience of White flight as a Black child: It happened suddenly. One day, we’d be outside with our friends, black, brown and white, on the arm summer days before the start of the next school semester, playing jacks and hopscotch, riding bikes. The next day, our white friends would be gone. […] White parents were grabbing their kids and escaping from Detroit […]. Often, it appeared as if they left in the dark of the night; the moves seemed so clandestine. This sense of them leaving virtually ‘overnight,’ packing up and disappearing, was likely due to the white parents’ reluctance to speak to their black neighbors—whom they often treated with pronounced neighborliness— about their impending moves, given that their departures were largely because of the color of the neighbors’ skin. (Music, 2018, pp. 18f.)

The latter, on the other hand, addresses (White) newcomers to Detroit, displacement, and re-segregation: See some Newcomers never lived, or worked around Black people here / Now find themselves creating ‘burbs, right inside Detroit streets and curbs / In enclaves made for just themselves, with coffee bars and foodie shelves / They do forget that we’re the source, of Detroit’s urban cool and soul / and just remember we must share, in all of this new Detroit flair / From businesses to urban farms, we’re leaders - as we always are / Just Say Hi! / Some take no time to navigate, complexities of diverse race / We’re urban background, just a haze; dark corridors through which they race, / to get to the Newcomer space where they can revel in the place / of cloistered corners of the D and never try to see our face / Some come from Lions, Tigers dens and even if they lose or win / they never see us as they pass, before and aft the sport and games / There are Newcomers who engage, with all Detroiters of all age / I have a dear assemblage of, Newcomer young folks whom I love / They’ve rolled up sleeves and lent their skills, to push this city past its ills / Enriching lives (as they do mine), I’m grateful that I’ve stayed alive / To see the rebirth come along, as long as we don’t push aside / the eightyplus percent of us, who’ve lived and worked here all the time / Some new kids who’d be a part, of everything that’s 8 miles south / Can’t figure how to get up close, some walk past us, just saying naught / Some come and ask me what to say, a ten-point plan? a 12-step way? / To start to the talk the Dee-troit way - it’s simple: / Just say Hi! (Music, 2015, para. 27ff., emphasis in original)

In 2012, Marsha was awarded a Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship (Kresge Arts in Detroit, 2015b) and in 2015, she received a Knights Arts Challenge award to establish Salon De’troit, a space for “[…] for artists and thinkers to exchange ideas and explore topics relating to the Motor City” (Knight Foundation, 2015).

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Karah Shaffer and Documenting Detroit “So … you know, the idea really was … to … I mean if we’re talking about saving Detroit, you know, something that has been really frustrating to me in the years that I’ve lived outside of the city was the narrative that like we couldn’t save ourselves. And it’s, it’s really that, the way resources are placed here … don’t give people the ability to ‘save themselves’ in a way that is really … I guess conventional. But that doesn’t mean that what people do here isn’t important […]. um … And I think it’s really interesting to be able to show that through photos” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018).

Documenting Detroit is a program of Facing Change: Documenting America, a non-profit photojournalism initiative. In 2015, Documenting Detroit was founded by Karah Shaffer, a visual artist, and curator who grew up in Rochester Hills, a suburb about 40 kilometers north of Downtown Detroit, and Alan Chin, a photographer and writer born and raised in New York City. On a shared trip from New York City, where both lived at the time, to Detroit a conversation about the state of photography in Detroit developed the idea for Documenting Detroit: And I found at the time115 that most of the people that were here [in Detroit] working with photography were taking photos of abandoned buildings. um … It was very like fist in the air with a selfie, like on the rooftop. um … And, you know, in one point of my life like when I was like in high school, I did stuff like that and then I left and I learned from people that were shooting professionally that that is actually super detrimental to the way that people view places like this, you know. (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018)

Besides, Karah observed that photojournalists covering stories in Detroit were mostly outsiders and that there was a lack of community documentation within photography: “But if we want to document what makes Detroit Detroit, which really is the people, then we have to have photographers from Detroit or from the area, that have connections to these communities” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). To achieve this, Documenting Detroit offers an annual free juried fellowship for early-career photographers from Detroit and its Metro region. The fellows are paired with mentors who are “[…] acclaimed photojournalists, editors, curators, and documentarians to hone their skills and craft a portfolio that stands on its own in the global documentary community” (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-c, para. 2). Thus, Documenting Detroit aims at three main objectives: bringing people together and creating local networks, changing the approach to photojournalism to become more localized, community-based, and community-focused by “[…] empowering people to tell their own stories” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018) and ultimately, changing the narrative about Detroit as solely a ruined and deprived city that needs to be saved, and “[t]o really line up what comes out of Detroit with what’s happening in Detroit” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). Since 2016, Documenting Detroit offered four rounds of fellowships to more than 60 fellows from different professional, racial,

115 Documenting Detroit launched their first event in December 2015, so ‘at the time’ is probably around 2014 or 2015.

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and economic backgrounds (field notes March 28, 2018). Their documentations cover a diverse range of topics, issues, and communities in Detroit like Black youth (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-b), Muslim communities (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-g), war veterans (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-d), local businesses (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-n, n.d.-a), nightlife (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-l), artists (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-h), everyday life (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-m, n.d.-j, n.d.-e, n.d.-i), and many others. The work of the fellows has been shown on various occasions inside and outside of Detroit: In 2017, for example, images were exhibited at Photoville – an annual photography festival in New York City – and at DLECTRICITY – an art and technology festival in Detroit and in 2016 and 2017, mural-sized images were installed in three different public locations in Detroit (on Library Street in downtown and in the two neighborhoods Islandview, on the east side, and Woodbridge, on the west side) (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-f) (field notes March 28, 2018; Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). The program started on a small budget and the support of volunteer work, and have received grants and support from the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, among others (Shaffer, n.d.) (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018).

Mary Smith and Photo Booth Detroit “And then since we … well I guess I started doing things without space, because it was hard to get it. So, I was trying to think of what I could do in the community without having a space. um … But it quickly became obvious that that was difficult to establish relationships, cause there was no communal space where people could meet. um … And it was, like you were having these one-off experiences where I was giving people cameras and they were using them, the end. There was no follow up. Even if they enjoyed doing it, the program was such that it was not necessarily re-lending out to the same person again. [...] So … I still do that, I still do the camera lending, but … the idea is that like longterm, the camera lending will encourage people to come use the space and interact with others and encourage and grow the community um … within a place” (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018).

Photo Booth Detroit is a non-profit photography initiative that offers studio space and photography classes in their space. It was founded for three main reasons: First, when the initiator, who is a photographer herself, moved to Detroit, she couldn’t find the resources she needed for her work: Like I need labs to process my film, and um … you know, printers, that sort of thing. And I just couldn’t really find it. That time there was maybe one place that was processing film. But there really wasn’t a lot of other … and that place has since gone defunct. [laugh] It no longer exists. um … But so there, it was really difficult to find certain things that were very available to me in other cities here … that I needed. (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018)

Second, as an instructor at local universities, she experienced that students were only allowed to use the darkroom for the time that they were taking the respective classes: “So, it was really disheartening to see all these, you know, young bright-

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eyed, bushy-tailed folks who really enjoy this process. And also, I think it’s important to me that it’s physical, rather than digital, that you’re interacting with actual objects” (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). Lastly, Mary stresses “[…] the social justice aspects of photography. um … And the narrative that was being told internationally about Detroit um … being very much based out of ruin porn, made by outsiders, right. So, the idea that people were traveling here, they were photographing a very specific subset of the city and then they were leaving” (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). This observation brought her to the conclusion that “[…] there should be people in Detroit who are making the narrative of their own city, not having it being made outsiders” (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). Through their offers (courses, equipment, etc.) and a communal space that is open and free of charge to the public, they seek to support this change. Photo Booth Detroit is mostly financed via fees for using the facilities and for the workshops (although it is usually a donation basis with suggested, not mandatory pricing).

John Anderson and Creativity Detroit “Detroit’s […] a very unique space. um … In one way it’s … the local population is very politically active. […] And there’s more community organizing here. […] So, it’s generally, like this area is generally like ‘How can I help you’ kind of … citizenly. um … And, at the same time, Detroit is a very unique space because it got so desolated that people are like ‘Hey, I gotta help you’. Where you just lend your neighbor a hand because … maybe they don’t have water today or maybe … the power is out and it’s not gonna get turned back on for two weeks because they don’t have the money to … I mean, all kinds of stuff. um … So, yeah, I think a combination of that … makes it a little unique” (John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017).

Creativity Detroit is a performance, studio, gallery, and residency organization and space in a neighborhood where it runs as a non-profit (John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017). It is based in a multi-use building that has several artist studios, a rehearsal and performance space, a gallery, and a garden. The studios are rented to local artists. Besides, the building houses a three-bedroom apartment where artists in-residence stay. They have their own room and studio space and share the rest of the facility with others, and they usually stay for about one month and have almost no requirements on their work while in residency: We allow them that opportunity, like we … a lot of residency programs, it’s like ‘You come here, you gotta produce a body of work, you get a new show, you gotta … do this, you gotta do that’ and we’re here like ‘Here’s some space, make something. You can do a show, you can have an artist talk, you can do this thing, you can do that, but none of that is required. Just, if you wanna come here and just do nothing but meditate for six weeks and then go home to your studio and do a huge body of work, well, if that’s helping that then … okay’. So, there’s no … um … there’s no public pressure of a show or event or a requirement to do something. It’s more like there’s … discover, hopefully. And I mean, everybody, there hasn’t been one person who hasn’t come here and has been like ‘I can do whatever I want, great. I don’t have to do a show, I don’t … no pressure’ and then they just do stuff and then they’re

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like ‘So, can I do a show?’. [laugh] ‘Cause I had no pressure, so, I just made this really cool stuff and I feel good about it, so now I wanna show it’. And that’s the good thing, you know. (John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017)

The aim of the residency program is to “[…] support artists that wanna discover their own practice” (John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017). Creativity Detroit was started in Anotherplace, but the initiators wanted to leave the city, among other things due to the high cost of living and the fear of displacement when renting a space for the organization. They eventually moved to Detroit in 2012: We were just looking for a place to move … to … um … maybe find some property, find a space for the building … um … or for the organization […]. And we, you know, we looked at […] all these different cities. And then we came here to visit some friends and it was just like … this makes sense. [laugh] […] But yeah, it was just kind of like we were searching for a space. We wanted to have a space for the organization to have a home base and we knew like Anotherplace wasn’t going to be a long-term solution. (John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017)

Before Creativity Detroit moved into the building, it was occupied by other cultural organizations. It is unclear what the building used to house before it was rehabbed in 1998, but it might have been a church and/ or general store. Today, the immediate surroundings of the low-density neighborhood are a few commercial and residential buildings and vacant lots (field notes April 28, 2017; John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017).

Claudia Mayer Claudia worked for the city of Detroit’s Planning and Development Department (PDD) where her work focused on historic preservation of the built environment with a focus on cultural heritage. To her, art “[…] is part of history and um … part of buildings and landscapes and so should be preserved and acknowledged and understood” (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2018). Claudia was recruited by Maurice Cox, who was the head of the PDD for four years. Cox116 took over the PDD after the city exited bankruptcy and was faced by a department that was understaffed, lacked organization, and had run out of ideas for Detroit’s future, and which he helped to revitalize (Gallagher, 2019) (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2018).

116 Cox work in the PDD is acknowledged for, among other things, the efforts he put into neighborhood planning and more human-centered urban design. However, he was also criticized for moving at too fast a pace and a lack of public participation in the planning processes (Gallagher, 2019, para. 24ff.). It remains to be seen what the long-term results of his and the PDD’s work are.

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Danny VanZandt Danny is the founder of the quarterly online Publication Detroit Cultural. He grew up in Redford, a suburb of Detroit, and studied Art History before starting Detroit Cultural in 2019 (Danny VanZandt, interview April 13, 2019). The online publication “[…] explores the social and political aspects of cultural production through interviews with artists, curators, educators, writers, and more” (VanZandt, 2019a).

Michael Hodges Michael is a writer for The Detroit News, the major local newspaper aside from Detroit Free Press. Michael has been working for the Detroit News since 1991 where he has covered fine arts since 2007 (Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019). He is the author of the books Michigan’s Historic Railroad Stations (2012) as well as Building the Modern World (2018a) on the life of architect Albert Kahn who was influential on Detroit, and contributed the chapter “How Detroit Got Its Groove Back” (2014) in the book Canvas Detroit (Pincus & Christian, 2014) which portrays contemporary art and artists in Detroit.

Vince Carducci Vince is the Dean of Undergraduate Studies (since May 2020: Dean Emeritus) at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit and the author of the blog Motown Review of Art (2020). A Detroit native, he studied Fine Art and Liberal Studies and holds a Ph.D. in sociology (College for Creative Studies, n.d.) (Vince Carducci, March 20, 2018). He describes himself as “[…] a cultural critic who writes about the visual and literary arts, popular and consumer culture, politics, and the media” (Carducci, 2020), often focusing on the intersection of social science and art and culture in Detroit. In 2010, he received a Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship. As these portraits have shown, the artists, projects, and other experts have diverse backgrounds. Further, the artists and art projects have different foci and approaches in their (artistic) practices, leading to sundry results (artworks). What they have in common, though, is their interest in and engagement with Detroit within their practices which will be described and discussed in depth in the following chapter.

7

Artistic practices

Following the previous chapters that have outlined the theoretical and methodical approaches to this study as well as introduced the city of Detroit, this chapter presents the results of the analysis. I focus on five artistic practices that I deduced from the empirical material as well as the literature study: 1) seeking, finding, and recycling material, 2) working site-specific, 3) making and/ or displaying art outside, 4) focusing on community, and 5) documenting and creating stories about Detroit. These practices can overlap and become indistinct, but they are dissected here so that they can be outlined and discussed before they are analyzed through the lens of the theoretical approaches to art, space, and place. ‘Practice’ is defined here as the ways in which artists operate, their modus operandi, so to say. Therefore, ‘practice’ includes both the actual making of art and the ideas and thoughts connected to it.

7.1

Seeking, finding, and recycling material

A prevalent practice I identified is working with found material. For some, this involves the process of seeking and finding the material while for others, the recycling and assembling of the material is paramount. A precondition for this practice is that material is available and accessible. This is grounded in the abandonment and ruination found all over the city which, in turn, is rooted in the city’s history as previously described. When Dabls founded the MBAD African Bead Museum, he started by cleaning the lots on which the installations are today. There, he found a piece of material that affected his subsequent work: And one day I was out there, I picked up a piece of concrete … with a piece of metal protruding out of it. And the metal had stained the concrete which is … was just small pieces of rock. So, I said ‘Oh, iron teaching rocks how to rust’. So that became the genesis for the installation. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

While continuing to clean the area, Dabls used the material he found and saw parallels to practices in, what he describes as, ‘traditional Africa’:

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Artistic practices We still continued to um … clean it up and use stuff that was out there. And that’s when a notion came from recycling because I noted in traditional Africa it didn’t have the title as recycling. It’s just that if you killed an animal, every aspect of that animal was used in that particular communities. There was no throw away, no trash, no garbage. So, we started using iron, rocks, wood, and mirrors to build the installation. You were in the city of Detroit that most industrialized … um … automotive industry on the planet. So, there was nothing but iron, rocks, and woods all over the place. So, we didn’t need to go to no art store, the only thing we had to buy was liquid nails and screws. And they were not that expensive. Paint occasionally because people started giving us paint. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

So, there are three main themes in Dabls descriptions: First, Dabls found inspiration and maybe even epiphany in the material he discovered. The installation Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust (fig. 13), like many others of his works, explores the topic of forced assimilation of culture/s rooted in colonization and slavery where, as Dabls describes it, “[i]f you mimic or simulate someone else’s culture, your own culture rusts away, without your knowledge. It just goes poof” (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). On a more general level, the installation can be regarded as a metaphor for trying to be or being forced to be someone or “[…] something you cannot be” (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017); just like the rocks are never able to rust.

Fig. 13: Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust, part of the MBAD African Bead Museum (photo by author, May 2017)

Second, Dabls indirectly poses the question of what trash is and what is of value in the sense of which material might be of use. What is particularly interesting here is that this notion of trash or leftover material includes structures as large as abandoned buildings – which Dabls incorporated into his outdoor museum e.g.,

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by painting on them. The question of trash versus value is not limited to Dabls practice but runs through several other artists’ practices in Detroit as well – a matter I will return to again later. For Dabls, his practice of recycling material parallels with traditional practices where the holistic use of e.g., an animal did not create trash in the first place. This, on the other hand, changes the perspective from trash to useful objects and suggests that the materials have “[…] meanings beyond their mere materiality, ones that may not be rooted in local social concerns but which are nevertheless invested with a conciliatory vision […]” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 180). And third, there seems to be a notion of practical utility shimmering through Dabls description of reusing and repurposing of discarded materials. They are not only already available, but they are also affordable since only a few additional materials needed to be bought. Further, Claudia Mayer describes the reuse of material as […] a very African American practice. You know African Americans, unfortunately due to this … the historical circumstances … um … have always had to resort to using the materials … that they have available, you know. So, a lot of early African-American artwork … has been … created using leftover materials … whether it’s fabric from then slaves, you know, plantation landscape, or urban landscapes, you know, whether it's pieces of wood from … whatever it is. But um … it’s definitely a tradition and I think in Detroit that tradition continues um … with great pride, you know, and this concept of … creating work, works of art that don’t necessarily conform to the academy’s concept of artwork, you know. (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2019)

The repurposing of leftover materials, including buildings, as well as painting are also at the core of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project. Similar to Dabls, he works mostly in situ and not in a studio or gallery (Carducci, 2014b, p. 134). However, while Dabls mostly works with materials that he describes as remnants of Detroit’s industrial era (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017) – iron, rocks, and wood –, Guyton creates installations with concrete discarded objects found in most households such as toys, shoes, or telephones (see fig. 14).

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Fig. 14: The Heidelberg Project (photo by author, September 2016)

Herron (1993) describes the arrangement of these objects as “[…] some sort of man-made lava flow. The magma of discarded lives […]. It is impossible to look at the Heidelberg Project and not imagine that something terrible has happened to cause this explosion of physical deformity. And of course something has” (p. 199). Along similar lines, Herscher (2013) identifies that “[…] the innovative aspect of the project lies in its reformulation of objects and spaces associated with failed attempts at urban survival as a critical reflection on contemporary urban conditions in Detroit” (p. 74). So, the Heidelberg Project can be seen as both, as a reminder of the past, of what is lost, “[…] a performance of history – a didactic representation of past public events and human affairs that makes material the intricacies of human experience typically not accounted for in conventional history or folklore” (Walters, 2001, p. 64) and, at the same time, as […] an acknowledgment that people still live in the city. While it serves as a visual record of the city's recent painful past, the Heidelberg Project illustrates the transformational power that is present in the community in both a real and imaginary sense. […] On Heidelberg Street, discarded objects embody optimism, memory, and hope for the area. Instead of ignoring the abandoned buildings, as is done in so many parts of the city, the Heidelberg Project marks their significance through Guyton's site-specific craftsmanship. (Walters, 2001, p. 65)

Thus, the Heidelberg Project is at once a site of mourning, loss, and (racial) trauma as well as hope, vision, and community, tied to its neighborhood but also sticking out of it. As described before and as these dualities hint at too, the Heidelberg Project is not free of conflicting perceptions: To some, it might be “[…] transforming and reframing the items from meaningless trash into meaningful remnants of a past that many would rather forget” (Stein, 2016, p. 58). To others, it is

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[…] a little bit more complicated because obviously … for many people that’s not considered art. It’s considered: ‘That’s our trash … or someone else’s … debris. So why is it strewn all over our neighborhood?’. So, this, this has been a … there’s a long history of conflict … between the artist himself, and the neighborhood, and the mayor. (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2019)

One of these conflicts between the Heidelberg Project and then-mayor Coleman Young led to the demolition of the “[…] Baby Doll House (which fused dismembered, naked dolls with an abandoned house to draw attention to issues such as the broken innocence of children, child abuse, abortion and prostitution) […]” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 180) in the late 1980s. But it might be in these conflicts, too, where the significance of the Heidelberg Project lies because it “[…] participates in the production of meanings, uses, and forms for the city” (Deutsche, 1988, p. 10). Through intervening in and alternating the site, it confuses, interrupts, and raises questions on past, present, and future Detroit and its social, racial, and economic condition. An installation of similar but much smaller fashion is the Hamtramck Disneyland. Hidden in an alley in Hamtramck (see fig. 15-17), it was established in 1990 by Dmytro Szylak, a Ukrainian immigrant and former autoworker for General Motors.

Fig. 15: View down the alley between Sobieski St and Klinger St towards the Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018)

Fig. 16: View down the alley between Sobieski St and Klinger St towards the Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018)

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Fig. 17: Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018)

Szylak turned his private property into a public art environment of assembled objects […] on and around two garages he owned. The objects he assembled were the detritus of middle-class American popular culture: bicycle wheels, toy dolls, pots of artificial flowers, model airplanes, Christmas lights, Elvis paintings, wooden soldiers, flags and signs. Reversing the regimented labor of the Fordist assembly line, Szylak’s assemblage is ad hoc, unplanned and accretive; pieces are added, one by one, to a work that is constantly in flux. (Herscher, 2012a, p. 274)

Szylak too met with opposition when he started the Disneyland but was saved from demolition because of the support of the art community and then-mayor of Hamtramck (Wasacz, 2006, para. 2). While Aghajanian (2018) sees the Disneyland as Szylak’s engagement with “[…] the immigrant experience: a state in which you exist in two places at once. This often unspoken, tangled duality, a yearning for a home left in the past combined with an appreciation for the one you have […]” (para. 12), Herscher (2012a) writes that [i]ndeed, Hamtramck Disneyland is not scripted as anything except ‘art’; it is only described by a sign that reads ‘Welcome to Art Show’ […]. The project’s intentions and meanings are left undefined, and thus, left to its audience to decipher, or not. (p. 275)

Szylak passed away in 2015 and soon after, the local art collective Hatch Art took ownership of Hamtramck Disneyland and renovated the two houses on the property. One of the four housing units is now an artist-in-residence space and Hatch Art works on preserving and maintaining the installation (Hatch Art, n.d.). For Dabls, Guyton, and Szylak the seeking or discovering of material does not seem to be at the center of their practice. Rather, the materials themselves and their reuse, repurpose, arrangement, and assemblage are the fundaments of their work. For Mirka and Scott, however, the process of discovering the material or specifically searching for it, respectively, are essential parts of their practice. Upon arriving in Detroit for her residency, Mirka set out to explore the city when she was overwhelmed by the abundance of trash she found:

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I … I was walking around here, like getting to know, what’s my spa… place here. And then I saw that there is a lot of like … my first expectation … I weren’t expecting that there is so much objects and trash around myself. And then I was just walking, realizing that ‘Wow, there is this and this and this I could use’. And then I came back here and took a plastic bag and started to like chose what I want to do or what I want to take. (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017)

Inspired by what she found and collected, she created the two pieces, Pebble Bubble Wrap and Rebound, that combine poems and found objects (see fig. 18 and 19).

Fig. 18: Pebble Bubble Wrap by Mirka Sulander (photo by author, April 2017)

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Fig. 19: Rebound by Mirka Sulander (photo by author, April 2017)

She describes the development of the artworks as a dialogue with the space which is “[l]ike knowing a new person in a way … like … you ask question and it, the art piece and the environment answers you” (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017). In her works, Mirka combines the found objects with poems and she describes the evolution of the poems as a process of finding and collecting, too: But I mean also, I think … because I’ve been writing poems. That’s like … I’m combining text and objects and I think that’s also collecting and that comes from not from somehow letting the … trying to put everything away and letting the city just come to you. So, when I was like biking through the city, it’s like … I don’t want to think about my artwork and want to just like try to be open, take it in … ‘What do I feel here? What is, what is it saying to me?’ and I try to understand it … yeah … I think it’s like gathering objects as well. (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20, 2017)

So, Mirka is not only collecting materials/ objects but also intangibles like impressions and perceptions that might find their way into her work as well. Scott has a similar approach, although, as someone who knows the city well, he specifically searches for material, knows where to find it, and has a distinct perspective: It’s not, you don’t see devastation, you see ‘Oh, I could do an installation here. I could use all of this stuff to make a sculpture’. People abandon things in Detroit, people throw out their trash on dead-end streets, even boats. So, I started off by gathering a lot of objects. (Hocking, 2016, min. 12:26-12:45)

He traces his intention to use found objects to his deprived background where money was scarce:

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And I loved these spaces, I loved all the vacant buildings, and I was very angry with … um … the waste, and I wanted to use the waste. I will say that even today one of the biggest influences on my practice is that I came from such an economic … um … low level … rife with economic problems, like economic strive all the time, money was always a scary factor in my life, and still can be, that I was often really moved to make work where I would see these huge factories in Detroit … neglected, falling apart, decaying. All the material inside wasted. And to me, what was most infuriating about that, is that somebody somewhere had the money to own that building at one time, and I will never have the money to own that building. And the people living around it in squalor will never be able to own this building, and yet, this person with all this wealth not only can afford to own it but can afford to say, ‘Fuck it, I’m letting it go,’ and that would infuriate me. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

So, where others see trash, objects they want or have to get rid of or leave behind, Scott sees beautiful and useful objects. He started his practice by entering abandoned buildings, gathering materials, taking them with him someplace else, e.g., his studio, assembling them and building sculptures and installations – a procedure that later shifted to working site-specific: Yeah, so this [the Packard Plant] is a place I gathered materials and did an installation. It's also a place that for many, many, many years I just gathered materials from because even now a lot of it has been destroyed as you can see um … there, there used to so much shit inside the Packard Plant. The Packard Plant like a lot of these old, abandoned buildings was last used as a storage facility. (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017)

Scott describes it as a “[…] light bulb moment […]” (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017) when he realized he did not only want to work with the material he found but with the site, too. His first site-specific installation was Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 (fig. 20) which he started building in 2007. Although I will describe the site-specific work in more detail below, I mention it here as well since Scott’s site-specific work is based on the material found on site and is a practice that evolved from gathering and taking materials outside of the site.

