Domesticating Detroit: Art Houses, Blight, and the Image of Care

Domesticating Detroit: Art Houses, Blight, and the Image of Care JULIA YEZBICK Oakland University Abstract Public circulations of politicized visualizations and definitions of blight serve not only to define and police an idealized image of care, but also bolster the state’s valorization of creative interventions that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape. An image of care of single-family homes presents an invented morality—one which sets itself as distinct from another manufactured idiom: blight. This duality allows for processes of domestication to be defined, defended, policed, and politicized. Creative interventions on Detroit’s built environment that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape become valorized by the state and its neoliberal partners (corporate business leaders, philanthropic foundations, and public-private partnerships), despite artists’ intentions to subvert the power of such interests. So long as blight is conceived of and imagined as the absence of care, instead of being the end result of decisions made, laws passed, and policies enacted, the racial and economic segregation of the 20th century will continue to shape our urban spaces. So long as artistic and creative interventions are conscripted into this image of care as a domestication of blight, social and aesthetic innovators will be instrumentalized in market-driven regimes of value. [Postindustrial Landscapes; Aesthetics; Urban Development; Blight; Single-Family Homes] A n image of care of single-family homes presents an invented morality—one which sets itself as distinct from another manufactured idiom: blight. This duality allows for processes of domestication to be defined, defended, policed, and politicized by the state. The state as referenced throughout this article refers to the city of Detroit including its municipal bodies such as the mayor’s office as well as authorities that extend the reach of the city’s power through both public and public-private partnerships, such as the Detroit Land Bank Authority and the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force. In Detroit, the state-defined image of care valorizes artistic practices that appear to ameliorate urban ills while diminishing—or even bulldozing—those that visually express social critique through the form or appearance of a structure. Though the city’s concern with how a building looks, or the extent to which it appears cared for, creates an aesthetic valuation in one sense, the city’s assessments lack an understanding of the structures as existent within multiple and at times conflicting networks of meaning, value, and utility. While state-defined aesthetics of care play out on the level of surface City & Society, Vol. 0, Issue 0, pp. 1–29, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12280. single-family homes […] provide a particularly salient site in which the collision of […] regimes of value can be examined City & Society the city and artists/designers struggle to define the norms of domestication in a city plagued by unoccupied single-family homes 2 appearances, artists and designers see potential for new forms of expression and sociality amidst the blight. These competing regimes of value (market-driven decisions, aesthetic valuations, and socio-political strategies) bump up against each other despite expressed intentions by artists and the city. Affectively and symbolically laden, single-family homes thus provide a particularly salient site in which the collision of aesthetic and market-based regimes of value can be examined. By controlling the visualizations of blight, the state bolsters its power over the built environment, ultimately shifting public conception of the role of creative interventions in the city from one of contestation to domestication. The perceptions of care held up as oppositional to blight become associated with other positively held attributes of society: good citizenship, responsibility, cleanliness, etc., while the state effectively drowns out the art of dissent that might point to the social, economic, and historic causes of the blight. In this way, the state floods its publics with discourses and images of the proper treatment of blight: remediation, beautification, and ultimately, erasure. Thus, the gatekeepers of these regimes of value shift public discourse toward an image of care that benefits a market-driven value system, rather than a critique, analysis, or recognition of the processes of disinvestment and dispossession that have led to the current state of the city. Based on in-situ observations, archival research, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, carried out between 2011 and 2017 in Detroit, Michigan, I will discuss two case studies of ‘art house’ projects: The Heidelberg Project and Power House Productions, in order to examine the ways in which visualizations of blight and conceptions of care of single-family homes are utilized by the state to domesticate the urban landscape. The dual meaning of domestication—both to make or dwell in a home and to tame the wild—highlights the ways in which an image of care not only naturalizes processes of deindustrialization, but also valorizes creative projects that appear to heal, care for, re-inhabit, or tame the blight. As this article will show through two case studies of artistic interventions on single-family homes, the city seems to support projects that fit visually within an imagined norm of what a house should look like. While this may not be novel, the ways in which these art house projects navigate their entanglements within conflicting regimes of value reveal a contested terrain in which the city and artists/designers struggle to define the norms of domestication in a city plagued by unoccupied single-family homes. Domestication as an analytic metaphor also situates the image of care within a history of conceptions of the city as a living organism (cf. Light 2009, Eisinger 2013, Mumford 1961, amongst many others). As early as the 1920s scholars from the Chicago School argued that because cities were like organisms, urban change occurred in natural and predictable patterns.1 The city-as-organism metaphor that proliferated throughout the 20th century often provided a raison d’être for urban policies of slum removal, policies that used a discourse of pathology to communicate their aims (Wilson 1996, Wilson and Mueller 2004, Akers 2017).2 A sick or dying city needed its cancers of blight extracted, its diseases of slums excised. The state-defined image of care and urban stewardship thus presents an image of cultivation and state-defined norms of dwelling—an image of domestication.3 I take up the dual meanings of domestication here, however, to recuperate an analysis of the uneven, hegemonic, and political processes that are often elided in a rhetoric of care. Moreover, those that control the image of care as a means of defining the realm of the domestic extend the history of binaristic conceptualizations of urban space (blight vs. care, nature vs. city, slums vs. neighborhoods, etc.), enabling urban planning and policies that have historically protected the property of white, upper middle class residents to the detriment of African American and lower class residents (Sugrue 1996, Herscher 2015, Manning Thomas 2013). In recent years, such planning and policies have shifted at least partially from the public realm into the private sector, rendering an image of care manufactured to serve the private interests that fund its actions. Within this nexus of interests, Alfred Gell’s notion of the “mobilization of aesthetic principles” highlights the ways in which those with power inflect, interpellate, and define the forms of cultural production, which in turn act both within and against these regimes of value (1998:4). However, while Gell’s assertion of the agency of art objects serves a use, Detroit’s art houses require a more relational, contingent, and emergent understanding of creative processes that does not limit agency to art objects as objects, per se. Art houses in Detroit cohere around the experience and agency of place-based histories of aesthetics and the ways in which such histories can be “understood as relational and contingent, situated and reflexive” (Feld 2015: 15). In this way, the art houses become more than real estate in the social contexts of aesthetic histories. Similar to Steven Feld’s realization that to understand Bosavi soundings, one must “concentrate on relational listening histories—on methods of listening to histories of listening— always with an ear to agency and positionalities,” (2015:15) to understand the visualizations of houses in Detroit today, one must look to histories of looking—and in particular, histories of looking at blight and domestic care. Domesticating Detroit A Brief History of Images of Blight in Detroit T he term “blight,” borrowed from agriculture, initially became popular through the Chicago School of sociology led by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and R.D. McKenzie, who used the word as a way to apply an “ecological approach” to the study of urban spaces. For over a century, definitions, metaphors, and imagery of blight as an urban cancer have been used to sway public opinion toward certain urban policies 3 City & Society (cf. von Hoffman 2008, Herscher 2015, Aelbrecht 2015, Chronopoulos, 2014, Akers 