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Fig. 20: Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 by Scott Hocking (photographed by Hocking in 2008, reproduced by permission of the artist)

Scott describes the process of his first site-specific installation as follows: And I spent about eight months in there [in the Fisher Body Plant 21], using the material I found, building this giant pyramid. So, the pyramid is made out of these wooden blocks that litter the floor. The floors of these concrete buildings would often have wooden blocks too, as shock absorbers, as insulators that, you know, they were just kind of like a way to, to deal with the giant machinery that’s all in these factories. Well, over the many years of being abandoned, a concrete building becomes like a cave, stalactites, stalagmites form. Everything starts to buckle and come up and move like tectonics of the earth. So, this is the first time I thought about a project where I was going to make a site-specific sculpture that would be encountered, people would find it, discover it. People would have an experience with it. But those people would probably be different than the people who found the photo series and go to a gallery or museum to see the photos. So, thinking about two different pieces really, thinking about two different projects. (Hocking, 2016, min. 29:42-30:37)

There are three themes mentioned in this quote that run through most of Scott’s work. First, he explores and researches the site as well as the material by using “[…] archival research, archeology, anthropology, social geography, walking, site-specific installation, and photography as means of simultaneously constructing, capturing, and investigating the processes by which forms within the city and ‘nature’ emerge […]” (Stone-Richards, 2014c, p. 35). He also has an interest in mythology and ancient times which is reflected in works like The Garden of Gods (see fig. 21) on the partially collapsed roof of the Packard Plant where he “[…] juxtaposes classical forms and mythology with Detroit’s surreal postindustrial landscape” (Panton, 2015a, para. 6).

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Fig. 21: Poseidon and the Garden of the Gods by Scott Hocking (photographed by Hocking in 2009, reproduced by permission of the artist)

Second, there is a distinct understanding of nature behind his work. He describes it as follows: To me like […] when people talk about the sadness and decay and abandonment of Detroit, I actually saw it as a beautiful example of how quickly nature reclaims what humans waste and how … nature is always, unless you fight it off, nature is always just going through this cycle of death and rebirth and life and death and rebirth … um. I think there is something beautiful in that transition and I think there’s something that should be embraced in that transition […]. So, we’re a part of the cycle, the things we create are part of the cycle, and that means cities are part of the cycle. And every, every ancient city in the world has gone through cycles of decay and rebirth […]. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

So, for Scott, Detroit has “[…] just always been a city in flux” (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017), constantly changing and transforming, which he regards as part of a natural or organic cycle. This is reflected in his work, too, where he uses abandoned materials and often has no control over the eventual destruction of his work. His work then is both a documentation and a demonstration of the ongoing cycle of creation and ruination (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 182; Hocking, 2016, min. 32:35ff.; Stone-Richards, 2014c, p. 38). The installations are, and this is the third point, permanently documented and preserved because Scott photographs them and thus creates two artworks – a physical one on site and a photographic one (which is usually a series of photographs). The two individual but still intertwined pieces are also encountered by different crowds. Whereas for the latter, people usually visit a gallery or the artist’s website on purpose to see the work, the work on site is, if at all, seen by accident. Those can be other people who trespass, scrappers, ruin enthusiasts, homeless people, or people who enter buildings legally, like construction workers or members of the law enforcement

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(Hocking, 2016, min. 50:04ff.). The following long excerpt from the ride-along with Scott illustrates his encounters and observations inside the Michigan Central Station and the path that eventually led him to work on site. This part of the conversation happened while we were passing by the Michigan Central Station. S: So … you know the train station? N: Yeah. S: You’ve seen that a million times by now. I did a project in the train station maybe … five years ago. I started it earlier, but I finished it about five years ago. Where … on the eighth floor I started building a large egg-shape … kind of ovular sphere thing out of marble fragments that were all throughout the building. The building used to be, all the walls used to be lined with these marble fragments. And after many years of people trying to steal the marble and scrap basically anything, most of the marble sheets that were covering the walls were destroyed and pieces on the floor. Also, a lot of people, a lot of the reason buildings like the train station are getting destroyed is because, sure the people come in to scrap the metal, but there’s also a lot of kids who come in and they just wanna fuck shit up. They just wanna have a good time by throwing stuff off the roof and tearing shit down. And … so a lot of the marble that was lining the walls was just torn down and thrown around by kids who wanted to break shit. um … So, in … like 2010 … 2011 I started building and finished in 2012. I made it about halfway up before I had to stop because it was so heavy it might fall through the floor. N: Oh, okay. S: And then … I finished later, but that’s another story. What I was gonna tell you about materials though is that, look at this fence, like look at all this way it’s been secured. When I first started coming here in the 90s, that main entrance there, which is now like a roll up door, like that main entrance underneath that window, that was just a whole and that fence didn’t exist. So, you could drive right up and inside the train station. N: Oh okay, that’s how you got in there? S: Well, that’s how you could get in there. Scrappers would drive their cars right in and load them up with things. It didn’t last like that forever but there was a time period where it was so abandoned and so open that you could drive right in. And some of the upper floors were just like bedrooms for homeless people. They just had their own rooms. And there were many, many, many people living in this building who were homeless, they’d just chosen their area. But no, the way you would normally get in there wouldn’t be to drive your car in because you didn’t want to get caught. So, the way that you used to go in was just park your car and walk in. I mean, honestly, it’s amazing to think this but, cars … people wanting to come and explore the train station, they would park right in front and walk right in. And one day I came and there were like three or four cars lined up and one of them was a cop car and the cops were just exploring. N: Oh really? S: They weren’t busting anyone, they were like looking around inside like ‘Wow, what is this place?’ like that kind of thing. It was not at all … it was a very different time where it was more like fascination than it was anything else. And so, for many years, like the Packard Plant, and like so many buildings, I would go in there, I’d walk around, I’d explore and if I saw things that I thought were valuable or usable to my artwork and my art practice, I’d take them um … and then make a sculpture out of them or incorporate them into an installation. It took me many, many years to get to a point where I stopped removing things from buildings and started working on site. And … so a lot of the places I decided to work on site were

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places that I had already spent so much time inside of and develop a relationship with and I loved being inside them and I wanted to work inside them instead of taking things out of them. Like this place. (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017)

So, while for some artists, reusing, recycling, and reassembling material is at the center of their practice, for others, the searching and discovering of material is also part of their practice. This often includes wandering about the city, exploring buildings and – sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly – searching for material. What they all have in common is that these materials, objects, and even ruins are catalysts and stimuli for their artistic practices and that they are incorporated into artworks or become artworks themselves. The respective artworks, their stories, and meanings, however, are very distinct. Following Scott’s evolution from gathering materials and removing them from a site to gathering materials and working on-site, I look at the site-specificity of artworks and practices more closely below.

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Working site-specific

Site, as elaborated before, is understood here as both, the material as well as immaterial form and relations at a particular locus at a particular moment (Massey, 1994, p. 154). Site-specific art, then, “[…] might articulate and define itself through properties, qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ […]” (Kaye, 2000, p. 1) and its site, and can intervene and alter the identity of both, the site and the artwork (Deutsche, 1988, p. 14). Site-specificity here includes the processes of production as well as the display of artworks. Similar to the practices of seeking, finding, and/ or recycling material, the sitespecific practices and works described in the following also have strong ties to Detroit’s history and urban development because they are largely “[…] facilitated by the city’s vast repository of abandoned buildings and vacant lots; city government’s inability to police or regulate use of urban territory; and depopulated neighborhoods, where few neighbors remain who might protest artistic interventions” (Herscher, 2013, p. 67). Looking at site-specific art and practices this broadly leads to three scales: site as a neighborhood/ community, site as a building, and site as the city of Detroit. The Heidelberg Project is probably where site-specificity becomes most apparent – not only, but also because of its name. Guyton, who grew up on Heidelberg Street, works with the site’s material elements (houses, lots, objects) and immaterial elements (experiences and feelings of violence, depopulation, racism), altering both, the site as well as the objects included in the artworks. Concerning the assemblage and (re)arrangements of objects, Sheridan (1999) states that Heidelberg is not merely a collection of refuse: it is transformative in the way the objects are presented through such devices as dislocation from ‘natural’ context (bicycles in trees, fishing boats in vacant lots); extreme redundancy (hundreds of pairs of shoes, dozens of vacuum cleaners and TVs), and artistic modification (everything is covered in polka-dots)—to name just a few. However transformed these things are, though, their origins and identities are never masked: they are always recognizable as ‘what they were’ […]. (n. p.)

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So, as described before, discarded objects receive a new and different meaning through the way and place they are arranged. The shoes, for example, are not solely the familiar everyday objects anymore: Shoes hanging from trees remind of the lynching practiced in the southern states and the piles and lines of shoes let the viewer not only wonder where the humans are that fitted into these shoes (The Heidelberg Project, 2018, pp. 19f.) but remind of “[…] those standing in unemployment lines and the wandering homeless” (Che, 2007, p. 38). According to Marsha Music (interview June 20, 2017), this also changes the space itself, confirms that it is art, and shows a relational aspect of the art: So … you do have a great art impulse that art changes space, you know, it changes your relationship to space. […] In the changing of space, no matter what you think about whether or not, or what kind of art Tyree created, the very fact that he had you engaged in the conversation is the art, if nothing else. If he got, you know, 300 people a day sitting over their trying to figure out ‘Is this art?’, that’s the art. [laugh].

But the Heidelberg Project also draws attention to the larger issue of neglect and uneven development in Detroit generally and to the sight specifically: Heidelberg is, among other things, a spectacle, something that says, ‘look at me.’ It is a celebration that can be ‘heard’ for miles in every direction (as evidenced by the attention of tourists, media, and the city council). On the most fundamental level it seems to be saying, ‘we are here; we exist’ and thus serves as an answer to those who construct Detroit as culturally empty space, as presently meaningless and worthless. [...] But […] one repeatedly hears the criticism leveled at city planners: don’t forsake the neighborhoods. Heidelberg, as something organic to the neighborhoods, a project literally intermingled with people's houses and homes, is a form of this criticism: it is a way of decentering the city, a way of saying, we are here, on the margins—don’t forget us. (Sheridan, 1999, n. p.)

So, the Heidelberg Project makes the abandonment and loss visible and, yet is a sign of life and activity in the neighborhood. However, it does not only call attention to Heidelberg Street but puts the local community at the center (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 180). One endeavor of the Heidelberg Project is “[…] the belief that all citizens, from all cultures, have the right to grow and flourish in their communities. The HP believes that a community can re-develop and sustain itself, from the inside out, by embracing its diverse cultures and artistic attributes as the essential building blocks for a fulfilling and economically viable way of life”. (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-c, para. 2)

This process of ‘healing’ (The Heidelberg Project, 2018, p. 18) is not reduced to the aesthetics of objects and colors spread all over the Heidelberg Project, but also finds expression in the project’s community outreach: Residents who would never visit the Detroit Institute of Arts or the Detroit Symphony Orchestra have become educated about art and participate in HP programs, festivals and forums. We provide modest jobs and an outdoor space in which members of the community can come together to reflect, play, create and interact with people from around the world. This practice builds a sense of self-worth and pride. (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-b, para. 5)

Other programs target local children and youth through in-school and afterschool programs, summer camps, and the like. While these programs and activities mostly involve art education and art making, the greater goal is the

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empowerment of the local younger generations of mostly Black children and youth from deprived socio-economic backgrounds (Che, 2007, p. 40; Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 180; Stein, 2016, p. 61; Walters, 2001, p. 72). When discussing site-specificity and how art and site relate and interact, the question arises what happens when the art is removed from its site. In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) featured two exhibitions on the Heidelberg Project, Process and 2+2=8, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Heidelberg Project (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2020b, 2020a). The exhibitions presented paintings, sketches, photographs, sculptures, and objects from the Heidelberg Project. In an interview with Danny VanZandt on the site-specific aspect of the Heidelberg Project and the exhibitions at MOCAD, art historian Rachel Adams states that it is “[…] important to showcase a project that has such a history with the city of Detroit in a Detroit institution. Not that it makes it more legitimate, but that its recognized in a new context“ (Adams in VanZandt, 2019, para. 2). However, she admits that it changes the art when it is taken to […] a museum, with white walls and object labels. That is drastically different from the context in which the work was made. And it does then create a conversation about ‘the other’ and taking objects–whether they are art or cultural or both–out of their original locations and putting them on display. (Adams in VanZandt, 2019d, para. 4)

In the conversation I had with Danny VanZandt, who interviewed Adams before, he identified a self-contradiction in the decision to exhibit at MOCAD because despite acknowledging “[…] the idea of like putting him [Tyree Guyton] within an institution … supposedly brings a new weight to his work or something”, he “[…] also feel[s] like … the idea of him making work outside of the institution is to critique that idea that work needs to be in the institution to be important” (Danny VanZandt, interview April 13, 2019). He also expresses the thought that the exhibition might be targeting a certain crowd that does not feel safe visiting the original site of the Heidelberg Project: I was really interested in like the idea of why do they feel a need to move a site-specific work two miles. Like if you’re going to MOCAD to see it, you could just go to the project to see it. And it seems like it's very much a sense of ... that neighborhood isn't as developed as midtown is. […] And that’s what it felt like to me. Like it was like ... ‘Well, we’ll move the work into a place that feels safe for a certain audience’. (Danny VanZandt, interview April 13, 2019)

For Adams, however, “[…] the works in MOCAD are just part of the larger project and when put into context with didactic materials, for me, its (sic) not so much of an issue. But again, I encourage all to visit the site of the project as that is really where the power, I believe, lies” (Adams in VanZandt, 2019d, para. 8). Even though the contradictions and related questions cannot be solved here – and unfortunately, I missed the exhibitions by a couple of months and therefore could not have a first-hand experience of it –, this should be kept in mind when continue reading as it will come up again when discussing the theme of making and/ or displaying art outside.

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Turning towards Dabls and the MBAD African Bead Museum now, sitespecificity takes a slightly different role there than at the Heidelberg Project. Whereas Guyton chose the neighborhood where he grew up and had family ties to as the site of his practice and artworks, Dabls established the museum at a site that was given to him as a donation (Pincus & Christian, 2014, p. 54). So, the museum, initially, was not tied to the site where it was established – it might have been possible anywhere else in the city where space was available and city officials did not pay close attention (Germain, 2019, para. 12ff.). However, the site-specificity of the museum grew over time. For one thing, Dabls built the museum mostly with what he came across on site. This includes materials like iron and rocks but also vacant buildings of which he painted and decorated the outer walls and uses one as a bead shop. For another thing, because Dabls met no resistance, he was able to pursue the museum to his imaginations and change the site from a block of vacant houses and messy lots, associated with crime and insecurity, to what is now describes as a “[…] safe zone […]” (Dabls in Pincus & Christian, 2014, p. 54), an “[…] amazing sight [, that] […] is ... very attractive in many ways […]” (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2019) and “[…] glistens brightly on its street corner” (Germain, 2019, para. 1). Finally, the museum did not only change the physical space but Dabls established ties with the surrounding community that helped develop the museum through donations of material, voluntary work, and (emotional) feedback on the artworks – which continues to this day (Avalon International Breads, 2018a, para. 12; Germain, 2019, para. 20) (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). And although Dabls did not seek this particular neighborhood, it seems almost like he hit home: So, I began to build installations out there and as we built the installation, people would stop by and ‘Oh man, that’s nice man!’. You know, it didn’t take a lot to win over the community. They saw some stuff they’ve never seen before. So, we started painting on the buildings, that stopped them even more. So, I knew … I said ‘Okay … there’s something here’. You know, these people normally drive by with blindness and now there are actually stopping, talking … um … and really started asking ‘Why are you here in this community? You go anywhere you want with what you’re doing,’ which kind of baffled me … I’m like ‘Why would you say that?’, as so art was not for poor people. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

He continues to say that the more they worked on the installations outside, the more they became “[…] connected with the community because they saw it as … more than what I was seeing. You know, to me it’s just … I’m making some shit. To them it was very personal” (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). So, in the case of the MBAD African Bead Museum, site-specificity developed once Dabls started working on the site, with the physical environment he found there and through connecting with the neighborhood and its community. Szylak, too, turned his private property into a public art landscape that is frequently described as site-specific (Hatch Art, n.d.). But since the Hamtramck Disneyland’s meanings and intentions rest vague and ambiguous, I can only make assumptions about its site-specificity. Hamtramck, the enclave-city in Detroit’s east side, is one of the most diverse cities in Michigan (Aghajanian, 2018, para. 8). Founded by Germans and then later build up by Polish migrants in the early 20th century, “[…] an influx of refugee populations and immigrants from the Balkans,

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South Asia, and the Middle East kept Hamtramck alive” (Aghajanian, 2018, para. 15) while many residents moved outside of the city for the suburbs. For Aghajanian (2018), the Hamtramck Disneyland is closely connected to Hamtramck’s diversity, describing it “[…] as a unique symbol of the city's pluralist culture” (para. 15). So, if the Hamtramck Disneyland is regarded as Szylak’s engagement with his migrant identity in his private space turned public, then it could also be read as an engagement with the surrounding migrant community through cultural references (flags, colors, maps, etc.) (see fig. 22).

Fig. 22: Backyard of the Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018)

Although Scott works site-specific too, it is on a different scale than the works described previously. A lot of his work, especially the earlier work in Detroit, could be described as building-specific. As indicated, Scott’s practice developed from entering buildings to gather materials to entering buildings to work inside them with the material he found on site. Most of the buildings he then worked in were those he had spent time in before. He thus knows them well and had already “[…] develop[ed] a relationship with […] them” (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017). These relationships are based on his practices of “[…] walking, surveying, […] the work of the hand with on-site available materials, process sculpture, investigation of site-specificity and spatial form as result of varied historical sedimentations, [and] the photograph as (partial) indexical record, or witness […]” (Stone-Richards, 2014c, p. 36). Scott himself describes the transition to site-specific work as follows:

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Artistic practices But this method [of removing material from buildings] began to slow over time as well, as I stripped away another layer of what really drew me to these locations. Eventually, I came to realize that it was the locations themselves that I really needed. The materials inside seemed like a reason to go there, but I didn’t need to remove them. I could work with them onsite. I could photograph the entire process and attempt to translate the feeling of being onsite. I could do what it was that I’d been drawn to doing my whole life: travel to these locations, explore and experience them, and temporarily escape into a different reality. For me, it was the closest I could get to nature. My art practice had crystalized into finding some kind of solace, spending time there, documenting it and moving on. (Hocking, 2018, p. 42)

To illustrate this, I return to The Egg that Scott built inside the Michigan Central Station. He describes the decision and process of building it as a collaboration: “And again, I spent many years going in this building I’m very familiar with it. And to decide to collaborate with it was a heavy thing” (Hocking, 2016, min. 49:23-49:32). And ‘heavy’ in this context does not only refer to a groundbreaking decision concerning his artistic practice but has another two meanings: From its opening in 1913 until the last train left in the late 1980s, the Michigan Central Station was one of Detroit’s most iconic buildings before it became one of Detroit’s (and the nation’s) most famous ruins which has been owned by the Ford Motor Company since 2018 with plans to renovate and turn it into their new campus (Pohl, 2019, pp. 2f.). Besides its architecture – “[d]esigned by the same architects who designed New York’s Grand Central Station, the train station […] [consists of] a Beaux-Art-style ground level that forms the train station and a modern-style office tower with eighteen stories on top of it” (Pohl, 2019, p. 3) –, one of its historic significances is that it was a main place of arrival for national and international migrants coming to Detroit in the early 20th century (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2018). But The Egg itself was heavy too and led Scott to another kind of collaboration: When workers inside the building discovered the sculpture, they were afraid that it was too heavy and would eventually fall through the floor, so they built a structure on the floor beneath it for support (Hocking, 2016, min. 50:23ff.) (see fig. 23 and 24).

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Fig. 23: The Egg by Scott Hocking (photographed by Hocking in 2012, reproduced by permission of the artist)

Fig. 24: Support for The Egg (photographed by Hocking in 2012, reproduced by permission of the artist)

So, in this case, Scott’s relationship with the site is in a material but also in a social and symbolic way.

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But although Scott frequently encountered others while working on site-specific installations, most of the time he explored and worked in solitude – which, however, has changed for some buildings, as he describes in the following: But yeah, back in those days it was real common that I could be in a building all day and never run into another person. um … And that’s the, the way I was able to do installations like that [Garden of the Gods]. Just because I could stay in there undisturbed for hours and hours and weeks and weeks. um … Obviously at the Packard Plant I couldn’t do that anymore. Even to get in and out of there would be a lot harder because they’re constantly kind of watching for people. For all I know they might have cameras up, I don’t know. (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017)

In some cases, when ownership changes or renovations are about to start, the policing of a building increases; in the case of the Packard Plant, it is mostly security personnel that watches the building and insistently points out to any bystander that it is forbidden and illegal to enter the building (Scott Hocking, ridealong June 07, 2017). However, as briefly pointed out before, part of Scott’s work in the abandoned buildings is about finding peace and solace: I love the solitude that I find in the city. My nostalgia for Detroit is for when it was emptier. I’ve had to adapt my ideas as the emptiness gets filled. I do like to work in anonymity, and the abandoned spaces of Detroit were and are my solaces. I find beauty in the decay, beauty in the transition. The difference now is that urban exploring has become a worldwide trend. Nothing is really unexplored anymore. (Hocking in Arnaud, 2017, p. 64)

Although Scott notices a change in Detroit where ‘the emptiness gets filled’, he still describes it as a place of unpredictability compared to other cities: So, that’s a good example, because the trip to Vienna, even though I had a great time, it made me realize how, what I love about places like Detroit is that I like the unpredictability, I like that there’s elements of the unknown, I like that not everything is figured out. I like living in a place where there’s some wildness to it. And if I was in a place where everything was figured out and there was no unpredictability, I might be bored. Now, there’s other people who feel the opposite, they are afraid of the unknown, they don’t like uncertainty. They wanna live where everything is safe and figured out … that’s not me! So, if Detroit becomes that, which I guarantee you, it will not, I would move. But … yeah … there’s no way in hell that would happen to Detroit, it’s just too big117. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

Here again, similar to where Scott finds beauty and use in objects that others have discarded or destroyed, he has a different conception of Detroit: Embracing the partial lack of regulation and organization concerning urban planning and design, he sees opportunity and excitement, especially in Detroit’s ruins and discarded materials. Edensor (2005) points to a similar direction when discussing the materiality of ruins:

117 By hinting at Detroit’s size, Scott – from another point of view – takes up one of the major issues Detroit faces and that has been pondered on by scholars and journalists for years: how to (officially) monitor, use, and redevelop the abundance of land and buildings in the city (e.g., Binelli, 2012, pp. 87ff.; Dewar & Thomas, 2013; Gallagher, 2010, pp. 21ff., 97ff.; 2013, pp. 115ff.; Galster, 2012, pp. 221f.).

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In the ruin, the transformed materiality of industrial space, its deregulation, decay and the distribution of objects and less distinguishable matter, provide a realm in which sensual experience and performance is cajoled into unfamiliar enactions which coerce encounters with unfamiliar things and their affordances. At first somewhat disturbing, this confrontation with the materiality of excess matter offers opportunities to engage with the material world in a more playful, sensual fashion than is usually afforded in the smoothed over space of much urban space. (p. 325)

This breaks with the conception of ruins as spaces of absence, failure, and worthlessness, often solely judged by their economic potential (de Solà-Morales Rubió, 1995, p. 120). Rather, it suggests an “[…] evocative potential […]” (de Solà-Morales Rubió, 1995, p. 120) of ruins where absence and decay exist alongside possibility, opportunity, and activity. It is for this reason as well as his engagement with and concerns for the sight that Scott’s work is usually not regarded as ruin porn – even though some of his photographs might fall into this category at first glance and without knowing the context (Mannisto, 2014, para. 1). On previous pages, I looked at site-specific art in the context of neighborhoods, communities, and buildings. And although they are specific to these neighborhoods, communities, and buildings, the question arises of whether this can be looked at on a larger scale where site is understood as the city of Detroit as a whole. The lack of formal control, the abundance of ruins and vacant land, the historical conditions, and recent urban developments, as well as ongoing racial, social, and political issues shape every corner of the city in one way or another. Thus, Stone-Richards (2014c) describes Scott’s art as “[…] an art of the city, where the city is taken as a historically conditioned and sedimented medium” (p. 35). Similarly, Ron Scott (2019) describes him as “[…] creating sitespecific installations, using the city of Detroit as his laboratory to create works of art […]” (para. 3) and Mannisto (2014) summarizes Scott’s practice as “[…] roam[ing] solitarily the vast area that is the city as if it was his studio […]” (para. 1). Whether studio or laboratory, what these quotes have in common is the engagement with Detroit – and its material and immaterial conditions – which they see in Scott’s work. When I asked Scott if his work is more about dealing with a certain site than with the whole city, he replied the following: Um … I would say it’s a combination. It’s … I mean, shit, it’s … it could be something I read, it could be something I hear on the news, it could be a comment a friend makes to me. All these things can factor what I make. But the history of a site and the history of a city, of course that factors in. Um … I’m especially interested in Ancient History. So sometimes, I’m interested in knowing what happened right in that location 2000 years ago. um … There’s a lot of factors that go into how I, how I use a site, how I’m influenced by a site. Materials are such an, of such importance because I’m not interested in buying a bunch of new materials and bringing it into a site. Um … it might be a different scenario if it’s a museum where we’re talking about a white cube that … it’s not the same as going to an existing building, an existing place or the woods or the forest or something. um … But yeah, I really do feel like there’s a myriad factors that contribute to what work ends up in a sight, for me, but it, it all kind of contributes to the end idea. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

It seems difficult, even for the artist himself, to discern site-specificity (e.g., as a building) and ‘Detroit-specificity’ as they are so strongly entangled and mutually influence each other. Michael, too, points to the possibilities that Detroit offers

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artists that, on this scale, might not be found in most other cities. According to him, “[…] it would be hard for him [Scott Hocking] to do the sort of, you know, huge sculptures in abandoned buildings that characterized his early career, in Boston, you know, or any normal city” (Michael Hodges, interview May 03, 2019). Interestingly, Michael differentiates here between Detroit and ‘normal cities’. For Dabls as well, Detroit provided a unique opportunity for his art: It [Detroit] gave me the platform to do what I’m doing … um … and it didn’t offer any kind of resistance […]. And I experienced some things here that was not available if I had been somewhere else. The first African American Museum, the second one in this country, was in Detroit. That 12-year history there afforded me the opportunity to do a lot of research which I chose to focus on Africa as opposed to what we have done in this country. That experience was unique to me. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017).

So, besides opportunities that are connected to abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and discarded objects and materials, Dabls also points out the resources he found in the city that shaped his practice. The question of whether site-specificity might be regarded as Detroit-specificity as well is also closely connected to the practices of documenting and creating stories about Detroit since these stories also imply site-specificity. The past two subchapters dealt with artistic practices that engage to a large extent with the material conditions of the city. Ruins, vacant land, and discarded objects and materials are the preconditions as well as catalysts and impulses for these practices: Ruins and land become sites of art, and objects and materials become (parts of) artworks. These practices, intentionally and unintentionally, raise questions of what is considered trash and what value, under which system of values is this evaluated, and the – almost notorious – question of what is considered art. They also share that they enter into a communication or a dialogue with space, working with and not just in a site, and transforming, re/arranging, and re/imagining it while the site also alters the practice as well as the artwork. In the following subchapter, I again focus on what can be described as post-studio art but shift my perspective away from the site-specificity and to the aspect that the art is made and/ or displayed outside.

7.3

Making and/ or displaying art outside

When addressing art that is made and/ or displayed outside in the following, I draw on the discussion of public art in chapter 2.3 and adapt “[…] the vast umbrella of public art […]” suggested by Cartiere and Zebracki (2016a, p. 3) which is art outside of museums and galleries that falls into at least one of these categories: 1 in a place freely accessible or visible to the public: in public, 2 concerned with, or affecting the community or individuals: public interest, 3 maintained for or used by the community or individuals: public place, 4 paid for by the public: publicly funded. (Cartiere & Zebracki, 2016, pp. 2f., emphasis in original)

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In the following, I mostly focus on art in public since access and in/visibility are central themes in the considered artworks and artistic practices. Site-specific installations like the MBAD African Bead Museum, the Heidelberg Project, and the Hamtramck Disneyland, as well as the mural-sized images that Documenting Detroit installed in 2016 and 2017 are almost exclusively located in neighborhoods outside of Detroit’s core. Dabls describes this as […] a more natural environment than going to these expensive galleries […]. […] This installation is a direct to the community. um … Therefore, there’s no filter on who will see it and who would say this … some very powerful emotional terms here … ‘I like it’ [laugh]. It’s not based on a fifteen-minute dissertation of words […]. ‘I like it man.’ ‘I don’t like it.’ [laugh]. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

Not only is there no filter on who sees the art, but it is accessible in the sense that is free of charge and “[y]ou can just see it driving down the street” (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017). So even if people do not feel comfortable or are not able to walk around e.g., the Heidelberg Project, they can drive around the block and still see artworks. Also, “[u]nlike many traditional cultural sites, there is no entrance point, no visitor center, no way-finding materials, no suggested route, no exhibit labels or other didactic materials” (B. L. Taylor, 2013, p. 51). But there is even more to the aspect of accessibility with what Dabls describes as a ‘natural environment’. He does not clarify what he means with this term, but it can be read as on a larger scale referring to the residential neighborhood and/ or on a smaller scale referring to the open area and the buildings that are former residential buildings. This can create a familiar space and an environment that people feel welcome to who would not feel the same at galleries or museums and thus not visit them; the ‘traditional’ gallery – often called ‘white cube’ – is frequently associated with “[…] stark white walls, artificial lighting (no windows), controlled climate, and pristine architectonics” (Kwon, 2002, p. 13), creating an “[…] air of inaccessibility and stuffy, elitist vibes […]” (Germain, 2019, para. 22). However, this also means that anyone passing by or living near spaces like the Heidelberg Project or the Hamtramck Disneyland has difficulties avoiding them, and people who might not visit a gallery for whatever reason might thus stumble over the art. Since these artworks can irritate, encourage to contemplate, and attract attention, they receive all kinds of feedback, appreciation, and resentments as the example of the Heidelberg Project clearly shows (Apel, 2015a, p. 107; Sheridan, 1999, n. p. Walters, 2001, p. 75). Besides physical, social, and economic access to art, it could be asked in what way these outdoor installations create different access to (the) meaning of (the) art. Although this can only be assumed, there are two points worth mentioning here. First, the installations often lack plaques or other kinds of description on site. So, it is up to the viewers to either apply meaning themselves, do their own research and apply meanings that are offered, or they encounter the artists on site and can engage in a conversation. The latter especially applies to Dabls who prefers to convey the information verbally (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). Second, meaning is connected to the site. While this does not imply that artworks inside galleries cannot be site-specific, the site-specific meanings in the given

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cases are inevitable – as discussed before. This leads back to the exhibitions of the Heidelberg Project at MOCAD where the critique focusses on access and meaning, especially the question of how the artworks are changed when they are placed outside their original site and if those visiting the exhibition at the museum are different from those visiting the original site at Heidelberg Street (VanZandt, 2019d) (Danny VanZandt, interview April 13, 2019). Another point that is special to art outside is its relationship with the environment. Dabls describes it as follows: You can’t take art that was designed in the studio to be seen in a museum and put it in a … an open space area. It won’t have the same effect. Because there’s some little subtle tricks in to working with nature which is: ‘You do it and I take it from there’ [laugh]. You know it’s really simple [laugh], ‘Hey, don’t worry about colors clashing, don’t worry about perspective, don’t worry … we’ll take care of that, you just put it out there’. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

So, for Dabls, creating art outside means working with but also handing over some control to the (natural) environment. Further, discussing the visitor-experience of the Heidelberg Project, Taylor (2013) states that it is “[…] likely to be influenced by the outdoor temperature (Detroit has hot, humid summers and very cold winters) since there is currently nowhere for visitors to escape the weather (other than inside their own automobiles)” (p. 51). Thus, temperatures, rain, sunlight, and so forth might have an influence on the artworks and the ways, they are perceived and experienced. Even though Scott practically works inside as opposed to outside, the environment plays a similar role within his practice where change and the eventual destruction of the artwork are part of it (Hocking, 2018, p. 39). However, it is not only ‘nature’ that alters and influences the artworks. Sometimes, artworks or parts of them are stolen (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018) (The Heidelberg Project, 2020), demolished (Walters, 2001, p. 68), or destroyed (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017). In this subchapter, I looked at art that is in most cases “[…] freely accessible or visible to the public” (Cartiere & Zebracki, 2016a, p. 3). The locations of the artworks themselves, however, are usually on private property – sometimes, but not always owned by the artist. In the case of the Hamtramck Disneyland, the installations are even on the same property where Szylak lived. In other cases, it is not even verifiable who the owner is (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018). Thus, the common notions of public and private become blurry and indistinguishable, creating a space in between these conceived boundaries (Carducci, 2011a, para. 5, 2012, para. 2, 2014a, para. 4; Darroch, 2015, pp. 299f.). This is particularly, though not only, the case for artworks and projects that are focused on (a) community.

7.4

Focusing on community

Art that is focused on community does not only come in different forms but also has varying comprehensions and integrations of community. To clarify this, I will

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discuss three foci: art making with and for the community, activist art, and supporting the (art) community. As previously discussed, a large part of the Heidelberg Project’s activities is its community outreach, including summer, in-school, and after-school programs of which art making is the main part (Che, 2007, pp. 40ff.). Dabls, too, turns to the community from time to time, although it is rather in need of support: In June 2019, for example, he posted on social media that he is looking for help fixing a mural and several installations, and invited people to stop by at a certain time to work together (Dabls, 2019). So here, art is made together with the community. But those are the same artists who create art for the community in the sense of e.g., beautifying a space (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017), ‘healing’ the community (The Heidelberg Project, 2018, p. 18) or reaching the community through artworks (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). Dabls, for example, states that artists “[…] can make you deal with your stress and [you do] not even realize the only thing you did, just saw some shit that was pretty in a shape” (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). He specifies this when telling of encounters he had with passersby: So, there were three couples, the guys, they were bringing their wives to the institute and they’d stop of here and looked. And the three people repeated the same thing ‘This is the only thing that I’ve seen that takes my mind off of my personal concerns.’ You see, she had breast cancer. But they’d come here, and they were forced to look at this and forget about their own personal enemy. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

In a similar way, Guyton “[…] believes that art is like a medicine, and that you can’t heal a community unless you heal the minds of the people” (The Heidelberg Project, 2018, p. 18), and that further, “[…] a community can re-develop and sustain itself, from the inside out, by embracing its diverse cultures and artistic attributes as the essential building blocks for a fulfilling and economically viable way of life” (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-c, para. 2). So, both ascribe more to (their) art than solely aesthetics: it takes people’s minds off of things and/ or changes people’s perspectives and mindsets. Mirka makes a similar observation when stating that she thinks “[…] that art is now here the thing that is like … making the city breath again” (Mirka Sulander, interview April 16, 2017). Dabls sees affirmation of his work in the reactions he received when establishing the museum: But then when we started doing what we're doing, then the proof began to show up. Because we were literally interacting with the community, so we could see the results. And there is one thing about common people: They don’t know how to be sophisticated […]. So, we were getting real information from real people. And it was positive stuff. In fact, most people thought this was a city project. (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017)

Beyond that, it is interesting that Dabls mentions that his work was perceived by some as a project realized by the city to emphasize the positive responses. Herscher (2013), however, raises critical questions, specifically concerning the Heidelberg Project and the terms ‘community’ and ‘neighborhood’: What if ‘neighborhoods’ and ‘communities’ are not so much contexts that preexist and stand outside attempts to engage them, in art or otherwise, but are inextricably enmeshed with

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Artistic practices those attempts? […] Who or what speaks on behalf of a neighborhood and community? Can art transform the public interest instead of merely satisfying it? Can an artist serve the public interest by creating an aesthetic composed of the residue of urban decline instead of or as well as attempting to overcome that decline? (p. 74)

Although Herscher poses these questions regarding the Heidelberg Project, their core is more fundamental and broadly applicable because it concerns power, voice, and representation as well as the transformative power that art may or may not have. These topics are especially relevant to activist art. In the context of Detroit, Jen – who describes herself as doing activist art – differentiates activist art and art for art’s sake, stating that there is a lot of the former in Detroit: But in the city of Detroit, obviously, there’s a lot of art that’s geared towards kind of community, kind of empowerment um … and sometimes a lot of it is more either about taking ownership of a community or a neighborhood or more combative in terms of like trying to make some kind of statement, right. So, like … in the city of Detroit, so like me, for instance, I do activist art, um … there’s less art for art’s sake, you know. (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017)

Jen then goes on to say that it is “[…] a more privileged setting to be in to be able to make art for art’s sake” (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017). So, not only does she distinguish these two ways of art making but she attributes power to it. Besides, it stands out that she emphasizes activist art in Detroit as something that is obvious. She later in the interview comes back to this point when talking about the people who stayed in Detroit over the past decades and who themselves became active at times the city government failed in providing basic support for them: Like people say that there’s a strong artistic energy, but even more so there’s a strong activist energy. And it just so happens that a lot of the artists are activists, you know. But um ... it’s very ... there’s kind of ... in pockets of the city there’s very much like a village mentality of like taking care of your own, you know, because the system is not made for you. And so ... it’s kind of like ... […] the energy of the city, right, ... it’s just a lot of people trying to, to mold their own city, right. um ... Like people that have been living here for so long and then seeing it go through its changes, you know. And ... are trying to form it regardless of what everyone else is doing, you know what I’m saying. (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017)

While she describes the ‘artistic energy’ and the ‘activist energy’ in the city as positive, relating it to long-term or longer-term residents, she looks critically at artists who recently moved to the city and who, to her understanding, are not making an effort to engage with and to fit into the existing community (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017): […] Detroit is kind of becoming like a Mecca of art, right. And ... that’s good and that’s bad. And I feel like there is different ways to enter in. So, a lot of artists just like come in, thinking of like that blank canvas mentality, you know. […] Not thinking about how it’s gonna fit in to the neighborhood, how it’s gonna fit in to the urban landscape. They’re just like ‘Oh, it’s cheap rent? Studio space? Abandoned houses that I can just do whatever the fuck I want in?’ […] (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017)

She picks up the “[…] constructions of Detroit as a blank slate, a vast, enormous canvas, a frontier, or the land of opportunity [that] serve to devalue and/or negate existing people, structures, and artifacts while glorifying the new” (Gregory, 2012,

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p. 223, emphasis in original). She does not, however, paint all Detroit-newcomers with the same brush. According to her, there are ‘different ways to enter’ when moving to Detroit: On the one hand, as illustrated in the quote above, people attracted by cheap rent, apparent opportunity and freedom, uninterested in the established communities, and on the other hand, “[…] a handful of artists that are also coming but are making some very conscious efforts to become a part, to gain acceptance in the community […]” (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017). So, Jen addresses the topics of power and representation too, but she also remains vague in specifying ‘community’. These topics are also reflected in her artistic work. In her opinion, artists “[…] have a lot of power to communicate with people in ways that are different than like the normal newspaper whatever, stuff like that. So, you can connect with people in ways that are just visual and more, more accessible […]” (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017). Concerning her art, she describes it as mostly concerned with […] race and racism, decolonization, um … specifically in like … well decolonization in general so like in Filipino culture, which I’m, Filipino, which is a highly colonized culture. um … And then also decolonization in terms of cities, right, um … because kind of gentrification is kind of like the equivalent of colonization in some ways, you know, it's like the modern-day colonization. (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017)

Starting from her personal experience and concernment with race, racism, and assimilation, Jen addresses these issues in and through her work, as the following quote illustrates: And ... so […] for instance when I was young, I used to wear like clothespins on my nose, right. Because like a sharper nose, growing up in the US um ... you know, as a Filipino I have like a more flat nose, um ... and growing up in the US I saw my friends had sharper noses, right. And so, I’d like walk around with like clothespins on my nose, cause for some reason at my young age I thought I wanted a sharp nose. And what’s crazy is that like my parents would never stop me, you know what I’m saying. And that’s because of the colonial mentality of ‘Oh yeah, you want a sharp nose,’ right. And then my mom would even like just kind of like grab my nose and kind of pull at it every once in a while, you know what I’m saying. So, kind of encouraging that glorification of whiteness, you know. um ... And so, in the, in ... in the performances I have one piece where I put clothespins like all up here and it’s more like an endurance test. […] And so, yeah, so activist art is kind of like that. (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017)

Drawing attention to these issues and challenges is then at the core of what Jen describes as activist art. The third focus of community-focused art is concerned with supporting local artists and fostering art making in the community. Different efforts are put into supporting local artists: offering work and performance space and/ or equipment, fostering local potential through workshops and fellowships, and exhibiting local art to enhance its visibility. One of the starting points for Photo Booth Detroit was the lack of resources in the city needed for digital as well as analog photography (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). However, they did not want to be a rental agency only but sought to establish relationships with those using their services and thus decided that they need to set up a permanent space in a building. Their idea is

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Artistic practices […] that you have communal spaces that are completely open to the public, like you can bring anybody you want there, and like have a creative meeting, but also if you’re, you know, a kid and you’ve gotten out of school and you don’t have anything to do from three to five, you can come like have a free cookie and look at some photo books and feel like it’s a save space for you to be. um … Which I think we just need more of, in general, in this city. I mean there’s not, you know, a ton of places that you can walk to and feel like you can just sort of hang out and it would be like a welcoming creative atmosphere, and you can look at books and you can access certain things without having to pay any money. (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018).

In the space, they now offer a darkroom and a digital printing lab that are open to the public for rental. Through a variety of classes and workshops, they try to awaken interest in photography and/ or promote skills. At the same time, the local photographers who offer the donation-based classes have the possibility to connect with other photographers and work on their publicity. When I interviewed Mary in March 2018, there were also two artists renting additional space as their studio in the building where Photo Booth Detroit is located (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). It is similar to Creativity Detroit that, besides the residency program, offers studio spaces to local artists for rent or work exchange. Besides, they have a theater space that performing artists can use for rehearsals or events, or that can be rented for workshops (John Anderson, interview May 18, 2017). Although the performing space can be booked by touring artists as well, they mostly focus on offering space to local artists to foster and support local creativity. What both organizations have in common and what ultimately allows them to operate the way they do is that they are located in multilevel buildings with several rooms that they own. To permanently establish the organization in a building is also a wish for the future of Documenting Detroit (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). But even without a permanent space, their focus is on empowering local photographers to tell their and their communities’ stories “[…] in a public way […]” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). Through their fellowship program, they support local early-career photographers. It usually runs for a couple of months during the summer, allowing people to take part in it even though they have other obligations. Usually, they have […] an intensive in the middle every year, which lasts for about ten days, and we have people from Detroit, people from out of town mentoring on the ground, doing portfolio reviews, presenting their own work. […] And ... then following the intensive, we have um ... we ended up doing like a weekly crit. So, everybody would shoot new work, come in, talk about it and we'd get, you know, kind of get into what people would need to round out the stories they were trying to tell […]. (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018)

The mentors, who are “[…] acclaimed photojournalists, editors, curators, and documentarians [support the fellows] to hone their skills and craft a portfolio that stands on its own in the global documentary community” (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-c, para. 2). So, they not only develop their own stories by documenting Detroit but are encouraged to develop their own portfolio for their next career steps. Through documenting communities and also showing their final works publicly, they engage more people in/ with their work, as the following example of mural-sized images on public display shows:

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But then, then we did one out on the east side, on Field Street, and we have one that is still up on the west side at Grand River and Warren. And … the times that we did the installations, I mean people were stopping, they’re pointing, they’re like ‘I know that street corner. I know that woman,’ like they reacted really positively to it. Because, you know, we’re really trying to just show the everyday and celebrate that. And even just in the, you know, couple hours that it took to put something up that it was evident that that was already very well received and the um … the installation on the west side was pretty amazing because um … we had the work of Cydni Elledge who shot um … she, she photographed portraits of young black men and women, ages like nine to 22. […] But … so she has this beautiful portrait series. um … And we, we hung her work on one side of the building and then four by five portraits that Steve Koss did in night clubs on the other side of the building [see fig. 25 and 26]. And the face of the building that Cydni’s work is one, is, actually I think both of the corners have bus stops, and as we were putting Cydni’s work up, the busses were kind of like rolling by a little slower. And Bruno, the owner of the building one day actually said that a woman had stopped and was just very emotional viewing the work because … um … she had a connection I believe with like her son had been killed and she was seeing, you know, these pictures of, of young men on the, on the building. And she was just really blown away by it […]. (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018)

Fig. 25: Portraits of Black Youth, Ages 9-22 by Cydni Elledge (photographed by Bruno Vanzieleghem, reproduced by permission of Vanzieleghem)

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Fig. 26: No Time to Worry by Steve Koss (photographed by Bruno Vanzieleghem, reproduced by permission of Vanzieleghem)

The extract from the interview exemplifies another part of Documenting Detroit’s concern which is visualizing local communities to see themselves represented and to celebrate it (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018) – which leads back to the beginning where I described art that is made for the community. On the previous pages, I have differentiated three ways in which art is focused on community: First, art that is created with the help of a community or with an educational focus, and art that is described as made for the community in the sense of changing or beautifying a space to provide healing or stress relief. Second, activist art that “[…] reunites aesthetic practice with the social dimension […]” (Carducci, 2015, para. 11), as demonstrated with Jen’s work that engages with issues such as race and racism. And third, supporting and fostering the local (art) community, through classes and fellowships as well as through providing studio space and other facilities. However, these three foci are closely intertwined, as the example of Documenting Detroit shows. They are also strongly connected to the last practice where documenting and creating stories about Detroit and its communities is at the center.

Documenting and creating stories about Detroit

7.5

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Documenting and creating stories about Detroit

When stories about Detroit are documented118 or created through art, the root, point of reference as well as explanation in the present cases is often the aim to change, broaden or correct common narratives of Detroit. As mentioned before, the ‘blank slate’ and ‘open site’ narratives are two of the most widespread. While these narratives are intricate and maybe even dangerous because they negate the old (residents) and glorify the new (residents and developments) (Gregory, 2012, p. 223), there certainly is partial truth to them. According to Vince, prior to the bankruptcy, Detroit was a blank slate […] to a certain extent. And part, partly because the city itself was just not capable of taking care of some pretty basic things … um … due to disinvestment and the sprawl of the city and also its … um … geography and the way in which it evolved from the river outward. (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018)

So, the lack of governmental control and the abundance of space – which, to a certain degree, are still true today – apply to this narrative and are probably a large part of what created it in the first place. Another closely connected narrative is that “[…] of the city as a death trap, a ghost town, […] a hell or a place of horror […]” (Draus & Roddy, 2016, p. 67). And while “[t]he basis of these accounts is certainly real enough—times are tough, and the city is poor and often violent […—]these narratives and images get in the way of understanding what is actually going on in the life of the city” (Draus & Roddy, 2016, pp. 67f.). Hackworth (2019) attributes a crucial role to the media in constructing these narratives, because “[…] despite being [only] the eighteenth-largest city in the United States, it is one of the most frequently mentioned in the media. Much of this national coverage focuses on the city’s pathologies—economic collapse, crime, and other visible crises” (pp. 97ff.). Marsha makes a similar statement concerning the exceptionalism created around Detroit: I think that … people tend to … um … look at the city … in a less than objective sense. In other words: the venom against the city has been so great. And the problems that the city has had in some measure have been so great, there’s a tendency to create a kind of exceptionalism around Detroit and … rather than to look at it as a part of a phenomenon that is taking place all over the world […], of the degrading of um industrial centers, industrial infrastructures, and built structures. (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017)

Hackworth (2019) regards this as a process of othering, where Detroit and other cities are “[…] made into foreign, dangerous entities unworthy of empathy” (p. 114); and in Detroit’s case, othering also often has a racist component (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 150). So even though the basis of these accounts is real and they are products of Detroit’s history (Draus & Roddy, 2016, pp. 67f.), they tend to generalize and disguise what happens in the city (as well). Thus, in the

118 When I describe artists who ‘document’ the city (or neighborhoods, people, communities, etc.) in the following, I do not refer to an objective or ‘real’ documentation: Rather, it is a documentation through the cameras, carving tools, brushes, etc. as well as eyes, (embodied) experiences, and perceptions of the artists.

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following, I look at art that documents and/ or creates stories about Detroit that show the city besides what is transported by common (negative) narratives in order to “[…] really line up what comes out of Detroit with what’s happening in Detroit” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). However, this, as will be seen below, does not mean that only positive stories are documented and created. It is rather an attempt to take up and show all or at least more aspects of the city. Karah from Documenting Detroit, for instance, sees their program as […] a response to the way that people who aren’t from here have come here and … and tried to kind of say what we’re about. […] I think that the worst thing that anybody can do in journalism is just walk into a place and, and demand to see the worst neighborhood, or, you know, where, you know, ask silly questions like ‘Where does all the crime happen?’ or … you know. And … you know, I’m glad that we have the ability to work in a different way, you know, I think. Because we’re not beholden to like making the news or anything like that […]. (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018)

Working in a different way, in this case, means working towards an approach in photojournalism that is “[…] more localized, […] more embedded in communities, like empowering people to tell their own stories […] in a public way […]” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). Mary Smith from Photo Booth Detroit goes in a similar direction when stating that “[…] there should be people in Detroit who are making the narrative of their own city, not having it being made by outsiders” (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). According to Karah, “[…] if we want to document what makes Detroit Detroit, which really is the people, then we have to have photographers from Detroit or from the area, that have connections to these communities” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). Over the past five years and four rounds of fellowships, 65 fellows have worked on documenting a diverse range of issues, topics, and communities. To show the variety, I’ll briefly introduce the works of three fellows in the following. Cydni Elledge’s work, which I briefly mentioned before, is a series of portraits of Black youth between the ages of 9 to 22. Her aim is “[…] to break down stereotypes of her peers” (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-b). In the video accompanying her work, she describes it as follows: Being black has such a negative connotation. I wanted to photograph these young men and women in a way that displays their purpose, that displays their confidence and shows them in a different light that the world sheds on them. (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-b)

The photo project Muslim In Detroit by Razi Jafri “[…] seeks to add texture and nuance to conversation about Muslims in America” (Documenting Detroit, n.d.g). Razi, who is a Muslim himself, is interested in how spirituality and everyday living intersect for Muslims and how lives are designed around the religion that involves several prayers a day at certain times (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-g). Stephanie Hume’s photo project is called Soul of Detroit and documents the celebration and commemoration of Aretha Franklin who passed on August 16, 2018, in her hometown Detroit. According to Stephanie, Aretha Franklin, who was “[m]ore than just the Queen of Soul, […] embodied female empowerment, was a civil rights activist, a god-fearing woman, and to many, Auntie ReRe. She was, and always will be, the Soul of Detroit” (Documenting Detroit, n.d.-k).

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For Karah, “[…] Detroit is a really interesting place. […] Detroit itself is an incredibly diverse city, religiously, you know, by race, I mean. It’s … it’s just very … it’s a lot of things that people don’t know that it is” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). So, Documenting Detroit’s “[…] long-term goal […] is to change the narrative of Detroit” (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018) and adjust it to the city’s reality and people’s everyday life. While these photographs certainly are snippets of Detroit too, they are a counter-project to the narratives of crime, crisis, failure, and abandonment, and they create visual narratives of Detroit that are not (solely) focused on ruins. Carl’s work too focuses on “[…] telling the stories of the individuals that are in the city” (Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017). For him, his work is “[…] always about the city, cause the city is the people” (Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017). His concern is to document the everyday life and ‘everyday people’ in Detroit: There are so many beautiful souls in this city that … are everyday people that go to work every day, they cut their grass, they decide that they’re going to make some type of art, that they sit in their front lawn. We’re here such a short time and … our stories need to be documented. People need to know that we matter, that our loved one’s matter, that our children and our grandchildren remember. And that’s the Detroit that my work is about. (Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017)

The Parkhurst Papers, for example, is a documentation of the Parkhurst neighborhood where Carl once lived. According to him, the neighborhood “[…] was scary and crime-ridden, but our block was populated by some of the finest and most refined people I know. It was a community of artists, writers, educators, and activists who believed they could and would make a difference” (Wilson, n.d.-b). According to Panton (2014), the “[…] prints look in a characteristically nonjudgmental way” (para. 3) at all the facets and nuances of the neighborhood, such as the prints John R Girls and O Pioneers! introduced before. After Carl mentioned in our interview that his work is always about the city because it is about the people in the city, I inquired about the role that space plays in his works. He describes it as follows: I always document the space that they [the people] are situated in. I think it’s probably a big part of how my work is composed, cause the person is never just there, in the middle of nothing. There’s the space that surrounds them. And usually, that space either screams chaos or tranquility. Whatever it is that is surrounding them. (Carl Wilson, interview May 08, 2017).

So, the space that Carl documents in his prints alongside the people does not only function as a surrounding, but he ascribes an agency or activeness to space, shaping and relating to the situations captured. A different kind of documentation are the photo series that Scott conducts: He photographs neighborhoods and phenomena that are disappearing or might disappear soon, like the neighborhood Delray where he took me on our ridealong: So, the photo series I’m working on is called Delrazed. I came up with a clever name for it [laugh]. ... But it’s not just Delray, there’s other areas in the city of Detroit that are kind of

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Artistic practices disappearing. Delray is gonna disappear in large part because of the new bridge119. (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017).

In the photo series Delrazed, Scott “[…] captures the remaining houses, buildings, streets, and neighborhoods as they‘ve changed over the last 10 years” (Hocking, n.d.-a). According to him, [...] hundreds of structures have been bought or acquired via eminent domain, and unceremoniously demolished in preparation for the New International Trade Crossing / Gordie Howe Bridge, its connector expressway ramps and planned customs center, and the continued land expansion of Marathon Oil Refinery and the Detroit Salt Company. Spanning well over one square mile of land in total, the NITC customs center alone will eliminate dozens of streets, and another layer of Detroit history will be paved over. (Hocking, n.d.-a)

The photo series mostly shows vacant and soon to be demolished buildings, vacant lots, streets, trash dumps and discarded objects, and scribblings and statements on buildings, walls, and signs. Other, rather different photo series where Scott captures disappearing things in Detroit include, among others, self-made memorials and mid-century playground sculptures made of cast concrete. On the previous pages, I described different approaches of artists to document Detroit. Some are pushed by the negative narratives about Detroit, some focus on everyday life in their neighborhood or community, and others capture what is soon to be lost. What all of them do, regarded separately as well as considered together, is telling stories about Detroit that capture diverse aspects and nuances of everyday life in the city and the individual issues and experiences that come with it. In this chapter I have explored the diverse artistic practices that have different and mutually influential relationships with space. In the following chapter, I will now discuss these practices in more detail regarding their spatiality and their interactions with space.

119 The ‘new bridge’ Scott refers to is the Gordie Howe International Bridge that is being built between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. It involves relocation of residents, demolition of properties and clearance of the area (Gordie Howe International Bridge, 2020).

8

Producing art – producing space

Following Lefebvre’s production of space, Paglen (2014) concludes that “[…] space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively ‘produced’ through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity” (p. 29). In the present study, I regard the production of space and the production of art as intertwined, and the focus lies on how artistic practices produce spaces and how spaces produce artistic practices. In the previous chapter, I have identified five artistic practices: - seeking, finding, and recycling material - working site-specific - making and/ or displaying art outside - focusing on community - documenting and creating stories about Detroit As mentioned before, these five practices are not clear-cut and overlap in multiple ways, but they are categorized here according to their respective common thread. To examine these practices now further regarding their spatiality and their interactions with space, I will discuss them by taking into account the theories on space and place outlined in chapter 3 as well as the approaches to art in chapter 2. In doing so, the structure of chapter 7 will mostly be maintained, but now, not so much the practices themselves are at the center, but their relations to space. Each practice refers to a specific aspect of space and its production. Like the practices, of course, these aspects overlap. But even more importantly, in reality, they are inseparable: the production of space and the artistic practices are regarded as intertwined, interacting, and producing each other (Hawkins, 2017, p. xvii). Also, they are dynamic, they have not one starting point and one endpoint because “[…] if space is a social product, it is an unfinished product that is continuously perceived, conceived and lived” (Buser, 2012, p. 294). Thus, the production of space and the artistic practices are always with each other in reality (in practice) rather than one and the other, and only in theory can be taken apart. These aspects, corresponding with the practices discussed above are: - materiality - site - public

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- social - story As explained in chapter 4, the theoretical approaches here are not applied as abstract models but are considered as foils to look through to discuss the relations of spaces and artistic practices of the examples in hand. Before addressing the five spatial aspects, however, I will begin by reconsidering the historical, economic, social, and political circumstances of the city of Detroit depicted in chapter 6 regarding their production of space, especially regarding the representations of space.

8.1

Representations of space

As discussed, when considering space, it is not one, but “[…] an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 8). Representations of space, “[…] the dominant space in any society (or mode of production)” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39) conceived by planners and the like, are “[…] where ideology, power and knowledge dominate” (Buser, 2012, p. 284). They could also be described as layer upon layer of ideologies, shaped by time. Thus, Lefebvre (1991b) suggests, that [w]e should have to study not only the history of space, but also the history of representations, along with that of their relationships – with each other, with practice, and with ideology. History would have to take in not only the genesis of these spaces but also, and especially, their interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interactions, and their links with the spatial practice of the particular society or mode of production under consideration. (p. 42)

Therefore, I will turn towards Detroit’s history once more, but now to highlight the history of representations, its interconnections, and implications, focusing on those that continue to have an effect to this day. As the artistic practices I study are often in reference to the city of Detroit as a whole (although sometimes articulate at specific places), I will consider the history of representations in Detroit as a whole, too. The first phase of ideologies that can be identified in the historical consideration in chapter 6 is that of Detroit as a trading center: Connected to several waterways that facilitated trade, with access to natural resources and with land fairly easy to work while hardly at risk of natural dangers, Detroit was strategically well located. After the fire in 1805 and the mostly failed attempt to rebuild the city according to the Woodward Plan, the grid system was established as the layout of the city with a division of rather large lots and single-family homes which eventually created a low-density and spread out city (Woodford, 2001, p. 39). The phenomenon still exists to this day and was reinforced by the population decline of the 1950s onwards and was also remarked rather sarcastically by Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s in her well-known book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961/1992): “Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure” (p. 204).

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The opening of the Erie Canal, the building of more roads that connected Detroit with its hinterland (and thus rich agricultural land), and the implementation of railroad tracks facilitated the growth of the city’s economy and, concomitant, its population. Besides geopolitical considerations, from early onwards, capital was decisive in Detroit’s development, with the city located and structured to serve economic profit through trade. The economic considerations, however, grew stronger during the industrialization from the mid-1900s onwards (Galster, 2012, p. 48). Leaping in time to the 20th century, the increasing dominance of the auto industry and the automobile becoming more accessible to the wider society prevailed the car-oriented city as the model for urban planning and development. Consequently, decisions in favor of motorized private transport were made such as the termination of the streetcar service in 1956 (Woodford, 2001, p. 107) and the restructuring of the urban fabric to build freeways beginning in 1941 as well as attempts of urban renewal (Woodford, 2001, pp. 154, 163, 169). The construction of freeways was of course not a local phenomenon: The passing of the Federal Highway Act in 1956 enabled the construction of the Interstate Highway System, connecting almost all states by highways. But it was also not only a political decision. The automobile industry, unsurprisingly, promoted the car-oriented city: At the world fair in 1939, for example, GM presented a model for the city of the future, called ‘Futurama’, where pedestrians and car traffic were separated and every important location should be connected to a network of highways, allowing every destination to be reached in a short time and with their own car120 (Hahn, 2014, p. 51). According to Marchand (1992), “[…] the Futurama propagandized for public support of massive and expensive superhighways that would assure an expanding market for automobiles” (p. 35), successfully imposing their idea (or ideology) of the car-oriented city. Now, following Lefebvre (1991b), “[…] representations of space have a practical impact, […] they intervene in and modify spatial textures which are informed by effective knowledge and ideology” (p. 42, emphasis in original). In the present case, the ideology and future of the car-oriented city intervened massively in the spatial texture and modified it to the extent of complete erasure of neighborhoods under the pretext of urban renewal (Sugrue, 1996, p. 47). It is a material intervention that “[…] occurs by way of construction – in other words, by way of architecture, conceived of not as the building of a particular structure, palace or monument, but rather as a project embedded in a spatial context […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 42). The destruction of existing buildings for the construction of freeways affected the residents differently and showed significant differences in building conditions: Homeowners did not suffer the effects of highway construction to the same extent as renters; of the 900 structures cleared in a largely white area between Wyoming and Warren Avenues,

120 Original: “Auf der Weltausstellung 1939 in New York hat General Motors eine Vision der Stadt der Zukunft mit dem Namen ‘Futurama’ vorgestellt. In dem Modell waren Fußgänger und Autoverkehr voneinander getrennt und alle wichtigen Standorte durch ein Netz von Autobahnen miteinander verbunden. Jeder Ort sollte in kürzester Zeit mit dem eigenen Fahrzeug erreicht werden können” (Hahn, 2014, p. 51).

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Producing art – producing space about 700 were moved intact to other sites. Renters, in contrast, suffered disproportionately, and the leveled black areas had few homeowners and few buildings that could be physically relocated elsewhere. (Sugrue, 1996, p. 48)

Further, in an attempt of so-called ‘slum clearance’, “[o]vercrowded, unsanitary, and dilapidated districts […]” (Sugrue, 1996, p. 49) were replaced by, mostly, high-rises of which some were public housing. However, as Sugrue (1996) notes further, “[t]he city had no adequate relocation plans for residents uprooted by urban renewal” (p. 50) which often led families to move into “[…] buildings at least as dilapidated as those that they had left” (p. 51). The ideology of a modern and clean urban environment thus led to the displacement of families and the destruction of not only the physical but also the social elements of neighborhoods. Adding to these political decisions, in a time when Black residents “[…] had little political power in a majority white city” (Sugrue, 1996, p. 48), were structural discriminatory practices on the housing market such as redlining and racialized mortgage lending (Sugrue, 1996, pp. 196f.; K.-Y. Taylor, 2019, pp. 29ff.). All of these developments combined facilitated the suburban growth, with businesses, plants, and residents (although mostly Whites) moving to the outskirts and resulting in a growing segregation between city and suburbs, mostly by race, but also by class (Sugrue, 1996, pp. 198ff.). Although the Fair Housing Act that passed in 1968 should have prevented discrimination in the housing and rental market, “[…] the effects of government promotion of and support for segregation […] still shape the racial landscape of today” (Rothstein, 2017, p. 178). It shows that “[u]nder the social relations of capitalism, conceived space […] occupies a privileged position […]. Conceived space facilitates the marketization of space, the reduction of space to a measurable entity to be valued as property” (Purcell, 2008, p. 93). In the present case, however, the marketization and the racialization of space intersect and interconnect: People of different races in the United States are relegated to different physical locations by housing and lending discrimination, by school district boundaries, by policing practices, by zoning regulations, and by the design of transit systems. […] Race serves as a key variable in determining who has the ability to own homes that appreciate in value and can be passed down to subsequent generations […]. (Lipsitz, 2007, p. 12)

The marketization of space was pushed even further with strategies for revitalization in the downtown area such as the construction of the RenCen in the late 1970s as well as two stadiums and three casinos beginning in the late 1990s (Woodford, 2001, pp. 243ff.). These are just some examples of the pro-growth and entertainment-led strategies that are part of the broader shift towards urban entrepreneurialism which, according to Harvey (1989a), “[…] typically rests […] on a public-private partnership focusing on investment and economic development with the speculative construction of place rather than amelioration of conditions within a particular territory as its immediate (though by no means exclusive) political and economic goal” (p. 8). In the case of Detroit these strategies were not successful in terms of economic growth. Although further steps were taken such as the reduction of city

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services, tax raises, wage cuts, and worker layoffs, Detroit’s bankruptcy was declared in summer 2013. It also led, however, to more strategies of the same kind which Kurashige (2017) describes as “[…] an extreme version of neoliberal restructuring […]” (p. 11). Herein also lies what Peck and Tickell (2002) call a ‘transformative potential of neoliberalism’, meaning that “[…] neoliberalism has demonstrated an ability to absorb or displace crisis tendencies, to ride—and capitalize upon—the very economic cycles and localized policy failures that it was complicit in creating […]” (p. 400). It, therefore, comes as no surprise that after the bankruptcy, neoliberal urban governance persisted (maybe even reinforced): Privatization, public-private-partnerships and public subsidies for private redevelopment projects, land speculation, the disposal and conversion of formally subsidized buildings into market-rate apartments, or the rebranding of the Cass Corridor as Midtown are just some examples of the implementations of these ideologies in the greater downtown area. Conceived space, the space of capital and order that also structures and organizes the perception of space, dominates in Detroit. The ideologies of marketization and racialization of space, that have been persisting for almost a century now, produced and still reproduce uneven spatial development and inequality. These representations of space, then, are not only conceptualized by planners, urbanists, and technocrats, as suggested by Lefebvre (1991b, p. 38), but also corporations and entrepreneurs play a significant role in Detroit. In the same vein, Boyle (2001), describing Detroit as the ‘product of industrial capitalism’, states that [t]he ruins of Detroit—the weed-choked lots where houses once stood, the shells of factories, the blocks of boarded-up storefronts—thus stand as symbols not of decay but of power, the power of corporations to shape the rise and fall of a great American city. (p. 126)

It shows the (capitalist) power that is wielded in the representations of space and that inactivity – or what appears to be inactivity – can be part of the conceived, too. Even some forms of art can be part of the representations of space if the artwork, according to Miles (1997), “[…] sits comfortably within the conceptual spaces of city planning […]” (p. 59). This is true for festivals and programs in Detroit such as, among others, Murals In The Market or the City Walls program which are either authorized or even initiated by the city government. In these cases, power and control over public space (or publicly visible space) are exercised by city officials according to a specific concept of (public) space where some forms of art, usually graffiti, if not authorized or legalized, are regarded as blight and lead to ticketing of property owners (and thus generate revenue for the city), while others, usually murals that are registered on the city’s website, are regarded as “[…] a deterrent to vandalism and also […] effective tools in economic development, community development, and beatification [sic]” (City of Detroit, n.d.b). While conceived space is the dominant space in Detroit, it only produces social space together with perceived space and lived space. They contribute, however, in different ways to the production of social space, “[…] according to their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in

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question, and according to the historical period” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 46). Their relations are dynamic and unstable, and they determine, contradict, and restrain each other as will be seen in the subchapters below. In the following section, I will now turn towards the five aspects of space that correspond with the practices discussed above, namely materiality, site, public, social, and story. As mentioned before, they are distinguished on a theoretical level while in practice, this dialectic relationship is indivisible.

8.2

Materiality

Vacant lots, vacant buildings, and ruins have been a part of Detroit’s cityscape for decades and despite vast efforts to demolish, rehabilitate or redevelop, they still are to this day (Drawing Detroit, 2019). Left behind or discarded inside as well as outside of buildings are also often artifacts and materials. It seems like there is nothing that cannot be left behind: large objects such as boats or sewer pipes, objects of utility such as vacuum cleaners, tv sets, and telephones, objects of recreation, fun, and play such as sports gear, toys, and stuffed animals, and more personal(ized) items such as shoes, books, and photos, as well as building materials such as wood, stone, concrete, and iron (see fig. 27).

Fig. 27: Pile of objects at the Heidelberg Project (photo by author, April 2019)

All these objects, materials, and ruins are stimuli, catalysts as well as foundations for artistic practices. They can be incorporated into an artwork or become an

Materiality

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artwork themselves, as I have shown above. But these items and structures have not always been like this: They were once owned, used, maintained, or occupied and had some kind of purpose before they were left behind. As material objects in the production of space, an active plant, by way of example, was once perceived as a place of work and conceived as a place of (capitalist) production. It is part of the worker’s daily routine and is closely associated with the urban reality, which is “[…] the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life and leisure” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 38) such as the daily commute between a plant and a home. Now, when the purpose of production became obsolete and a plant closed and eventually entered into a state of ruination (like the Packard Plant, see fig. 28), the spatial practice shifts, too: It is no longer a workplace and thus might no longer be part of the workers daily routine, but it can still structure their lived reality and “[…] aid or deter a person’s sense of location and the manner in which a person acts” (Merrifield, 2006, p. 110). And it might also be of interest for new users and other uses.

Fig. 28: Part of the Packard Plant at East Grand Boulevard (photo by author, April 2019)

This, on the other hand, influences and is influenced by the lived space in so far as “[…] space is directly lived through and moulded by everyday actions, memories, experiences and feelings towards space by its inhabitants and users” (Degen, 2008, p. 19, emphasis in original) – this should be understood as a more general example, though, and I will return to this when discussing the artistic practices. Coming back to the materials now, they are not only left behind but leftovers and residues of past times, creating a “[…] temporal disorder [that] contrasts strongly with the necessarily rigid scheduling and time-management that

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facilitated industrial production, and signs of these defunct temporalities persist in clocking-on devices and schedules on notice boards” (Edensor, 2008, p. 137). At the same time, vacancy, ruins, as well as discarded objects and materials exist in abundance in Detroit as a result of past developments. From this angle, ruins might also be described as the backside of the conceived space, the flawed ‘byproduct’ of ideologies such as the car-oriented or the neoliberal city. They are then relics of a past that have lost their initial use or purpose: “As soon as a factory is abandoned to its fate, the previously obvious meaning and utility of objects evaporates with the disappearance of the stabilizing network which secured an epistemological and practical security” (Edensor, 2005, p. 313). Consequently, the question rises of “[…] what matter is waste, and what is not yet over and done with” (Edensor, 2005, p. 314). However, the answer to this question does not necessarily fall into the binary of matter being either waste (here understood as useless) or useful but rather depends on many factors such as the perspective from which an answer is given. Concerning objects inside ruins specifically, Edensor (2005) describes their material status as “[…] transient, so that they are in a state of becoming something else or almost nothing that is separately identifiable. Things are stripped down in stages, giving up their form and solidity over time. If objects are not rescued, curated or obliterated, initial signs of decay such as a mild tarnish or rust, herald future eventualities”. (p. 319)

If objects and materials inside of ruins are transient then the ruin itself, in a material sense, is transient; it may be deteriorating further, altered, redeveloped, or erased, but it is never stagnant since a place is never stagnant (Massey, 1994, p. 155). This ‘transformational character of ruins’ (Darroch, 2015, p. 307; Edensor, 2005, pp. 317ff.) is highlighted by artists who engage with ruins, objects, and materials as Darroch (2015) observes: In contrast to the image of Detroit as a stagnant stage for ‘ruin exploration’, urban interventions by artists […] attempt to engage with the city as a site of change, where empty spaces are characterized by constant movement: the circulation of waste and abandoned artefacts, and the gradual transformation of the built environment’s material character, either by the process of decay or by intervention. (p. 307)

The notion of the city as a site of change rather than stagnation is also expressed by Scott Hocking (interview, May 23, 2017) when he states that in Detroit “[…] there’s just been that ongoing flux and change … it’s a city of change” which “[…] will never become what it was before, it will become something else”, showing that “[…] what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (Massey, 1994, p. 154). This approach is reflected in Scott’s large scale works such as Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21, The Egg or The Garden of the Gods. All of these installations were built inside abandoned buildings that were (or still are) at least partially in a state of ruination and from material found inside these buildings which had lost its previous ‘meaning and utility’ (Edensor, 2005, p. 313): The wooden blocks which were once installed as shock absorbers in the body stamping press Fisher Body 21 and then – I assume – lay unused for decades after the plant closed, were then

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used by Scott to build the ziggurat. Before he built the installation, though, Scott had already “[…] spent ten years getting to know this place before deciding to work inside – onsite, as opposed to removing materials for use in [his] studio” (Hocking, 2018, p. 39). While working on the ziggurat, Scott developed a daily routine where he’d “[…] wake up in the morning, walk to the corner gas station to buy a coffee, newspaper, and maybe a hard-boiled egg, and hoof it to the 600,000-square foot former auto plant” (Hocking, 2018, p. 39) which is a fiveminute walk from his studio. Eventually, the ziggurat “[…] was destroyed when the Environmental Protection Agency boarded and re-fenced Fisher Body, cleaning out any hazardous materials – including the creosote preserved floor-blocks that made up the wooden pyramid” (Hocking, n.d.-d). While this might seem like the first step of renovation work and, although Fisher Body 21 was fenced and police guarded by 2010, it still is vacant today (Hocking, n.d.-d). The ziggurat is then not only a representation of transition, of a city in flux and change, but also subject to these processes of creation and destruction. Following Massey’s (1995a) approach “[…] to think of places […] as constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time; and to think of particular attempts to characterise them as attempts to define, and claim coherence and a particular meaning for, specific envelopes of space-time” (p. 188, emphasis in original) leads to understanding Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 as a particular configuration of relations at a specific point in space and in time (or timespan, in this case). It is an appropriation of space where the artist created not only a physical but also a symbolic installation: According to Stone-Richards (2014c) “[…] the Ziggurat in its original Mesopotamian function […] was a form of celebration of victory over an enemy and the establishment of a sacred place upon that defeat […]” (p. 37, emphasis in original). Scott’s practice, Stone-Richards (2014c) continues, “[…] is less about mourning […] than commemorating, but even more than commemoration […] his practice, rather, is an un-veiling of oblivion and forgetfulness […]” (p. 37, emphasis in original). Thus, with the ziggurat he produces a representational space that does not obey the “[…] rules of consistency or cohesiveness” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 41) suggested by representations of space. Rather, it “[…] overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39) and creating “[…] meaning which values places in ways that run counter to the dominant representations of space […]” (Leary, 2009, p. 196). The past as well as changes and transitions in the city are then unveiled, celebrated, and performed rather than mourned. As a side note, it is worth mentioning that underlying Scott’s practice is not only an appropriation and making use of space, but an illegal act since he trespassed to enter the Fisher Body 21 and worked with someone else’s property. The photographic documentation of the ziggurat can then be regarded as an attempt to capture specific envelops of space-time because “[t]he identity of places, indeed the very identification of places as particular places, is always in that sense temporary, uncertain, and in process” (Massey, 1995a, p. 190). The photographs of the ziggurat are thus snapshots that capture and eternalize what is now already destructed. These photographs, however, should not be regarded

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as solely documentations or reflections of the artwork. They are also, especially with taking into account their snippet-like character, powerful and purposeful spaces of representation that “[…] have their own effects” (Rose, 2001, p. 15). They are perceived in various ways by viewers because there cannot be an objective look if “[…] ways of seeing are historically, geographically, culturally and socially specific […]” (Rose, 2001, p. 16). The photographs also offer – in their limited scope – access to a place that is not only long gone now in the way it was on the photographs but to see it would also have meant to know about its existence, let alone to trespass. The entanglement of space and time and the (conflicting) multiplicity of place that comes with it is also reflected in questions that Scott Hocking (2016) poses: “What makes a ruin become a monument? What makes someone’s mentality of it?” (min. 31:13-31:18). He differentiates here between a ruin that to him is beautiful but he “[…] feel[s] like people don’t see it […]” (Hocking, 2016, min. 31:04-31:05) and a monument that is something that people usually cherish. According to him, then what makes a difference is “[…] the time it takes before you, you look and you don’t have the, the real connection to it so you can kind of see it from a distance” (Hocking, 2016, min. 31:19-31:26). Scott also describes this ‘real connection’ as people’s “[…] way of thinking [that] is based on some kind of memory of what it used to be […]” (Hocking, 2016, min. 31:07-31:11) – in other words, it is based on their lived space. This is in line with Pohl’s (2019) observation that “[…] you cannot speak about the city without facing its past. While this could be said of most places, it is a particular obsession of Detroiters to point to the city’s history in order to explain its present (and future)” (p. 7). Galster (2012) also describes this as a ‘metanostalgia’ (pp. 16, 41) or ‘hypernostalgia’ (p. 250) of Detroit: “The resulting abandonment and demolition of the city’s physical history created a vast prairie of the imagined past where the weeds of rootlessness, mutual blame, and hypernostalgia sprout” (p. 267). Consequently, the nostalgia for […] ‘the glory days’ of Detroit are ultimately a retroactive product of the city’s present. While the historical Detroit is something that once was, but no longer is, the imagined Detroit of the past comes to life in the ruined present. […] While Detroit is […] a city that appears to be ‘lacking in being’, ruins like Michigan Central Station enable us to imagine a […] preapocalyptic world where ‘things were alright’. (Pohl, 2019, pp. 7f.)

So, the nostalgia, as described here, is based not only on someone’s experience and memory of place but also on someone’s imagination of place and, therefore, not simply exists but is created. Thus, lived space here dominates over perceived space (although not necessarily over conceived space), creating a nostalgia that is based on images and symbols. Galster (2012) therein also identifies a problematic notion for the future: “Hypernostalgia leads Greater Detroiters to live in an invented past, which proves a huge barrier to investing bravely and creatively in the future. The future can never be as great as the glorious, albeit imagined, past” (p. 250). Massey (1995a) however states that “[t]he identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant” (p. 186, emphasis in original),

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suggesting to rather understand a place as “[….] a conjunction of many histories and many spaces” (p. 191). Thus, the identity or rather identities of a place are subject to change and there is no universal truth about a place (Massey, 1996, p. 120). Also, if places are thought of this way, then they are – at least on a theoretical level – not bound to a future determined by their/ a past, but open to possibilities of change. At the same time, the “[…] making and remaking of places is a persistent and continuous process. […] There will be rival claims over the interpretation and meaning of places which may result in power struggles over their future” (Massey & Jess, 1995, p. 231). By building the ziggurat inside Fisher Body 21, Scott thus also challenges the identity of the building whose two dominant histories are that of the body stamping press in the past – as which it was conceived – and that of the ruin in the present: “So, for me, the way to jog people’s perception was to somehow infiltrate or collaborate with the building to make something that in a way now you can see the building differently, you can think about the building differently” (Hocking, 2016, min. 31:26-31:45). This contrasts the aforementioned nostalgia or obsession for the city’s history in so far as Scott’s work is based on in-depth knowledge of, as well as, corporeally and immaterially, “[…] deeply rooted in the historical conditions of the city of Detroit […]” (Stone-Richards, 2014c, p. 35) and it emphasizes transition and possibility. Instead of mourning for what has been lost, his practice is open to and part of change, and he finds beauty and solace in the ruinated parts of Detroit. At the same time, however, it should be noted that this perception might also exclude (in the sense that it not directly addresses) another identity that is to say Detroit “[…] as the site of a decades-long disaster that has resulted in the traumatization of resident populations, the severing of local social networks, the devastation of neighborhood economies, and the gradual physical destruction of much of the built environment […]” (Draus et al., 2019, p. 154). Thus, it is questionable if traumatized and stigmatized residents are in a position to and/ or willing to reframe an abandoned building through an artwork as much else than a ruin or something that was lost. Where the ‘decades-long disaster’ plays a more obvious and visible role, however, is in the case of the Heidelberg Project; although here too, the identities and meanings of the place are contested and even conflicting. One of the major conflicts of the Heidelberg Project is based on a rather fundamental question: Is it art or is it trash? As pointed out before, parts of the Heidelberg Project have been destroyed in the past as an attempt to answer this question, but the Heidelberg Project still survived. It is a demonstration of the power struggles inherent in places: “[…] the power to win the contest over how the place should be seen, what meaning to give it; the power, in other words, to construct the dominant imaginative geography, the identities of place and culture” (Massey & Jess, 1995, p. 232). It also shows that the conceived space of city officials here prevailed, forcing the demolition of parts of the Heidelberg Project. The intentions behind the official demolitions might have been “[…] to distract attention away from the city’s failure to address more material concerns within the Heidelberg

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neighborhood”, Walters (2001, p. 72) suggests. The Heidelberg Project is so contested, it seems, because of its ambivalent character: It is a reminder of the past, a performance of history, and at the same time, an acknowledgment of the people who are still there as well as a performance of transformation and change; it is a site of mourning, loss, and trauma and at the same time, a site of hope, vision, and community (Dobraszczyk, 2017, pp. 165f.; Walters, 2001, pp. 64f.). Therefore Jackson (2007) wonders “[…] whether divergent interpretations are simply a function of the differing perspectives of different viewers or whether qualities of the Heidelberg Project itself support or engender strikingly divergent responses” (p. 30), concluding that “[b]y its very contraries the project attracts interest, provokes discussion, and challenges boundaries of conventional thinking” (p. 37). The discussions as well as the way interest is taken, however, are still differing for different viewers, as Dobraszczyk (2017) suggests when stating that “[…] the Heidelberg Project is clearly problematic for some, particular those who live nearby (some of whom may have been responsible for the recent arson attacks)” (p. 166). This too might be grounded in “[…] conflicting interpretations of the past, serving to legitimate a particular understanding of the present […]. What are at issue are competing histories of the present, wielded as arguments over what should be the future” (Massey, 1995a, p. 185). Referring back to Dobraszczyk’s (2017, p. 166) statement, the conflicting interpretations of the Heidelberg Project are also based on different lived experiences. It can be problematic and hurtful if regarded as a remnant and reminder of urban failure and loss solely, but it can also be seen “[…] as a critical reflection on contemporary urban conditions in Detroit” (Herscher, 2013, p. 74) and a symbol of the “[…] potentially transformative nature of Detroit’s abandoned sites, objects and buildings […]” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 180). Thus, this not only reveals the multiple, conflicting, and contested identities of place, but it also shows that they are always in the making: The identity of a place is thus not to be seen as inevitably to be destroyed by new importations. On this alternative reading that identity is always, and always has been, in process of formation: it is in a sense forever unachieved. (Massey, 1995a, p. 186)

When the identity of a place is never fully and finally determined but always in process, then a place always has the potential and possibility for change, which in turn, however, is accompanied by power struggles or, in Massey’s (1996) words, “[…] battles over spatialised social power” (p. 120, emphasis in original). These battles over spatialized social power in terms of the Heidelberg Project have, as discussed above, in part resulted in demolitions and destructions of installations over the past three decades, but also the continuation of the project and the recognition now “[…] as an internationally-important art work and the second most visited tourist attraction in Detroit after the Detroit Institute of Arts […]” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 166). While to some extent, legal boundaries might account for no more official demolitions of the Heidelberg Project for twenty years now (Walters, 2001, p. 78), it also seems as if representational space prevails and reimagines the perceived and conceived space. Through its artistic and symbolic use of physical objects and materials, the Heidelberg Project reminds of the past

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while it also imagines a colorful and more inclusive future (Walters, 2001, pp. 79ff.). Zooming in now from looking at the Heidelberg Project as a whole to focusing more on its material components, the concept of ambiguous, multiple, even conflicting identities and meanings can also be applied to them. Here, as well as with Szylak’s Hamtramck Disneyland and Dabls MBAD African Bead Museum, the reuse, repurpose, (re)arrangement, and (re)assemblage of materials and objects are fundamental to their works. Accordingly, Edensor (2005) states that “[…] ruins and their contents are rather ambiguous […]” (p. 317). So, the materials and objects addressed here can also be regarded as in process and in transition or as between what they were and what they could be because “[…] ruinous matter has not been consigned to burial or erasure, and still bears the vague traces of its previous use and context, however opaque. Accordingly, ruins contain manifold surplus resources with which people can construct meaning, stories and practices […]” (Edensor, 2005, p. 317). In the case of Detroit, however, it is not only the ruins that contain these resources: Discarded and left-behind objects and materials can be found on vacant lots as well as on illicit trash dumps, too. At the Hamtramck Disneyland, Szylak constructed an assemblage of abandoned objects that was constantly changing and in process through the addition and accumulation of new pieces (Herscher, 2012a, p. 274). Further, by adding objects that are “[…] the detritus of middle-class American popular culture: bicycle wheels, toy dolls, pots of artificial flowers, model airplanes, Christmas lights, Elvis paintings, wooden soldiers, flags and signs” (Herscher, 2012a, p. 274) and combining them with references to Ukraine, his country of origin, their meanings and stories shift and they are “[…] transformed into an artwork telegraphing Szylak’s complex, bifurcated identity. […] These Ukrainian and American sentiments suggest the ultimate mark of the immigrant experience: a state in which you exist in two places at once” (Aghajanian, 2018, para. 11f.). While of course, it is physically impossible to exist in two places at once, Szylak brought the two places, the US and Ukraine, together on a symbolic and mental level by creating the Hamtramck Disneyland. It does not, however, generally stand for these two places – it was neither (as far as it is known) the aim of the Hamtramck Disneyland nor is it possible: Places, as dynamic, relational processes that have multiple identities and no boundaries in the sense of enclosures (Massey, 1994, p. 5), can only be reconstructed in/ as segments or snippets and, in the present case, through the lived experience and perception of Szylak: References to his love of both America and Ukraine co-mingle in symbols and snatched words affixed to the work: The installation incorporates American flags and maps […]. On one wooden board, Szylak wrote ‘America Big Winner.’ On another, the phrase ‘Ukraine independent from Russia for 23 years’ appears, handwritten in yellow paint. (Aghajanian, 2018, para. 11)

Through the art environment, Szylak creates a utopian space where his ‘bifurcated identity’ of a migrant indeed still exists, but it melts together rather than conflicts. Through symbolically and physically intervening in the present, he

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envisioned but also realized an alternative way of being, a ‘micro-utopia’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 31). Just as the Heidelberg Project or the ziggurat by Scott Hocking, the Hamtramck Disneyland was built with abandoned objects. It seems, however, that these objects were alienated differently: While the abandoned objects installed at the Heidelberg Project are obviously displayed out of their former context and thus alienated, too, they still are evocative of that very process of loss. Similarly, the wooden blocks – former shock absorbers – that Scott used to build the ziggurat, were left in their place, allowing the observer to quickly trace back their origin although they were arranged in a completely different manner. Now the objects at the Hamtramck Disneyland – model airplanes, wooden horse statues, paintings, and many others – which Herscher (2012a) describes as “[…] the detritus of middle-class American popular culture […]” (p. 274) are probably perceived as such because of the context of the Hamtramck Disneyland and the way Szylak added colors and words to the items. It remains unclear to me if/ why he chose these objects in particular or if he just collected what he found. But he modified and reimagined them – by painting or writing on them, by arranging them in a certain way, or simply by adding them to the art environment – and thus produced a lived space of images, symbols, and codes that subverts the existing and creates new meanings. Dabls, in turn, explicitly found inspiration in the material he found on site, like the piece of metal protruding out of a piece of concrete that lay the foundation for the installation Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). This is similar to Mirka, who changed her initial project idea once she arrived in Detroit and was overwhelmed as well as inspired by the material she found while wandering the streets to get to know the city – a process she also describes as having a dialogue with space (Mirka Sulander, interview April 20,2017). Dabls uses the left-over material of Detroit’s industrial era and recycles and transforms them into installations (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017), creating “[…] a dazzling kaleidoscopic effect to celebrate AfricanAmerican history and culture and to reflect the cosmic vision of the artist […]” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 180). So, while Dabls uses discarded materials for his work too and also focuses on African-American history, his work is, according to Dobraszczyk (2017), “[…] conceived in a much more celebratory way than some of Guyton’s work” (p. 175). At first glance, this is a surprising statement since Dabls’ installations deal with topics such as colonization and slavery. They do so, however, by materially creating metaphors such as the iron that teaches rocks how to rust in order to assimilate and deteriorate the rocks – a metaphor that people apply even beyond the topic of colonization to their personal lives (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). Yet, this process of assimilation and deterioration cannot be achieved (materially), rocks can never rust, and thus “[…] Dabls’s work sees blackness as a privilege and responsibility rather than a state of victimhood in the face of white prejudice” (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 175). In this perspective, Dabls produced a space that runs counter to discriminatory narratives and celebrates what is often marginalized (see fig. 29). It conflicts with the history of

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representations discussed before which were shaped by White supremacy. It then creates a place of empowerment, appreciation, and education through materials which artist Bree Gant (in Benvenutti et al., 2020) in a conversation with Dabls describes as “[…] materials of the city, of the people of the city […]” (min. 00:4300:49). So, the ‘materials of the city’, referring to those which were discarded or left behind, first inspired Dabls to the genesis for the installation (Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust) and were then used by him to further create and communicate metaphors and meanings.

Fig. 29: Mosaic mural at the MBAD African Bead Museum (photo by author, May 2017)

He describes this as recycling, based on traditional African material culture where “[t]here was no throw away, no trash, no garbage” (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). Like the other artists and artworks, Dabls uses many materials that were not initially created and designated for the sake of art. The materials and objects as well as buildings and lots were, in the past, something else or part of something else. They are, as discussed above, ambiguous and in process, having lost their previous value, use, and context (Edensor, 2005, p. 317). But for the same reasons, they provide opportunities for future and different values, uses, and contexts as can be seen in the examples. Then, if space and time are regarded as deeply entangled, thought of as space-time (Massey, 1994, p. 2), and “[…] if time is to be open then space must be open too” (Massey, 2005, p. 59). This does not at all deny the structural inequalities and power relations that underly space, but it opens a non-deterministic perspective on space, its history, present, and future. It allows streets such as Heidelberg Street to be looked at and not only see various forms of loss, but […] the possibilities and potentials that decline brings—the ways in which the shrinking city is also an incredible city, saturated with urban opportunities that are precluded or even unthinkable in cities that function according to plan. Taking advantage of these opportunities

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To discuss these possibilities and potentials of decline, Herscher (2012a) uses the term ‘unreal estate’, referring to “[…] urban territory that has fallen out of the literal economy, the economy of the market, and thereby become available to different systems of value, whether cultural, social, political or otherwise” (p. 8). While this approach focuses mainly on property (real estate turning ‘unreal’), it can also be applied to the discarded and left-behind objects and materials inside and outside of ruins. They too, have fallen out of the official economy121 of the market but could become available to other value systems. In other words, their exchange value has almost completely deteriorated – one of the most famous examples for this is the houses sold for $100 (Barlow, 2009). What is particularly interesting is that this phenomenon is both the result and the subversion of the capitalist mode of production: The surplus production or, in Harvey’s (1982, pp. 190ff.) words, the ‘overaccumulation’ of buildings, combined with the developments discussed before, created an economic devaluation that, in the most extreme cases, resulted in the abandonment, ruination, and, in some instances, demolition of buildings. The exchange value is then replaced by the use value which can take different forms depending on the “[…] wants and needs […]” (Harvey, 1982, p. 5) of the individual user. So, referring to the artworks discussed above, buildings, objects, and materials whose exchange values have not only declined but in some cases dissolved completely, were perceived as of value by the artists in a material sense as well as on a mental level (e.g., as afflatus) and then used to create installations of social, political, and/ or cultural use. The value attributed to the assembled artworks, however, can also vary depending on the respective beholder. Assuming that decline also brings possibilities and potentials, however, does not only make room for artistic or alternative practices. It could also play into the hands of neoliberal urban development. That is not to say that either one or the other can exist. It is quite the contrary, as the example of Detroit shows. Based on Massey (1994), I assume that “[i]f […] the spatial is thought of in the context of space-time and as formed out of social interrelations at all scales, then […] place is […] a particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings […]” (p. 5). So far, I have addressed the practices of seeking, finding, and recycling material focusing on the themes of transformation, transition, flux, and change of place through material (re)use, the multiplicity and confliction of identities and meanings of places as well as questions of power and domination such as who determines a place’s future and which/ whose history of a place is told as the common narrative. It has become apparent that these material-based practices produce urban

121 It should be noted that economic value systems can still play a role, albeit not necessarily completely legal. One prime example in Detroit are scrappers who strip (abandoned) buildings of metal which they then sell to scrap yards (Hocking, 2005).

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spaces that often run counter to dominant representations of space, producing divergent values and meanings which are, in turn, mostly based on symbols and codes (Leary, 2009, p. 196; Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39). In this context, waste, for its part, is understood as “[…] not a trans-historical given, either in form or content; rather, it is mobile description of that which has been cast out or judged superfluous in a particular space-time” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1649). Thus, waste, or the perception of something as waste, is bound to space and time as well. The urban spaces, on the other hand, offer the abundance of materials and objects, ruins, and lots as well as histories which, in turn, are used as material, subject, or impetus for an artwork and/ or as a place of work.

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Site

Site, here defined as material as well as immaterial form and relations articulated at a particular locus at a particular moment, could also be reframed as place for the following discussion (Massey, 1994, p. 154). Site-specific122 practices are therefore those that engage with as well as are informed by the place where they occur, be it in the process of artistic production and/ or the display of artworks, while site-specific artworks then “[…] define [themselves] through properties, qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position it occupies” (Kaye, 2000, p. 1). Assuming that space is a social product that is never finished but always produced and reproduced also allows to regard the relation of site and art as reciprocity. They “[…] alter[…] the identity of each [other], blurring distinctions between them and preparing the ground for the enhanced participation of art in wider cultural and social practice” (Deutsche, 1988, p. 14). In the following, I will discuss the role of place on two different scales: First, zooming in to the levels of the neighborhood, community, and building, and second, zooming out to the level of the city of Detroit. In connection with the underlying definitions of space and place, however, it should be clear that these levels (or places) are not understood as enclosed locations but rather as open, porous, if not even elusive. The Heidelberg Project did not emerge at its location randomly but is located on the street where the artist Tyree Guyton grew up: The HP was born out of Guyton’s own experiences and hardships growing up in a community that had experienced devastating changes. What used to be a diverse, working class neighborhood over the years became a community characterized by violence, racism, abandonment, despair and poverty. Such conditions became the pretext for the birth of what is known today as the HP. (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-b, para. 3)

122 Although I use the term site-specific art here to refer to art that is placed outside of the rather traditional art spaces such as galleries and museums, it should be noted that site-specific art can also be found inside them (Kaye, 2000, p. 91).

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From this perspective, the site-specificity of the Heidelberg Project also lies in the person of the artist who took his own experiences but also those of his family and the community as a reason as well as an impetus to create the art environment. Through arranging material found on-site or close by and painting on streets, pavements, and houses, he not only created something but altered the site which is now also perceived as an art environment and not only as a block of vacancy; the perception and assessment, however, remain individual and subjective and can therefore be one or the other or even something completely different. In this way, it calls attention to the neighborhood of the Heidelberg Project which even became a tourist destination. But it also draws attention to the issues of decline and neglect as well as the failure to address them, in this specific neighborhood but also in Detroit in general. Therefore, there are two ways the site-specificity of the Heidelberg Project and the meanings it produces through the relationship of the artworks and their place can be discussed: in regard to the whole city of Detroit and concerning the surrounding neighborhood of the Heidelberg Street. I will address the former further on in this subchapter since this involves other artworks, too. For the latter, it is helpful to first return to a subject broached before: the Heidelberg Project’s exhibition at MOCAD. Regardless of for what reason the exhibition was created, it is certain that it changed the artworks. According to Kaye (2000), “[t]o move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else” (p. 2, emphasis in original). What is different concerning the exhibition at MOCAD compared to the original site at Heidelberg Street, aside from the assumption that it targets different visitors (Danny VanZandt, interview April 13, 2019), is that it replaces selected works and thus removes them from their immediate and perceptible context. At MOCAD then, the artworks themselves are to the fore, not only because there are fewer objects, installations, and paintings to be explored but also because they are much more polished and neatly arranged. The ‘made-made lava flow’ (Herron, 1993, p. 199) on Heidelberg Street, on the other hand, creates a very different picture, almost overwhelming the visitor. But it is not only the large-scale assemblage of various items that is different. At Heidelberg Street, the installations are perceived almost within their context of origin and in reference to what they are supposed to symbolize or point out. They are on, in, or next to overgrown lots and ruins on a fairly quiet street with little traffic. The loss and devastation the neighborhood experienced are perceived right away, even if no further information is given (Herron, 1993, p. 199). At MOCAD, in turn, there probably is no feeling of absence, no birdsongs, or no smell of ruins. These and other sensual experiences are connected to the place and shape the way it is perceived. The representational space, however, is laden with “[…] values, personal associations, appropriations, exclusions and invitations […]” (M. Miles, 1997, p. 59) and thus the Heidelberg Project, as discussed above, has a history of conflicts, appreciation, and disapproval. So, the material as well as social, political, economic, and historical relations that come together then construct a unique place, defined here as “[…] the contemporaneous existence of a plurality of trajectories; a simultaneity of stories-so-far […]. It is simply the principle of

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coexisting heterogeneity” (Massey, 2005, p. 12). Tyree Guyton’s site-specific practices and artworks then interact with and alter, and, at the same time, are shaped by the unique place created by these relations. By turning his own migrant identity, his ‘bifurcate identity’ (Aghajanian, 2018) outside and public, Szylak’s Hamtramck Disneyland could be understood as a larger engagement with Hamtramck’s communities, too. It reflects Hamtramck’s diversity as it shows one of its many pieces. It also shows that there is no ‘pure’ or ‘simple’ place: “We are all, somewhere in the past, migrants. None of us is simply ‘local’. And all local places and ‘local cultures’ are, actually, hybrid processes interweaving many influences” (Massey, 1996, p. 117). Szylak took some of these many influences and by physically as well as symbolically altering what used to be an ordinary residential building and neighborhood, he constructed the Hamtramck Disneyland. Scott’s work discussed in this study on the other hand could be described as ‘building-specific’ and has its roots in researching the building’s history, frequent visits to as well as developing a relationship with a building. Buildings such as the Michigan Central Station or the Packard Plant were part of his spatial practice long before he started to work inside them because he had been entering them for years to gather materials to take to his studio. The change of practice then involved working with the material found on-sight. Besides the material connection to the site, there are also symbolic values of the artworks that could be understood in reference to the site. Take, for example, The Egg and Michigan Central Station, which Scott describes as […] based on the ancient symbolic meanings of the egg, as well as stacked stones that can be found worldwide (cairns). The form of an egg has traditionally represented the unborn potential yet to be hatched; the new beginning; the gestating idea; the primordial matter; creation. While cairns have been used as markers of tombs, caves, or pathways; places of significance; astronomical and navigational tools; and points of mystical or religious importance. (Hocking, n.d.-c)

The theme of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction which runs through many of his works becomes apparent here as well: The egg was eventually destructed after it was built throughout one and a half years (Hocking, n.d.c). The Michigan Central Station, the site of the egg, was a symbol for new beginnings too, especially for the first half of the 20th century. It is the place “[…] where many generations of Detroiters first stepped foot into the city for factory jobs” (Austin, 2020, para. 2), an arrival point for European migrants as well as those from the south, drawn to Detroit in hope for work and, for the latter group particularly, for less discrimination (Claudia Mayer, interview April 16, 2019). But, as is known, the Michigan Central Station eventually lost its purpose as hub and destination of rail traffic with declining passenger volumes and the proliferation of private transport by car. It was vacant for three decades and “[…] became an attraction for urban explorers, scrappers, homeless people, artists and journalists” (Pohl, 2019, p. 3). So, vacancy here does not necessarily refer to inactivity or inutility but rather facilitated new, albeit illegal, uses. After several changes of ownership, the Ford

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Motor Company bought the train station in 2018 and currently renovates it to turn it into their new campus which will serve as, according to the company’s words, “[…] an innovation hub in an urban setting to develop, design and test mobility solutions that will shape the future of transportation” (Ford Motor Company, 2020, para. 1). Like the egg that bears potential and the cairns that mark tombs as well as pathways and places of significance, the Michigan Central Station stands for significant historic, present, and future developments. Some of the gestating ideas for the train station – most of them articulated by its owners or by city officials –, however, were never realized such as a casino, a nightclub, an international trade and customs center, or even its demolition (Austin, 2020, para. 34ff.). While the shell of the building has mostly remained the same over the decades, its interior, including the way it was used, its purpose and what was projected into it changed (Pohl, 2019, pp. 7ff.). It demonstrates again that a place “[…] is always […] temporary, uncertain, and in process” (Massey, 1995a, p. 190) and in this sense, open to the future. At the same time, the future, as well as the histories and the present of a place, are shaped by struggles over its interpretation and meaning and, as a consequence thereof, its use (Massey & Jess, 1995, p. 231). In this sense, The Egg and Michigan Central Station and its associated symbolism, as well as the larger theme of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction that runs through Scott’s work, might not only be specific regarding the Michigan Central Station but specific to Detroit. Similarly, Michael Stone-Richards (2014c) describes Scott’s work as “[…] an art of the city, where the city is taken as a historically conditioned and sedimented medium” (p. 35). The city as a medium, as a source, as a laboratory, as a studio, or as a canvas – these issues thread through many of the artistic practices discussed here. If practices like Scott’s are described as ‘of the city’, then the follow-up question should be what it is about Detroit that creates these specificities. This is closely linked to Massey’s analysis of the ‘specificity of place’ or ‘uniqueness of place’ which, according to her, is based on several sources, among them […] the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations interact with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world. (Massey, 1994, p. 156)

Transferring this to Detroit then allows for a perspective where Detroit, as a place, is the unique articulation of accumulated histories, global and local power struggles as well as a network of social, political, and economic relations at a particular moment; and thus, it is also many things at once and always something different because it is ever-changing. This does not deny that global developments or structural issues – Massey (1984, p. 9) uses the term ‘general processes’ – exist and have an impact on a specific place. On the contrary, “[w]hat is at issue […] is the articulation of the general with the local (the particular) to produce qualitatively different outcomes in different localities” (Massey, 1984, p. 9). From this

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perspective, Detroit offered, and partially still offers, artists the many ‘resources’ discussed in previous chapters such as ruins, vacant lots and houses, an abundance of land, discarded objects and materials, a lack of (governmental) control, a rich and troubled history, reoccurring images and narratives, diverse neighborhoods and communities, and so forth. While these things taken by themselves are not necessarily unique to Detroit, their particular outcomes, trajectories, and interrelations are. The Heidelberg Project, then, for example, is not only site-specific regarding the Heidelberg Street but is also Detroit-specific: It stands for the numerous other neighborhoods which underwent similar developments of crime, loss, racism, and deterioration. The MBAD African Bead Museum can be regarded similarly: While the site-specificity, at least regarding the neighborhood, grew over time, the materials Dabls used are remnants of Detroit’s industrial era (Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017) and the themes he takes up – colonization and slavery, and, at the same time, celebrating and embracing Blackness and seeing it as a privilege (Dobraszczyk, 2017, p. 175) – are not specific to the site of the installations, but knitted into Detroit’s fabric. On the previous pages, I have looked at the site-specificity of artistic practices on two different scales: first, a neighborhood, community, or building as a site, and second, the city of Detroit as a site. On both scales, I define site as the material and immaterial form and relations articulated at a particular locus at a particular moment. Sites are dynamic and open, they are subject to change and they do not have boundaries in the sense of enclosures (Massey, 1994, pp. 154f.). The practices I discussed engage with their sites in both ways, materially as well as immaterially. The histories, identities, and meanings of the sites are taken as subjects and incorporated into the artworks – pursuant to the interpretation and understanding of the artist. This is often done through symbolisms that overlay the physical space (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39), such as the egg’s meaning or the metaphor of iron and rocks. The sites of the artworks are, at least temporarily and depending on the artwork, altered in both ways, too: They are not only materially altered because objects or materials were added, rearranged or removed, but also mentally, referring to the ways the sites might be perceived once the artworks appear – how they might be perceived in detail by neighbors, visitors, and others, is mostly unbeknownst to me because I was not able to directly follow up on this in the present study and have to rely on articles and on what the artist have told me themselves. The site, too, alters the artworks. It might provide context or reference for the artworks, as I have discussed in the case of the Heidelberg Project. Or it might provide a specific ambiance in which the artworks are perceived. This, of course, might change anytime for the site or vary for different people since weather, seasons, or the presence of other persons, as well as the viewer’s emotional state, their background, or their knowledge of the site, among many other factors, all contribute to the perception of the site and the artwork. All in all, however, the site-specific artworks produce and reproduce meanings in the relationship of the work and the site. In this relationship, then, uniqueness of place produces art and art reproduces uniqueness of place.

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8.4

Public

Closely linked to this discussion of site-specific art is the subject of public art since most of the site-specific works discussed above are in public – or at least in what appears to be public. Public art is a changing concept and elusive term, which is why it is used here rather as an umbrella term which subsumes the four main directions in public art practices which are in public, public interest, public place, and publicly funded, suggested by Cartiere and Zebracki (2016a, pp. 2f.). However, ‘art in public’ is the most prevalent practice addressed in the following. Similar to the site-specific practices, practices of making and/ or displaying art outside are based on an understanding of site as the built environment as well as the social. Further, an artwork being in public refers not only to a location but here implies that meaning is produced in/ through the public (e.g., between artist and community). It includes certain characteristics that make the artwork different from art located inside a museum or gallery. Among them, access is one of the most distinctive differences. Art environments and artworks in public such as the Heidelberg Project, the MBAD African Bead Museum, the photographs of Documenting Detroit hung on buildings on the west side, and others are all freely accessible: There usually are no visitor centers (or at least none that visitors must pass through), no entrance fees, no exhibit labels, and no security personnel that monitors the visitors’ movements. There are fewer, if at all, behavioral codes and rules of conduct than in traditional art spaces. Most of the works discussed here are in the neighborhoods – some also in or connected to what used to be ordinary residential buildings – and thus in an environment where people might feel more welcome and at ease than in a museum or gallery associated with a sterile, artificial and elitist atmosphere (Germain, 2019, para. 22; Kwon, 2002, p. 13) (Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018; Olayami Dabls, interview May 03, 2017). This in turn might also mean that these public art environments and artworks provide access to art for people who might not experience it otherwise, be it for economic, social, or other reasons. On the downside, though, art outside is less protected: it can be stolen, demolished, altered, or destroyed – and in some cases, this transient character is even part of the artwork and the underlying artistic practice. At the same time, there is no filter but often also no (easy) way to avoid the artworks which become part of people’s everyday life. That this is not free from conflicts becomes most evident in the case of the Heidelberg Project and its mixed responses from the neighborhood. The artworks change public space according to a specific vision of the artist – and the artworks, in turn, are altered by the site. For some, this might be seen as beautification of public space while others perceive it as unpleasant or even disturbing. It shows that artists, too, exercise power over public space, sometimes conflicting with the political or economic rulers or with residents. Power, however, is not necessarily tied to ownership rights, commissions, or other entitlements. The artists do not always own the lots or the buildings where artworks are made and/ or displayed. In the case of the Heidelberg Project, for example, lots were acquired over time while some were already covered by installations for several years (The Heidelberg Project, n.d.-d). For

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Scott, in turn, trespassing could almost be described as a common part of his artistic practice where he enters and alters abandoned buildings. From the perspective of law, these and other practices are at least somewhere in the grey zone, if not outright illegal. For this to become a problem, however, they would have to be caught and/ or charges would have to be pressed. But the issues of the law put aside, ‘art in public’ can not only be discussed in terms of (property) rights but also according to use and appearance (or perception of appearance), creating what Vince Carducci (2014a) has termed the ‘art of the commons’. It “[…] trespasses the boundaries of conventional property relations of modern capitalism, existing in an indeterminate zone between public and private as customarily understood” (para. 3). It refers to the concept of the common, a “[…] land left open for grazing, farming, and other uses by anyone without requiring individual ownership […]” (Carducci, 2012, para. 2). Within this framework, the distinction between public and private has become increasingly blurry, with the vast amount of abandoned land and property in Detroit creating a space in between this familiar binary. But this space does not just exist in itself, it, too, is produced and reproduced constantly. This overlaps with another perspective that can help to decipher these practices in more spatial terms: When property rights are either deliberately disregarded or just don’t matter (anymore), space might be appropriated as it is/ was the case with the Heidelberg Project or Scott’s installations inside the Packard Plant, the Fisher Body 21 or the Michigan Central Station. Their practices could also be described as claiming their right to appropriate urban space, referring to its access, occupation, and use despite not having official ownership over it: “The conception of urban space as private property, as a commodity to be valorized (or used to valorize other commodities) by the capitalist production process, is specifically what the right to appropriation stands against” (Purcell, 2002, p. 103). This is also reflected in Scott’s explanation of why he started to work inside abandoned buildings: […] I was often really moved to make work where I would see these huge factories in Detroit … neglected, falling apart, decaying. All the material inside wasted. And to me, what was most infuriating about that, is that somebody somewhere had the money to own that building at one time, and I will never have the money to own that building. And the people living around it in squalor will never be able to own this building, and yet, this person with all this wealth not only can afford to own it but can afford to say, ‘Fuck it, I’m letting it go,’ and that would infuriate me. (Scott Hocking, interview May 23, 2017)

The right to appropriate, as the collective right to the city, is rather programmatic and something to work towards: It is an ongoing process towards a utopian vision of urban life rather than a finite state that is easily achieved. Similarly, Purcell (2002) further states that “[…] appropriation reworks control over urban space, resisting the current hegemony of property rights and stressing the primacy of the use-rights of inhabitants” (p. 103). Now, referring back to art, the practices that, as part of their mode of operation, appropriate space challenge property rights and declarations on a small scale – intentionally as well as unintentionally. Regardless of property rights, they claim spaces and through their practice produce, at least partially, a differential space that accentuates differences and

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peculiarities instead of eliminating them (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 52). But also, those who officially own property are contributing to this by deliberately opening their private spaces to the public through creating artworks, as Szylak did with the Hamtramck Disneyland or Dabls with the MBAD African Bead Museum. The practice of making and/ or displaying art outside is interlinked with the dissipation of the distinction between public and private space (Carducci, 2012, para. 2). While this space in between, the space which is neither public nor private, offers possibilities to and abets (produces) the practice of making and/ or displaying art outside, the practice also re/produces this space in between. At the same time, the practice produces (more) accessible, and, as a consequence thereof, spaces that are less avoidable in people’s everyday life. This, in turn, can produce (new) conflicts over space which show themselves in “[…] battles over spatialised social power” (Massey, 1996, p. 120, emphasis in original). In these battles, identity, and meaning, and associated therewith, use and occupation of space are contested and negotiated – in some instances leading to the destruction of artworks and in other cases to their preservation.

8.5

Social

In chapter 7.4, I have identified three ways in which art and artistic practices are focused on community: art that is created with the help of a community or with an educational focus as well as art that is described as made for the community, activist art, and supporting and fostering the local (art) community. Although they are closely connected and intertwined, they can take different forms and have varying comprehensions and inclusions of ‘community’. What they have in common, though, is their emphasis on relations. This relational aspect of art, however, should not be understood in terms of Bourriaud’s (2002) concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ “[…] which […] emphasizes mainly the aesthetic aspect of [human] relations and stays within the realm of the art world […]” (Malzacher, 2015, p. 17). In the present case, it is quite the contrary. The relational aspect rather lies in a “[…] more substantial participation and the possibility of change” (Malzacher, 2015, p. 17). This still differs from one practice to another and can be, for instance, in the form of community outreach and educational programs or in the form of asking for help to create an artwork. Despite these rather collaborative forms of participation, there are more nuances to it. The Heidelberg Project, as well as the MBAD African Bead Museum but also the photos of Documenting Detroit fellows that hung in neighborhoods, are all different forms of art that can communicate with the viewer. They might be intended to be as well as perceived as beautification of space, as something that heals like medicine, as something that helps to deal with stress and takes people’s minds off of things, or as empowerment and representation of oneself. So, apart from a sheer aesthetic impact – which differs from positive to negative and everything in between according to the individual concerned –, there can be a mental impact. Concerning the Heidelberg Project, for example, Jackson (2007) puts it the following:

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For visitors the colorful assemblages of familiar objects lifted from their context in daily life take on new and unexpected meanings and can spark associations and new ideas. Conversations are inevitable, and the role of the visitor can shift quickly from passive viewer to active participant or collaborator. (p. 35)

Taylor (2013), however, states that the work is dialogic, not collaborative, and substantiates it with the following: It is challenging to articulate the various ways in which the public interacts with the Heidelberg Project […]. For as much as the Heidelberg Project is intended as ‘a medicine for all people,’ this medicine is most often delivered on site through individual encounters with the artwork. While the Project is intended to ‘uplift,’ to ‘provide alternatives,’ and to ‘heal,’ the way it achieves this end is largely by encouraging personal creative exploration and experimentation in others. (p. 52)

I side with Taylor (2013) on the terminology since the Heidelberg Project, apart from its explicit programs of community outreach and education, remains Tyree Guyton’s “[…] autobiographical, individualized, and personal” (p. 52) work which rather has the mission “[…] to spark the creative spirit in others, helping visitors discover their own personal Heidelberg Projects” (p. 52, emphasis in original). The representational space of the Heidelberg Project thus raises conversations, with oneself, one’s community or others – from my personal, and thereby not representative, experience, the conversations I had about the Heidelberg Project with others almost always involved the question of whether or not it is art and debating its meaning/s. Similarly, Mouffe (2013) ascribes an affective power to art: If artistic practices can play a decisive role in the construction of new forms of subjectivity, it is because, in using resources which induce emotional responses, they are able to reach human beings at the affective level. This is where art’s great power lies – in its capacity to make us see things in a different way, to make us perceive new possibilities. (pp. 96f.)

Jen, too, pointed out that artists “[…] have a lot of power to communicate with people in ways that are different than like the normal newspaper whatever, stuff like that. So, you can connect with people in ways that are just visual and more, more accessible […]” (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017). This is reflected in her work, which she describes as activist art – opposed to art for art’s sake (Jen Reyes, interview June 01, 2017) –, that deals with topics such as race, racism, decolonization, and gender, often from a personal experience. It could also be described as critical art “[…] that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate [… and] aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (Mouffe, 2007, pp. 4f.). Empowerment also takes a crucial role in initiatives that focus on supporting local artists and nurturing art (making) in the community by offering work and performance spaces as well as equipment, workshops, and fellowship, and by exhibiting local art to enhance visibility and creating spaces of possible gathering and encounter. Organizations like Creativity Detroit, Photo Booth Detroit, and Documenting Detroit seek to empower local artists as well as arouse the general public’s interest in art and art making. Since some of these organizations were

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created because they identified a lack of material as well as immaterial resources, the question arises if they take over where the government does not carry out its duties. This would lead to a larger discussion of, among other questions, whether or not cultural and creative education and support are (or ever were) a government’s duty, or whether or not artistic freedom and independence exist. While this cannot be further addressed now – it would be a whole discussion in its own right –, it is still worth mentioning that, as non-profits, these and other organizations and projects as well as independent artists often depend on external funding. In the case of Detroit, this mostly comes from private, not public resources. Funding, in turn, might be bound to expectations and interests, e.g., to be socially engaged, to serve a certain purpose, or to have a specific outcome (Yezbick, 2014, para. 4ff.) (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018). This could be regarded as organizations and artists taking over where the state (enacted through the local government) had rolled back and now “[…] new forms of institution-building and governmental intervention […]” (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p. 389) have rolled out in light of neoliberalism which “[…] has been able to make a virtue of uneven spatial development and continuous regulatory restructuring, rendering the macro power structure as a whole partially insulated from local challenges” (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p. 401). On the other hand, this could also be regarded as organizations and artists appropriating spaces and actions where the government left off. This is not to say that they necessarily act outside of the neoliberal project but that they might be able to pose alternatives and challenge it from within. One might even go further and regard the efforts as micro-practices of appropriation toward the right to the city. Appropriation here refers to “[…] an act of reorientation. It reorients the city away from its role as an engine of capital accumulation and toward its role as a constitutive element in the web of cooperative social relations among urban inhabitants […]” (Purcell, 2014, p. 149). It, therefore, includes not only the physical occupation, alteration, and reproduction of ‘alreadyproduced’ urban space to make it one’s own (Purcell, 2002, p. 103); it is also the rather invisible mental appropriation of space where viewers/ visitors are called upon to reflect on and interact with space, as discussed before, e.g., in reference to the Heidelberg Project (M. E. Jackson, 2007, p. 35; B. L. Taylor, 2013, p. 52). In this way, “[…] the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real […]” (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 13). These ‘ways of living and models of action’ might be on a micro-scale and ephemeral, but they are still ways to experiment with and intervene in social-spatial settings. Also, since most of the practices, initiatives, and projects discussed in the present study are located outside of the city’s core and ‘traditional’ art spaces, and inside the neighborhoods, outdoors and indoors, “[…] it is in dealing with space and the intersection of art and daily life that Detroit stands out in pushing the global conversation about where art belongs, what function it serves, and to whom it belongs” (S. R. Sharp, 2017a, p. 2017, para. 9). Darroch (2015) points to a similar direction, though adding the aspect of private and public space: “Detroit is different […] because a wide range of art-

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makers and cultural creators live and work outside conventional notions of private or public property and, moreover, are civically engaged in ways specific to Detroit, which resist easy exportation” (pp. 299f.). Socially engaged art is often, as discussed here, made on behalf of or for the community as well as addressed to the community. Still, even in this discussion, I have yet remained vague on the question of who/ what community is, although I have used the term frequently. Herscher (2013), referring to the Heidelberg Project, raises similar questions such as [w]hat if ‘neighborhoods’ and ‘communities’ are not so much contexts that preexist and stand outside attempts to engage them, in art or otherwise, but are inextricably enmeshed with those attempts? […] Who or what speaks on behalf of a neighborhood and community? (p. 74)

While there is no simple answer, and Herscher does not give one either, I refer back to the examples discussed. As Herscher suggests in the quote and bringing in Massey’s concept of place, community and neighborhood are not enclosed or static entities, but dynamic socio-spatial networks. They could be described through administrative borders of neighborhoods or districts, but these are merely imposed on space and are also not necessarily of relevance for people’s daily lives – they are usually not even perceivable if one does not have a map on hand and communities do not stop at administrative borders. I will therefore not give a precise definition of what (a) community is – every attempt would be inaccurate and incomplete, and it is not my province to impose what community means for the individual artist –, but I will offer some suggestions based on my research. Following the discussion of site-specificity in chapter 8.3, community can refer to the whole of Detroit’s residents (or long-time residents, although this too is a contested term in Detroit and there is no rule or agreement on the amount of time that makes someone ‘a Detroiter’). Community can also refer to race and/ or gender, in these cases often relying on shared experiences of discrimination such as sexual harassment or racism. A community might be described through similar occupations such as an artist community or through shared values that bring people together and that they stand up for. And lastly, community can also be described through spatial proximity, for example referring to people who live close by an art environment and encounter it daily. Regardless of whether an artistic practice refers to any of these communities or others, the question that Herscher (2013, p. 74) raises – ‘Who or what speaks on behalf of a neighborhood and community?’ – remains relevant. To speak on behalf of a community implies that an artist has the right and the power to do so. It might be given to them, or they might have taken it and thus speaking on behalf of others does not necessarily mean that community is given a voice and being represented. I do not suggest that any of the artists or projects discussed are wrongfully seizing power or claiming space. However, I point out that even if someone is regarded as part of the ‘targeted community’, they not necessarily have to feel addressed, represented, or integrated. The conflicts surrounding the Heidelberg Project show very clearly the dissents over meanings and identities as well as the issues of whether

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something is regarded as art, what belongs in public space and whose power it is to decide. Artistic practices of focusing on community produce spaces of gathering and encounter as well as of education, support, and empowerment. These thoroughly relational practices aim at the beautification of space, to create spaces of healing, stress relief, and inspiration. This is inseparable from the perception that space needs to be beautified or healed. This perception, in turn, is structured by the conceived space whose ideology of marketization and racialization produced and reproduces uneven spatial development and inequality. This not only leaves a gap for these artistic practices but maybe even a need: Education, artistic support, and beautification of urban space are provided by artists and organizations because they seem not to be available otherwise. They take matters into their own hands, often criticizing the present and/ or past and, at the same time, “[…] open[ing] up thought about and imagination of urban futures in Detroit, beyond those currently on offer” (Herscher, 2013, p. 82) and already testing these futures on a micro-level.

8.6

Story

The practices of documenting and creating stories about Detroit are largely based on and instigated by the numerous narratives that have been told about Detroit for decades: loss, deprivation, devaluation, ruination, inability, absence, and so forth on the one hand, and, starting around the late 2000s, the blank slate, blank canvas, urban prairie, postindustrial frontier and a new haven for creatives where it is “[…] desirable to be associated with the city” (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017) on the other hand (Draus & Roddy, 2016, pp. 67ff.; Gregory, 2012, pp. 218ff.; Kinney, 2016, pp. viiiff.). Almost thirty years ago, Herron (1993) already opened his book with the words: […] Detroit is the most representative city in America. Detroit used to stand for success, and now it stands for failure. In that sense, the city is not just a physical location; it is also a project, a projection of imaginary fears and desires. (p. 9)

All these different, sometimes highly conflicting narratives are publicly told “[…] stories that string together events to construct meaning […]” (Mohatt et al., 2014, p. 6). Or, as Kinney (2016) puts it: “Stories are the way we make sense of the world. But when it comes to Detroit, the content of those stories, and the drama with which they are pronounced, takes on a particular significance” (p. ix). The significance of these stories lies, among others, in “[…] the undercurrent of neoliberalism” (Kinney, 2016, p. x) that runs through them which, […] although seen as a universalizing project, is one that further obscures the ways in which race, gender, and citizenship are implicated in the process of capitalism. […] Ultimately, the racialization of place is not a symptom of capital but is produced by and in relationship to capital. (Kinney, 2016, p. x)

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Similarly, Hackworth (2019, p. 114), as well as Dobraszczyk (2017, p. 150), criticize the media’s depiction of Detroit as othering and Herscher (2012a) ascribes a crucial role to capitalism in the […] framing of Detroit as a shrinking city [where] change is understood as loss, difference is understood as decline, and the unprecedented is understood as the undesirable. These understandings presume the city as a site of development and progress, a site defined by the capitalist economy that drives and profits from urban growth. The contraction of such a site, therefore, provokes corrective urbanisms that are designed to fix, solve or improve a city in decline. (p. 6, emphasis in original)

As mentioned before, some of the basic assumptions that underly these narratives are real, among them the issues of poverty and violence, but they “[…] get in the way of understanding what is actually going on in the life of the city” (Draus & Roddy, 2016, p. 68). On a spatial level, these narratives produce spaces of representation that overlay the physical space with symbolism and imagery (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 39). Now, the artistic practices of documenting and creating stories about Detroit are in part pushed by these narratives to tell ‘what is actually going on in the life of the city’, to tell more nuanced and diverse stories about everyday life or capture what is soon to be lost. They are largely based on the spatial practice and perceived spaces of artists and their communities as well as residents in the city. These (artistic) stories, too, produce spaces of representation that conflict and fight against the spaces of representation produced by the (media) narratives123. It shows, once again, the conflicting histories, meanings, and identities of place as well as the various claims that people make to place. But it also shows that space and place are always in the making, always produced and reproduced. Thus, Massey (2005) suggests to “[…] imagine space as a simultaneity of storiesso-far” (p. 9). These stories-so-far are neither innocent nor universal, but contested: The identities of both places and cultures, then, have to be made. And they may be made in different, even conflicting, ways. And in all this, power will be central: the power to win the contest over how the place should be seen, what meaning to give it; the power, in other words, to construct the dominant imaginative geography, the identities of place and culture. (Massey & Jess, 1995, p. 232)

These questions of power are intertwined with issues of voice and representation. They ask what the dominant stories (identities and meanings) of place are and who tells them, and which and whose stories are subordinated and/ or not told. This is where organizations such as Documenting Detroit and Photo Booth Detroit come in which focus on empowering and supporting people to tell their own stories about Detroit in a more public way. They seek to create stories about the city, which are more localized, embedded in the communities, and based on

123 I differentiate between ‘narratives’ that are created by media and ‘stories’ that are created by artists because in the present context, a narrative is understood as the attempt to tell something conclusive and self-contained while a story is rather a fraction of the whole picture of Detroit (which, however, can never be fully and finally told because space and time never stand still).

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everyday lives to create counter-images (in the true sense of the word) to the narratives of abandonment, deprivation, or even apathy (Karah Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018; Mary Smith, interview March 30, 2018). These counter-images usually show people – in contrast with images of ‘ruin porn’ which are mostly characterized by the absence of humans – aiming at ultimately changing the narrative of Detroit and adjust it to people’s everyday lives, experiences, and perceptions of the city. Dobraszczyk (2017), too, in referring to the Heidelberg Project, the MBAD African Bead Museum, and other artworks states that […] the art that is being produced in Detroit is […] grounded in praxis rather than simply image-making. For practices cannot help but be centred on processes rather than final products, engaging those processes in the realities of the lived rather than emptied out spaces of Detroit. (p. 160, emphasis in original)

The fellows of Documenting Detroit portrait several of these lived realities. They engage with topics such as race, religion, activism, education, pollution, mental health, growing up, growing old, fun, play, nightlife, and many others – every list would probably be incomplete since the topics are as diverse, nuanced, and multifaceted as Detroit is. Detroit, then, cannot be sealed “[…] up into one neat and tidy ‘envelope of space-time’ […]” (Massey, 1995a, p. 191). It is rather the multiplicity of stories, or, in Massey’s words (1995a), the “[…] conjunction of many histories and many spaces” (p. 191) that comes together in this place called Detroit. Similarly, Carl documents the everyday lives and people in the Parkhurst neighborhood, re/presenting them the way he perceives them. Put simply, it seems that a lot of these practices of documenting and creating stories are concerned with nothing less and nothing more than the ordinariness of life in Detroit. But this would trivialize and disguise the social production of space in everyday life. Every one of the ‘everyday people’ is constantly producing and reproducing space, contributing to the uniqueness of place. In contradistinction to exceptionalism and othering, Detroit’s uniqueness is “[…] the articulation of the general with the local (the particular) […]” (Massey, 1984, p. 9) and “[…] should not be seen as a deviation from the expected; nor should uniqueness be seen as a problem. ‘General processes’ never work themselves out in pure form” (Massey, 1984, p. 9, emphasis in original). The practices of documenting and creating stories then emphasize and show the specific circumstances and histories as well as the particularities of Detroit, but they do not claim wholeness or the only truth. It is rather a re/presentation of how the ‘general processes’ or global and urban developments – from economic developments such as de- and post-industrialization and neoliberalism to societal challenges such as group-focused enmity – work themselves out in Detroit. Scott’s photo series on the disappearing neighborhood of Delray is another example of how a general process (the decision for faster international traffic and trade between Canada and the US) articulates in the local (the neighborhood Delray which has to make way for it). These photographs, like many others, are snapshots in and of space-time and are merely able to tell partial stories. At various occasions in the present study, I have addressed that part of artistic practices is that they experiment with and imagine different urban realities than

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the present, be it through the theoretical lenses of ‘real utopias’ (Carducci, 2012; Wright, 2010), ‘art of the commons’ (Carducci, 2012, 2014a), ‘the right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996) or ‘the unreal estate’ (Herscher, 2012a). Seen in this way, many of them tell stories that are different from the narratives that solely focus on abandonment, deprivation, loss, or blankness. That is not to say that they ignore the city’s history or present. Quite the contrary, the material, social, economic, political, and historical remains and remnants inform the practices, but the artists also appropriate these remains to create and communicate their own stories. Herscher (2013) describes this as ‘bifurcation’ and although he refers to the Heidelberg Project in particular, the underlying thoughts are applicable more broadly: “This bifurcated recognition of the author of the Heidelberg Project as both urban threat and urban supporter reflected a similar bifurcation in perception of the project as both sign of urban decline, as many neighborhood residents saw it, and potential instrument of urban recovery, as some municipal institutions saw it. These ambivalent responses to the Heidelberg Project express the challenge it posed to imagine what art and urban space could look like in Detroit”. (pp. 72f.)

These ambivalences, bifurcations, and ambiguities are reflected in several practices: be it as the cycles of construction, destruction, and transformation in Scott’s works, as the many metaphors in the installations of Dabls and Tyree Guyton where, especially concerning the former, art is used as a conveyer of information, as the activist and educational work that Jen does or as the dialogues that Mirka has with space. They do not tell singular or universal stories that are free of conflict but rather emphasize multiplicity and allow dissent to exist.

9

Space, artistic practice, and Detroit 9.1

Space, artistic practice, and Detroit

Based on the assumption that artistic practices and spatial practices are entwined in a dialectic relation, this study poses the questions of to what extent artistic practices are producing spaces in Detroit and to what extent spaces are producing artistic practices in Detroit. What seems to be two rather simple questions, has demonstrated to unravel and show manifold relations of spaces and artistic practices in Detroit. Each space is “[…] an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 86), a “[…] product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages” (Massey, 1994, p. 156) and thus, “[n]o space disappears in the course of growth and development […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 86). It is for this reason that in chapters 6 and especially 8.1 the histories of Detroit were discussed in order to understand the conditions of the production of space by uncovering layers, conflicts, and ideologies of space. Within this setting, five specific artistic practices were identified from the collected data: the practices of seeking, finding, and recycling material, working site-specific, making and/ or displaying art outside, focusing on community, and documenting and creating stories about Detroit. As discussed above, these five practices produce spaces and are produced by spaces. What they all have in common is that they are grounded in Detroit, its spaces and histories in the sense that they are based on them: the material, as well as immaterial features of the city, are the subjects as well as the substance for and in artistic practices. In the following, I will now take a final look at space and artistic practices in Detroit. After a brief summary of the respective practices, I will consider the practices taken together regarding their overarching significance in/ for Detroit. De- and post-industrial urban developments, neoliberal strategies including the rollback of the local government, racialization, and marketization of space as well as population loss produced and reproduced uneven spatial development and inequality in Detroit. One ‘product’ of these developments is the sheer abundance of materials and objects, ruins, and lots which play a major role in materialbased practices of seeking, finding, and recycling material. These practices repurpose and transform what might be regarded as waste and valueless to create artworks. In this way, they produce spaces that run counter to dominant

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representations of space (e.g., where a ruin is regarded as blight only) and that produce diverse values and meanings. This also applies to practices that produce and reproduce spaces that are neither public nor private but rather in between this common binary that has become increasingly blurry due to the amount of abandoned land and property. This indistinction can foster the appropriation of space where it is occupied and made use of according to the artist’s ideas and practices but without necessarily having official (legal) authority to do so; and thus, further blurs the demarcation line between public and private, producing spaces of multiple meanings and identities, but also of conflict. Practices that seek to beautify or heal spaces or to provide stress relief and inspiration are based on the assumption and perception that spaces – and thus society – have a need to be healed or beautified, de-stressed, or inspired. This could be understood as a direct reaction to the conceived space’s ideology of marketization and racialization that run through Detroit’s, but also the nation’s history and present. The artistic practices that focus on community then produce spaces of gathering and encounter as well as of education, support, and empowerment – they could be described as literally ‘social spaces’. These spaces, however, do not replace existing spaces but are rather adding (new) spatial layers. Following this perspective further, limitations of these practices also become clear: Despite the best efforts to educate, empower, or beautify a community and space (and even if these practices are successful in their endeavors, which is not to be assessed here), they are not able to reverse the mistakes of the past (or erase the spatial layers) and they are most probably not able to achieve a systemic change towards a more inclusive, sustainable, and just city by themselves. But of course, this is far from stating that they are ineffective or futile, especially regarding the transformative processes of (social) space, as I will return to at the end of this chapter. What runs through many of the practices but becomes most explicit and apparent in the practices of documenting and creating stories about Detroit is the emphasis on the diverse histories and identities as well as particularities of Detroit. In contrast to the many narratives about Detroit which are often told by media or non-residents, the stories that these practices tell are created by local artists and are often based on their own or their community’s everyday experiences. They do not make claims of telling complete stories or the only truth. Rather, they are adding hi/stories and meanings to space by telling them publicly. The uniqueness of place (of Detroit) then produces these practices and these practices re/produce the uniqueness of place by emphasizing the articulation of the general in the local (in Detroit). Now, concerning ‘the general’, the question arises whether these five artistic practices might also follow more general patterns that could be found in other places, too. This also leads back to the introduction where Herron (2007) is quoted stating that “[…] Detroit is no exceptional place; on the contrary, it is the most representatively American place on the planet” (p. 669). Since Detroit was not compared to other places in this study, I can only make assumptions which, however, take into account the specificity of Detroit (place)

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on the one hand and the specificity of the artistic practices on the other. Regarding the former, I addressed this in depth in chapter 8.3 through the lens of ‘site’, where Detroit (the place, the local) can be described as the unique articulation of its accumulated histories, power struggles, social, political, and economic relations at a particular point in time. The same general developments or issues never play themselves out in the same way at different places because they are always met with a specific set of local circumstances: Social, political, historical, and economic relations “[…] together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise” (Massey, 1994, p. 156). This explains why, even though other cities in the US, especially in the Rust Belt region, have been affected by similar processes of deindustrialization and population loss, none of them has experienced it the same. Detroit, then, is not exceptional, but it is unique in the sense that Massey (1994, p. 156) suggests. And part of this uniqueness is that it offers specific resources for the specific artistic practices discussed here, such as ruins, vacant lots and buildings, open land, discarded objects, a specific history, a lack of formal or governmental control that created pockets of almost outlawed spaces, diverse neighborhoods and communities, and so on. Their particular outcomes, trajectories, and interrelations are then what make these unique to Detroit. So, put simply, the artistic practices that engage with Detroit’s specificities or uniqueness are, in turn, unique to Detroit. This, however, does not mean that they are exclusive to Detroit and that similar practices cannot be found in other places. It just implies that the outcome would be different. Site-specific, public, or socially engaged art practices, for example, are rather general themes within the arts and exist in a diverse number of settings. Scott, for example, has created site-specific installations beyond Detroit in cities such as Wolfsburg, Germany, and Indianapolis, IN, and in the woods of Rabun County, Georgia (see Hocking, n.d.-b). It should be noted here, too, that clearly, Detroit is not the only re/source that drives, informs, and shapes someone’s artistic practice: Lived experiences and decisive turning points, personal backgrounds and (social) positionings, among many others, can all influence the individual and contribute to their artistic practice. So, returning to the question raised above, I can conclude that while the five practices identified in the gathered data can most likely be found in a similar or related way at other places, too, – especially when they follow more general patterns such as being socially engaged or specific to a site – in their respective specificities, they are still unique to Detroit. This, in turn, demonstrates again the importance of field-based research and the methods chosen for the present study since they allowed to engage with Detroit (as the ‘field’ and as a place) in-depth and in situ. In Detroit, where abandoned buildings, ruins, and vacant lots over decades have become part of the everyday life and the perceived space of many, where they could even be described as the backside, the by-products of the conceived space’s ideologies, they are no longer irritating the eye of the passer-by as they might in other places. But art might disrupt this normalcy when it is, at least partially, working against the dominant experience of the conceived space and emphasizing representational space. In this conflicting relation, differential spaces

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are produced that accentuate differences and heterogeneity, and that are often characterized rather by use values than exchange values. It is then not only the ‘class struggle’ as Lefebvre (1991b) suggested that is able “[…] to generate differences which are not intrinsic to economic growth qua strategy, ‘logic’ or ‘system’ […]” (p. 55, emphasis in original), but also artistic practices that, at least to some extent, are insurgent; even if just temporary. Although they might not be intentionally insurgent or even subversive, many of them are at least to the extent that they produce a ‘different’ space, the differential space. Differential space is the space of the urban society (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 238) where urban is defined as “[..] a mental and social form, that of simultaneity, of gathering, of convergence, of encounter (or rather, encounters). […] It is a difference, or rather, an ensemble of differences” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 131, emphasis in original). The urban, which is “[…] based on use value” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 131), is, therefore, not only an attack on a homogenous and hierarchical production of space (Vogelpohl, 2011, p. 236), but it is also “[…] what we might call a possible world, a society yet to come” (Purcell, 2014, p. 151). But only because it is a possible world or even a utopian vision does not mean that it is completely absent from today’s society. As discussed above, the artistic practices, at least in some part, contribute to the “[…] millions of everyday acts of resistance and creation” (Purcell, 2014, p. 151) that are necessary for the urban revolution. And even if the urban revolution that Lefebvre proposes is never (fully) achieved, the practices that appropriate and claim, produce, re-create, and change spaces, are efforts to make them, among others, more public, more social, more usable instead of exchangeable, more accessible, more representative, or simply more differential. They are small, sometimes ephemeral steps towards and, at the same time, enactments of the urban society.

10 Conclusion, or: space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far Conclusion, or: space as a simultaneity of stories so far

The basic premise of this study is that artistic practices and urban space in Detroit exist in a dialectic relationship where one produces, depends on, and reacts to the other. In order to analyze these mutual dependencies and influences, I looked at artistic practices to explore productions, transformations, and reinterpretations of space and vice versa since spatial practice and artistic practice are regarded here as intertwined (Hawkins, 2017, p. xvii; Paglen, 2014, p. 31). I therefore followed the guiding questions: To what extent are artistic practices producing spaces in Detroit and to what extent are spaces producing artistic practices in Detroit? Since in this study, I was only able to address a part of this larger research topic, I focused on artists who engage with Detroit in terms of its material, social, political, and/ or symbolic layers of urban space within their artistic practices124. By doing this, I was able to identify five artistic practices that produce and are produced by space. Subsequently, I have shown that each of these practices refers to a specific aspect of space and its production. To be able to discuss the practices, though, two strands of theoretical approaches – to art and to space and place – needed to be laid out. Beginning with approaches that focus on the social as well as spatial aspect of artistry and artworks, I emphasized three main topics. First, I foregrounded approaches to socially engaged art practices that have in common that they focus on social relations and interactions which can take material as well as immaterial forms. Two perspectives within this realm are of particular importance to this study: on the one hand Bishop’s (2012, pp. 26ff.) understanding, based on Rancière (2010), that socially engaged art can be political, social, and aesthetic at the same time as well as simultaneously heteronomous and autonomous. On the other hand, it is

124 However, it is necessary to add that these artists also create works that are rather detached from Detroit and do not have these strong ties to the city as the ones discussed here. This is not to say that they are ‘spaceless’ practices because I don’t think any practice could. It is rather that they do not engage with the place Detroit in that work. And while also there are many more artists in Detroit who do not engage with the city in their artistic practices, there are many more that do, but who were not included in this study because I was not aware of them, I was not able to reach them, or the timing was not right.

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Mouffe’s (2007) view on the relationship of art and politics which she differentiates into the three dimensions political art, critical art, and activist art of which the latter two describe practices that have the capability to intervene in the existing hegemony. Second, I turned my focus towards public space and emphasized different forms of public art. I followed Kwon’s (2002, p. 60) categorization of ‘art in public places’, ‘art as public spaces’, and ‘art in the public interest’, which run along a spectrum of varying degrees of accessibility, publicness, as well as sitespecificity – which are all reflected in the practices and the discussion in chapters 7 and 8. And third, I addressed the rather economic and pro-growth perspective of culture-led urban regeneration and the ‘new urban imperative’ (Peck, 2005, p. 740) of the creative city and creative class. While these perspectives seem to have only little contact with the artistic practices identified in this study, they still describe strategies that the City of Detroit adopted such as the City Walls program and the graffiti task force. These strategies not only police public space, but regard art as means to beautify space, forcing it to be rather submissive in order to be preserved, and, at least partially, contrast the practices and artworks discussed in this study. Having established these perspectives, I turned towards space and place which I defined as relational social constructs, based on the approaches of Henri Lefebvre (1991b, 1996) and Doreen Massey (1984, 1994, 1995a). Two aspects of Lefebvre’s spatial theory have proven to be particularly significant for this study: the urban and the production of space. The urban is defined as a ‘mental and social form’ that allows gathering, simultaneity, and heterogeneity (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 131). Since the urban is merely a possible future, something programmatic, it can only be achieved by overcoming a homogenous, hierarchical, and capitalist production of space and claiming the right to urban life, which allows centrality, difference, participation, and appropriation (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 158; Vogelpohl, 2011, pp. 236f.). Hence, the space of the urban is the differential space. The production of space, in turn, has at its core that space does not just exist, but is socially produced in the triad of spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space), and representational space (lived space). Only together, the three formants are able to produce space. However, they influence and restrict each other, and one can dominate over the other. Adding Massey’s approach to place enabled to not only focus on the process of the production of space and place but also on analysis of the meanings, identities, and histories of place. When places are defined as dynamic and socially produced, so are their characteristics. Therefore, meanings, identities and histories never just ‘exist’ or are ‘finally produced’. Rather, they are contested, negotiated, constantly made and remade (Massey & Jess, 1995, pp. 231f.). All this contributes to the uniqueness or specificity of place. The specificity of place, in turn, “[…] is the articulation of the general with the local […]” (Massey, 1984, p. 9). Therefore, Massey emphasizes that it is necessary to not only analyze the specific (local) articulation, but also the general (global) process behind it because it has different outcomes in different places (Massey, 1994, p. 156).

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To be able to describe, understand, and analyze the artistic practices Detroit’s history as well as recent urban developments were laid out in chapter 6 and discussed in regard to their representations of space in chapter 8.1. This is necessary because “[n]o space disappears in the course of growth and development […]” (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 86) and each space is a “[…] product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages” (Massey, 1994, p. 156). Therefore, these representations of space, to different degrees, continue to have an effect to this day. Focusing on the historical, economic, social, and political circumstances, I was able to show that ideologies such as the car-oriented city or urban renewal efforts as well as the racialization and marketization of space were not only material interventions in the urban fabric, but also displaced residents and supported segregation. While these spatial layers are not only in some part still visible e.g., in the form of vacant houses and lots, they also continue to contribute to uneven spatial development and inequality. From this perspective, Detroit almost seems to be a palimpsest, where the urban space is continuously written, erased, and rewritten but the traces of the past still remain visible. It is not surprising, then, that many of the artistic practices discussed engage with these traces, too. The question almost arises whether the practices engage with space in Detroit or rather with the city’s decline. I would argue, however, that this is not an either-or-situation: The decline (of the economy, the real estate market, the population, etc.) is inextricable from space and, therefore, if art engages with space in Detroit, it ultimately engages with the social, political, economic, and material implications and interrelations of decline. This is not to say that it is always obvious, direct, or planned. It can also be subtle or by happenstance, as I have shown in the previous chapters, such as Dabls’ discovery of iron and rocks while cleaning vacant lots or Mirka’s walks and bike rides that turned from exploring the city into collecting objects for her artworks. When viewed as a whole, the practices of seeking, finding, and recycling material, working site-specific, making and/ or displaying art outside, focusing on community, as well as documenting and creating stories about Detroit have the ability to evoke dissensus in the way that they unveil “[…] what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate” (Mouffe, 2007, p. 4). The practices question “[…] dominant representations of space as purely functional and commodified” (Zieleniec, 2016, p. 10), creating spaces, through the aspects of materiality, site, public, social, and story, that tend more towards differential than abstract spaces. As I have pointed out, especially since the bankruptcy, the City as well as private investors are increasingly “[…] reasserting control over the urban space” (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018). While this has some positive effects such as the re-implementation of streetlights or regular garbage collection, it might also reinforce the commodification of space for sheer economic interests. Besides the already addressed topic of gentrification, this might also “[…] foreclose certain alternatives to a very, kind of mainstream idea of space and how we interact with it” (Vince Carducci, interview March 20, 2018). I can only presume that this might be the reason why most of the artworks and practices that I

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discussed are in the neighborhoods and not in redeveloped downtown areas. Sharp (2017a) addresses this topic, too, concluding that [t]hough many here [in Detroit] struggle to remain free – especially as the redevelopment engine encroaches upon and reclaims spaces that have been freely maintained by individuals, sometimes for decades – the spaces held by artists can still represent sovereign territory. Free space is an absolute necessity for art to provide meaningful pushback to society, as well as progress. (para. 11)

The quote highlights that it is and will be a balancing act between necessary urban improvements – from meeting human rights such as access to adequate food and clean water, improvements in Detroit’s schools, crime prevention, equality, etc. – and still allowing space that is and remains free. As this study has shown, however, artists might not only need spaces that are free, but are also able to produce spaces that are free, if free is understood as allowing dissensus, conflicts, differences, and heterogeneity.

10.1 Reflection “Don’t worry, you’re not gonna die” (Scott Hocking, ride-along June 07, 2017).

Before I close this chapter with an outlook, I will reflect on this study by focusing on the research design and the epistemological interest, what they enabled to be accomplished as well as what fell short. For this empirically based study with a rather exploratory approach, the decision to combine the spatial theories of Massey and Lefebvre proved to be very effective regarding the research question. It allowed analysis of the characteristics of place (identities, meanings, histories, etc.) and the production of space (including the relations producing it), as well as scrutinizing how power, control, and conflicts over space and place are negotiated and reflected in them. Combined with the theoretical approaches to art, I thus built a theoretical framework which I used in accordance with the empirical findings. This made possible analysis and discussion of the diverse aspects of the space-practice-relationship as well as their respective particularities. In retrospect, this seems to do justice to the openness that this study guided. At the same time, however, the theoretical approaches were challenging since they, especially Lefebvre’s spatial theory, are complex theoretical systems that lack suggestions for operationalization and often remain rather vague. While this was rather unproblematic for the research design of this study, it also revealed a specific limitation of the two spatial theories which could be described as a lack of guidance or instruction for in-depth and detailed research. In hindsight, and this is an outlook in as much as it is a reflection, it might had been insightful to add another layer of theoretical approaches such as practice theory to further deconstruct the artistic practices regarding the “[…] doings and sayings” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 89) that form them. However, this would also have been the entry to a whole new rabbit hole to go down with its own set of theory discussions. Concerning the spatial theories, in some instances, it was

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already difficult to decipher how deep I must dig into the theories to be able to build the adequate theoretical framework. Though I feel like I managed to navigate through this sea of theories and built a firm framework, it also meant bidding farewell to other approaches that might have also been useful for this study – I am thinking in particular of Lefebvre’s works on everyday life (1991a, 2002, 2008), including Rhythmanalysis (2004). I feel similarly about a lot of data gathered during the research trips, which did not find their way into this study directly. In part, this might be the downside of the ethnographic approach, which was shaped by openness and exploration and thus gathered material that later proved to be rather unsuitable. At the same time, however, it needs to be acknowledged that a lot of these data are still inscribed in this research, although they might have become virtually invisible. This, amongst other reasons that were discussed throughout this study, also speaks for doing field-based research within the scope of this study. The longer trips to Detroit in particular advanced the research. They offered deep insights as well as thought-provoking impulses not least because of encounters and confrontations with people, events, developments, and more, that could only happen on site and were not always planned. Another challenge that the ethnographic approach issued is the wordiness of this study as well as the linear structure of the text. While this is not limited to ethnographic or qualitative research and applies to a lot of research within and beyond geography and urban studies, it might be particularly challenging to translate qualitative data into something else than words. While I used mapping throughout the coding process (e.g., to visualize connections between codes), it remained a tool rather than a means of visualizing data. Further, visualizations of data (including the processes of gathering, analyzing, and discussing) might have helped to break the linear structure of the text. Besides restricted time availability, this did not happen because of my limited expertise in visualization especially concerning the translation of qualitative data into visual data as well as my own insecurity and lack of knowledge of what kind of visualization might be appropriate for a scientific work like this one. Hawkins (2019, p. 970) comes to a similar conclusion stating that “[d]espite widespread support for the creative turn within geography, acceptance, or even understanding, especially of alternative outputs, is very varied and by no means universal”. Further, and this leads back to the point discussed before, it also implies that this research could have easily been continued and extended. In addition to more/ other theoretical or methodical approaches, there are always more artists to interview and ride along, and more perspectives, thoughts, and practices to learn about. I would have liked to interview more Black women and Women of Color, for example, to learn more about the intersection of race and gender in relation to space and artistic practice. I am not sure if this would necessarily have meant more/ other results as I feel content that this study used its existing capacities to the best of its (and my) abilities (and, at the end I was reliant on who agreed to be interviewed), but it still is a gap I identified in my data. Another thing that needs to be pointed out because it is missing in this study, is the perceptions, assessments and responses of/ to art by residents and visitors. Where possible, I

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addressed this through the statements of the artists or through what I found in the literature. For the purpose of this study, these might be sufficient. But as an addition, especially to learn more about the role and meaning of (public) art in everyday life, this in an interesting topic; and one that I regard as methodical challenging but also intriguing. This already leads me to the outlook where I will now address more topics and questions that emerged in this study and which offer interesting starting points for other research.

10.2 Outlook “And I think that ... okay I keep on saying I'm through, but I keep on talking ...” (Marsha Music, interview June 20, 2017).

While this study offers several different connecting points for further research, I will briefly highlight three topics that I regard as interesting but also important research fields concerning Detroit and beyond. First, as described before, gentrification is a reoccurring topic at events in Detroit, in my interviews, as well as in a few books, articles, and essays (see for example Carducci, 2015; Doucet, 2020; Harte, 2014; Kreichauf, 2017; Moskowitz, 2017; Music, 2015). However, the discussions often still lack in-depth and longterm research on gentrification in Detroit. I regard this as a crucial topic because patterns of gentrification in Detroit seem to run along the lines of class as well as race, leading e.g., to the displacement of poor Black senior residents while targeting a younger, Whiter population in the downtown and midtown area (Kreichauf, 2017, pp. 88ff.). Further, this can reinforce uneven spatial development in a city where the core, unlike the neighborhoods, has been transforming rapidly in the past decade which Moskowitz (2015) framed as “[t]he two Detroits: a city both collapsing and gentrifying at the same time”. So, while there is gentrification on the one hand, there is still a high number of vacant buildings and lots on the other which could offer possibilities of development without displacement. This, however, poses the overall question how a more inclusive development that targets all residents could be fulfilled. Inevitably, this also leads to a more general discussion on the role and capacities of urban planning as well as comprehensive regional planning in Detroit but especially beyond. The lack of comprehensive regional planning and of “[…] cooperation among the vast number of local governments in South-East Michigan […]” (Galster, 2017, p. 49) continues to create competition between the city and the suburbs as well as between suburbs (Farley, 2017, p. 62). This is a particular important point for Detroit’s fiscal situation because taxes are imposed as well as paid to local governments. The background for this is [t]he century-old Michigan Home Rule Law [that] created a situation in which cities that are growing—both economically and in population—are likely to have a tax base sufficient to pay the costs of local governments. However, Michigan cities that have been losing

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Conclusion, or: space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far population and employment […] have seen their tax base plummet while their obligations to provide services declined more modestly. (Farley, 2017, p. 63)

So, a systemic change towards governmental cooperation as well as revenue sharing and statewide taxes might support declining (economically and in population) entities (cities, townships, villages) in the future (Farley, 2017, pp. 61ff.; Galster, 2017, pp. 48ff.). This wider subject area also includes the topic of cultural or psychological gentrification which describes the phenomenon of “[…] particular groups not feeling welcome to visit and live in Downtown anymore” (Kreichauf, 2017, p. 89). The feeling of not being welcome or not feeling addressed by redevelopment is often based on a change of shops, restaurants, coffee shops, events, urban design and/ or demographics. This, too, needs more research to uncover how these feelings are prompted and what their underlying causes are, so that it could be addressed in planning and redevelopment processes. It also calls for more/ different ways of participation and collaboration in urban planning, which not only include current residents but also acknowledge existing practices of self-organized land stewardship such as community gardens or maintaining vacant lots (see for example Campbell et al., 2020, pp. 68ff.; Kinder, 2016). With this, I concur with Jane Jacob’s (1961/1992) statement that “[c]ities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” (p. 238). Second, closely connected to the matter of urban change is the intersection of space and trauma in Detroit. Draus et al. (2019) describe Detroit as a “[…] site of a decades-long disaster that has resulted in the traumatization of resident populations, the severing of local social networks, the devastation of neighborhood economies, and the gradual physical destruction of much of the built environment […]” (p. 154). Not only “[…] residential structures and land cover patterns […]” (p. 153) were lost, but the “[…] decades of segregation, outmigration, institutional neglect and violence exposure produce high levels of post-traumatic stress that fuel persistent health disparities” (pp. 153f.). Traumatization, therefore, is here understood as shared by a group of people as well as embedded in space (Draus et al., 2019, p. 160). As shown in chapters 7 and 8, these traumatizing experiences can also be processed by and transformed into art. However, this still leaves room for a deeper engagement, in particular concerning questions of memory and commemoration within and beyond art. Especially if trauma is regarded as shared or collective, the questions rise how trauma can be coped with collectively as well as what a shared or public memory could look like. These topics not only open room for research in geography and urban studies but could also be of interest to interdisciplinary researchers including sociologists, urban planners, and ecological psychologists. And finally, while this study intentionally focuses on different media of visual art, I could have easily focused on photography alone judging by the amount of photography that has been going on in Detroit for decades. In my interview with Karah from Documenting Detroit she said that she “[…] would love for someone to like do an anthropological study on all of the work we've got so far” (Karah

Outlook

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Shaffer, interview March 26, 2018). While this got me thinking, I would add that also a geographical study on their work as well as other photography could be of interest to uncover different approaches to space as well as how the representation of Detroit in photography might (or might not) have changed over the decades and what effects this might have (on residents, on narratives, on politics, etc.). This is based on the assumption that creating as well as viewing photography is an embodied, situated practice “[…] in which particular visualities structure certain kinds of geographical knowledges, knowledges—and thus visualities—that are always saturated with power relations” (Rose, 2003, p. 213). This too, after all, applies to all the photographs shown within this study. While these are just three of many topics and thoughts that came up throughout the course of this research and could not be explored further, they are those that stuck with me the most. I hope that the already existing debates on these topics will be continued in the future and contribute to more and deeper knowledges of Detroit in particular and of urban space, its dynamics and developments in general.

Fig. 30: One of many entries to and exits from the Packard Plant (photo by author, April 2019)

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Taylor, K.-Y. (2019). Race for profit: How banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership. University of North Carolina Press. The Heidelberg Project. (n.d.-a). Frequently Asked Questions. The Heidelberg Project. Retrieved May 8, 2020, from https://www.heidelberg.org/faq The Heidelberg Project. (n.d.-b). History. The Heidelberg Project. Retrieved May 8, 2020, from https://www.heidelberg.org/history The Heidelberg Project. (n.d.-c). Mission + Vision. The Heidelberg Project. Retrieved May 8, 2020, from https://www.heidelberg.org/mission-vision The Heidelberg Project. (n.d.-d). Timeline. The Heidelberg Project. Retrieved May 8, 2020, from https://www.heidelberg.org/timeline The Heidelberg Project. (2018). Elements of the Canvas. https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/ 5898d0ecf7e0ab698b48c696/t/5b2d374b2b6a2872d6ce0ba4/1529689940010/2018+Element s+of+the+Canvas+for+HP+Educator+Kit.pdf The Heidelberg Project. (2020, April 10). [Instagram Post]. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzddKnlMWS/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link The Kresge Foundation & Millier Dickinson Blais. (2012). Creative Vitality in Detroit. The Detroit Cultural Mapping Project. https://kresge.org/sites/default/files/Creative-Vitality-inDetroit-2012-revised071713.pdf The Scarab Club. (n.d.). About Us. The Scarab Club. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://scarabclub.org/about-us/ Thiel, J. (2017). Creative cities and the reflexivity of the urban creative economy. European Urban and Regional Studies, 24(1), 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776415595105 Thompson, H. A. (2004). Whose Detroit? Politics, labor, and race in a modern American city. Cornell University Press. Tißberger, M. (2017). Critical Whiteness. Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-172237 Tolf, L. (2014). Can the Arts Save Detroit? Huffington Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/can-the-arts-save-detroit_b_5311138 Trendafilova, S., Waller, S. N., Daniell, R. B., & McClendon, J. (2012). “Motor City” rebound? Sport as a catalyst to reviving downtown Detroit: A case study. City, Culture and Society, 3(3), 181–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2012.09.001 UNESCO Creative Cities Network. (n.d.). Mission Statement. Retrieved November 28, 2019, from https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/sites/creative-cities/files/Mission_Statement_UN ESCO_Creative_Cities_Network_1.pdf United States Census Bureau. (2018a). American Community Survey 1-year estimates. Census Reporter Profile Page for Detroit, MI. https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US2622000detroit-mi/ United States Census Bureau. (2018b). Commuting characteristics by sex. United States Census Bureau. https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=S08&d=ACS%201-Year%20Estimates%20 Subject%20Tables&g=1600000US2622000&table=S0801&tid=ACSST1Y2018.S0801&lastD isplayedRow=20&hidePreview=true United States Census Bureau. (2019, September 16). Glossary. United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/about/glossary.html#par_textimage _4 United States Courts. (n.d.). Chapter 9—Bankruptcy Basics. United States Courts. Retrieved December 11, 2019, from https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptcybasics/chapter-9-bankruptcy-basics van den Berg, K. (2019). Socially Engaged Art and Fall of the Spectator since Joseph Beuys and the Situationists. In K. van den Berg, C. M. Jordan, & P. Kleinmichel (Eds.), The art of direct action: Social sculpture and beyond (pp. 1–40). Sternberg Press. van den Berg, K., Jordan, C. M., & Kleinmichel, P. (Eds.). (2019). The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond. Sternberg Press.

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van den Berg, K., & Pasero, U. (Eds.). (2013a). Art production beyond the art market? Sternberg Press. van den Berg, K., & Pasero, U. (2013b). Introduction. In K. van den Berg & U. Pasero (Eds.), Art production beyond the art market? (pp. vii–xv). Sternberg Press. VanZandt, D. (2019a). About us. Detroit Cultural. https://detroitcultural.com/about-us/ VanZandt, D. (2019b). I Don’t Know What the Fuck That Is But That’s a Lot of Work: In Conversation with Scott Hocking. Detroit Cultural, 2. https://detroitcultural.com/2019/05/01/ in-conversation-with-scott-hocking/ VanZandt, D. (2019c). Identity, Material, and Culture: In Conversation with Olayami Dabls. Detroit Cultural, 3. https://detroitcultural.com/2019/10/25/identity-material-and-culture-inconversation-with-olayami-dabls/ VanZandt, D. (2019d). The Heidelberg Project & the politics of site-specificity: In conversation with Rachel Adams. Detroit Cultural, 1. https://detroitcultural.com/2019/03/01/the-heidelberg-project-the-politics-of-site-specificity-in-conversation-with-rachel-adams-2/ Vergara, C. J. (1995). The New American Ghetto. Rutgers University Press. Vergara, C. J. (1999). American Ruins. Monacelli Press. Vergara, C. J. (2016). Detroit is no dry bones: The eternal city of the industrial age. University of Michigan Press. Verhoeven, P. (1987). RoboCop. Orion Pictures. Vine, T., Clark, J., Richards, S., & Weir, D. (2018). Introduction. In T. Vine, J. Clark, S. Richards, & D. Weir (Eds.), Ethnographic Research and Analysis (pp. 1–12). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58555-4 Vogelpohl, A. (2011). Städte und die beginnende Urbanisierung. Henri Lefebvre in der aktuellen Stadtforschung. Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 69(4), 233–243. https://doi.org/10.10 07/s13147-011-0105-3 Vogelpohl, A. (2018). Henri Lefebvres „Recht auf Stadt“ feministisch denken. Sub\urban, 6(2/3), 149–158. Vojnovic, I., & Darden, J. T. (2013). Class/racial conflict, intolerance, and distortions in urban form: Lessons for sustainability from the Detroit region. Ecological Economics, 96, 88–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.10.007 Walford, G. (2009). The practice of writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Ethnography and Education, 4(2), 117–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457820902972713 Walters, W. S. (2001). Turning the Neighborhood inside out: Imagining a New Detroit in Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project. The Drama Review, 45(4), 64–93. Wasacz, W. (2006, August 15). Unofficial Art. Model D. https://www.modeldmedia.com/features/folk57.aspx Watson, A., & Till, K. E. (2010). Ethnography and Participant Observation. In D. DeLyser (Ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography (pp. 121–137). SAGE. Weinert, P. (2014). Geisterstädte, Detroit – Wiederbelebung einer toten Stadt. HR, ARTE. Welz, G. (1991). Street Life: Alltag in einem New Yorker Slum. Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie der Universität Frankfurt. Wetherell, S. (2017). Richard Florida Is Sorry. Jacobin. https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richard-florida Willett, E., & Dunlavey, B. (2019). Building Opportunity: Mapping Gentrification and Investment across Opportunity Zones. RCLCO. https://www.rclco.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/ 02/Advisory-Opportunity-Zones-Gentrification-Investment.pdf Wilson, C. (n.d.-a). About. Carlwilsonart. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.carlwilsonart.com/about Wilson, C. (n.d.-b). Father John’s Church... Retrieved August 26, 2020, from https://www.carlwilsonart.com/print?lightbox=image13jj Wilson, C. (n.d.-c). John R Girls. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.carlwilsonart.com/print?lightbox=image3mu

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List of figures 10.4 List of figures

Fig. 1: Triad of the production of space (own figure based on Lefebvre (1991b, pp. 33ff.)) ........ 44 Fig. 2: Extract from photo-essay (photo and text by author)............................................................ 69 Fig. 3: Changes of Black and total population in Detroit and its suburbs since 1900 (own figure based on Galster (2017, p. 45)) ..................................................................................................... 97 Fig. 4: Housing vacancy rate in Detroit in 2010 (Data Driven Detroit, 2012) ............................... 98 Fig. 5: Abandoned shop, East Side (photo by author, September 2016) ......................................... 99 Fig. 6: Overgrown lot, East Side (photo by author, May 2017) ........................................................ 99 Fig. 7: Abandoned factory, East Side (photo by author, April 2017) ............................................... 99 Fig. 8: Ruin of a house, East Side (photo by author, April 2017) ..................................................... 99 Fig. 9: Clocks at the Heidelberg Project (photo by author, March 2018) ..................................... 117 Fig. 10: Dots on Heidelberg Street (photo by author, May 2017) .................................................. 117 Fig. 11: Arranged objects on a lot on Heidelberg Street, part of the Heidelberg Project (photo by author, September 2016) ............................................................................................................. 118 Fig. 12: Installations in the sculpture garden, part of the MBAD African Bead Museum (photo by author, May 2017) ........................................................................................................................ 120 Fig. 13: Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust, part of the MBAD African Bead Museum (photo by author, May 2017) ........................................................................................................................ 132 Fig. 14: The Heidelberg Project (photo by author, September 2016) ............................................ 134 Fig. 15: View down the alley between Sobieski St and Klinger St towards the Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018) ............................................................................... 135 Fig. 16: View down the alley between Sobieski St and Klinger St towards the Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018) ............................................................................... 135 Fig. 17: Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018) .................................................... 136 Fig. 18: Pebble Bubble Wrap by Mirka Sulander (photo by author, April 2017)......................... 137 Fig. 19: Rebound by Mirka Sulander (photo by author, April 2017) ............................................. 138 Fig. 20: Ziggurat and Fisher Body 21 by Scott Hocking (photographed by Hocking in 2008, reproduced by permission of the artist) .................................................................................... 140 Fig. 21: Poseidon and the Garden of the Gods by Scott Hocking (photographed by Hocking in 2009, reproduced by permission of the artist).......................................................................... 141 Fig. 22: Backyard of the Hamtramck Disneyland (photo by author, April 2018)........................ 147 Fig. 23: The Egg by Scott Hocking (photographed by Hocking in 2012, reproduced by permission of the artist) ................................................................................................................................... 149 Fig. 24: Support for The Egg (photographed by Hocking in 2012, reproduced by permission of the artist)........................................................................................................................................ 149 Fig. 25: Portraits of Black Youth, Ages 9-22 by Cydni Elledge (photographed by Bruno Vanzieleghem, reproduced by permission of Vanzieleghem) ............................................... 159 Fig. 26: No Time to Worry by Steve Koss (photographed by Bruno Vanzieleghem, reproduced by permission of Vanzieleghem) ..................................................................................................... 160

230

List of figures

Fig. 27: Pile of objects at the Heidelberg Project (photo by author, April 2019) ......................... 170 Fig. 28: Part of the Packard Plant at East Grand Boulevard (photo by author, April 2019) ...... 171 Fig. 29: Mosaic mural at the MBAD African Bead Museum (photo by author, May 2017) ...... 179 Fig. 30: One of many entries to and exits from the Packard Plant (photo by author, April 2019) ............................................................................................................................................... 207

List of obtained data and visited events 10.5 List of obtained data and visited events

Interviews - Interview with Mirka Sulander, April 20, 2017, at Spread Art, Detroit, USA - Interview with Olayami Dabls (MBAD African Bead Museum), May 03, 2017, at MBAD, Detroit, USA - Interview with Mariuca Rofick and Carl Wilson, May 08, 2017, at their home, Southfield, USA - Interview with John Anderson (Creativity Detroit), May 18, 2017, at a construction site for Creativity Detroit, Detroit, USA - Interview with Scott Hocking, May 23, 2017, at his studio, Detroit, USA - Interview with Jen Reyes, June 01, 2017, at Great Lakes Coffee, Detroit, USA - Ride-Along with Scott Hocking, June 17, 2017, Detroit, USA - Interview with Marsha Music, June 20, 2017, at her home, Detroit, USA - Interview with Vince Carducci, March 20, 2018, at his office at CCS, Detroit, USA - Conversation with Jennifer Johnson (Showroom Detroit), March 22, 2018, at Showroom, Detroit, USA - Interview with Karah Shaffer (Documenting Detroit), March 26, 2018, at The Roasting Plant, Detroit, USA - Interview with Mary Smith (Photo Booth Detroit), March 30, 2018, at Photo Booth Detroit, Detroit, USA - Ride Along with Michael Hodges (The Detroit News), April 12, 2019, Detroit, USA - Interview with Danny VanZandt (Detroit Cultural), April 13, 2019, at Urban Bean Co., Detroit, USA - Interview with Claudia Mayer (City of Detroit), April 18, 2019, at The Guardian Building, Detroit, USA - Interview with Michael Hodges (The Detroit News), May 03, 2019, at The Red Hook, Detroit, USA Visits -

Visits to Heidelberg Project (photographic documentation), Detroit, USA, September 2016, May 2017, March 2018, April 219 Visit to Hamtramck Disneyland (photographic documentation), Hamtramck, USA, April 02, 2018

Public talks and lectures - “Sliding Walls: Reimagining the Architecture of Cultural Space”, panel discussion with Elizabeth Diller (founding partner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Franklin Sirmans (Director, Pérez Art Museum Miami), Trevor Paglen (artist), and Dennis Scholl (former Vice

232

List of obtained data and visited events

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

President, Arts of the Knight Foundation), September 15, 2016, Taubman Center for Design Education, Detroit, USA “Stones Thrown: Art and Social Progress”, panel discussion with Eva Franch I Gilabert (architect), Glenn Kaino (artist), Adam Pendleton (artist), and Salvador Salort-Pons (Director, Detroit Institute of Arts), September 16, 2016, The Jam Handy, Detroit, USA “Picturing Detroit. Öffentlicher Vortrag mit Camilo José Vergara (NYC)”, talk by Camilo José Vergara (photographer), November 16, 2016, HafenCity Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany “Promoting and Measuring Public Life” talk by Mathew Lister (Gehl Architects), April 25, 2017, The Jam Handy, Detroit, USA “Detroit – The Dream is now” book signing and panel discussion with Michel Arnaud (photographer), George N’Namdi (art dealer), Allie McGhee (painter), Lynn Crawford (art critic and fiction writer), Sebastian Jackson (founder and CEO at The Social Club), and Avery Williams (attorney) April 26, 2017, N’Namdi Center, Detroit, USA “SmithGroupJJR Perspectives Panel: Why Detroit Matters” panel discussion with Olga Stella (Executive Director, Detroit Creative Corridor Center), Peter D. Cummings (Principal, The Platform), Geraldine Ide Gardner (Director, Urban and Regional Policy, Washington, DC), Wendy Lewis Jackson (Co-Managing Director, Detroit, The Kresge Foundation), Dan Kinkead (Principal and Urban Design Practice Leader, SmithGroupJJR), Kimberly Driggins (Director of Strategic Planning/Arts & Culture, City of Detroit), and George Athens (Principal and Detroit Workplace Studio Leader, SmithGroupJJR), May 16, 2017, The Guardian Building, Detroit, USA “Detroit 1967 Book Launch Celebration”, book launch and panel discussion with Joel Stone (editor) and Ken Coleman, Peter Hammer, Thomas Klug, Danielle McGuire, and Marsha Music (contributors), May 18, 2017, Detroit Historical Museum, Detroit, USA “Book/Author Talk with Peter Moskowitz”, book discussion of “How To Kill A City: Gentrification, Inequality, and The Fight for The Neighborhood” (2017), June 08, 2017, Source Booksellers, Detroit, USA “Allied Media Conference”, June 15-18, 2017, Detroit, USA “Public Art & the Urban Landscape feat. Jane Golden & Maurice Cox”, panel discussion with Jane Golden (Founder, Mural Arts Philadelphia), Maurice Cox (Director of Planning and Development Department, City of Detroit), Kimberly Driggins (Director of Strategic Planning/Arts & Culture, City of Detroit), Nic Esposito (Zero Waste and Litter Director, City of Philadelphia), Meg Heeres (Beacon Park Detroit Manager, DTW Energy) April 30, 2019, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, USA

Exhibition Openings - “Mirka Sulander and Evangelos Michelis AIR Showing”, April 27, 2017, Spread Art, Detroit, USA - “Now and Then: Artists contemplate the summer of 1967”, April 28, 2017, Detroit Artists Market, Detroit, USA - “Never again (again)”, April 29, 2017, 333 Midland, Highland Park, USA - “2017 Spring Exhibition Opening ft. Moonwalks + Vnesswolfchild”, May 19, 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit - MOCAD, Detroit, USA - “In::Sequence feat. Cuppetelli and Mendoza + Shigeto”, May 25, 2017, Red Bull House of Art, Detroit, USA - “Inner State Presents “Fields” by 1010”, May 26, 2017, Inner State Gallery, Detroit, USA - “Untied States of Autonomy”, June 10, 2017, Lincoln Street Art Park, Detroit, USA - “25 yrs Hanging Out“, April 13, 2019, Cass Café, Detroit, USA - “Scott Hocking, Maritza Caneca, Jack Henry @ Wasserman Projects”, April 26, 2019, Wasserman Projects, Detroit, USA

List of obtained data and visited events

233

Official Tours - “Art & Architecture – Downtown Walking Tour”, Detroit Experience Factory, September 16, 2016, Detroit, USA - “Walk/Bike Tour: Mashup of DIA Inside|Out + Murals in the Market”, Detroit Institute of Art and Inner State Gallery, June 06, 2017, Detroit, USA Other events - “Drinks x Design: Interior Design and Event Production”, May 11, 2017, Display Group, Detroit, USA - “Sensory Photography Workshop”, June 03, 2017, Spread Art, Detroit, USA - “The United States of Detroit”, film premiere and panel discussion, June 21, 2017, The Fisher Theatre, Detroit, USA - “2018 Fellowship Application Workshop and Portfolio Critique” for Documenting Detroit, March 28, 2018, Inside Southwest Detroit, Detroit, USA

Ralf Leipold

Erinnerung, Spur und Raum Geohistorisches Spurenlesen entlang erinnerter DDR-Grenzgeographien Mit einem Vorwort von Ulrike Jureit SOziAlgEOgRAphiSchE BiBliOThEk – BAnD 22 2022. 312 Seiten mit 7 s/w-Abbildungen 978-3-515-13172-8 kARTOniERT 978-3-515-13173-5 E-BOOk

Sie umgeben uns immer und überall: Spuren. Trotz ihrer Allgegenwärtigkeit bleiben sie zumeist unbemerkt und stumm. Ob als justizieller Beweis einer Straftat oder als unfreiwilliger Bote der Vergangenheit, einer Spur hängt stets etwas Geheimnisvolles sowie Rätselhaftes an. Ralf Leipold greift den Topos der Spur auf, um ihn für geographische wie auch geschichtswissenschaftliche Forschungszwecke gleichermaßen zu erhellen. Hierfür entwickelt er das Konzept des geohistorischen Spurenlesens. Ins Zentrum rücken dabei die besondere Räumlichkeit und Zeitlichkeit der Spur sowie der Spurenleser als erinnernder Orts- und Zeitzeuge. Das geohistorische Spurenlesen findet seine empirische Anwendung in der Frage, welche raumzeitlichen Erinnerungsspuren die deutsche Teilung bis heute in der alltäglichen Gedächtnispraxis diverser Geschichtsakteure hinterlassen hat.

Leipold bietet einen Beitrag zur Konvergenz von Geographie und Geschichte und stößt zu einer reflexiven Erinnerungsarbeit an. Eine Form der Retrospektive, welche offen für die verborgenen oder verlorengegangenen Ortsspuren der Vergangenheit ist, und damit auch für das, was gemeinhin nicht im Blickpunkt steht: das Vergessen. DER AUTOR Ralf Leipold war von 2011 bis 2017 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Sozialgeographie der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, an der er 2018 promovierte. Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten gehören Gesellschafts-, Raum- und Zeittheorien, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, geographische Erinnerungsforschung und Qualitative Sozialforschung.

Hier bestellen: [email protected]

Anna-Lisa Müller

Migration, Materialität und Identität Verortungen zwischen Hier und Dort sozialgeographische BiBliothek – Band 21 2020. 316 Seiten mit 1 s/w-Abbildung und 1 Tabelle 978-3-515-12473-7 kartoniert 978-3-515-12474-4 e-Book

Wie leben Menschen ihren Alltag, wenn sie von Berufs wegen häufig umziehen? Um diesen Balanceakt zwischen Hierbleiben und Weggehen zu untersuchen, hat Anna-Lisa Müller Interviews mit hochqualifizierten Menschen aus der Privatwirtschaft, dem Kultursektor und der Wissenschaft geführt. Die Interviews geben Aufschluss darüber, wie sich Menschen das Leben an und zwischen Orten unterschiedlich einrichten. Ebenso wichtig wie andere Bezugspersonen und ihre Netzwerke sind für sie dabei Dinge: das Cello, das immer wieder über Ländergrenzen hinweg umgezogen wird; das Familienfoto, das in jeder Wohnung steht; aber auch der Motorroller, der nur in einer Stadt wichtig ist, um sich zuhause zu fühlen, oder der Computer, um soziale Medien zu nutzen. Wichtig für das Balancieren zwischen Hier und Dort sind außerdem Verortungen: an dem Ort, an dem man lebt, an den Orten, an denen man gelebt

hat, an den Sehnsuchtsorten und zwischen den Orten im transnationalen Netzwerk. Müller zeigt, dass Migrantinnen und Migranten in Relationen von Menschen, Objekten und Orten eingebunden sind und darüber charakteristische Identitäten entwickeln, die Ausdruck ihrer Migrationsbiographie sind. die autorin Anna-Lisa Müller ist Sozialgeographin und Soziologin. Sie forscht zu gesellschaftlichen und räumlichen Transformationsprozessen in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft; ihre Schwerpunkte sind internationale Migration und Stadtentwicklung. aus dem inhalt Einleitung | Menschen und Mobilität | Menschen und Objekte | Menschen und Orte | Verflochtene Identitäten | Nachwort | Literaturverzeichnis | Register

Hier bestellen: [email protected]

grounds diverse and manifold relations of artistic practices and urban space in Detroit and unveils the dynamics and conflicts as well as multiple meanings and histories of (artistic) spaces in Detroit that often run counter to dominant representations of space. Nora Küttel also shows how those practices produce spaces that are shaped by heterogeneity and participation. The research contributes to geography’s engagement with art by offering a critical perspective on the intersection of artistic practices and space with regard to issues of power and representation over and within urban space.

ISBN 978-3-515-13357-9

www.steiner-verlag.de

When art and space meet An ethnographic approach to artistic practices and urban space in Detroit

23

Franz Steiner Verlag

Sozialgeographische Bibliothek Band 23 Franz Steiner Verlag

Küttel

9 783515 133579

Nora Küttel

When art and space meet

Based on the premise that art as well as space are part and product of social, political, and economic relations, the book analyzes the dialectic relationship of artistic practices and urban space in Detroit. The city of Detroit, with its massive population loss, abundance of vacant lots and buildings, and continuing racialization and marketization of space, provides a unique, although not exceptional setting for this research. Through a set of ethnographic methods, Nora Küttel identifies five artistic practices that each refers to a specific aspect of space and its production, such as materiality or publicness. She fore-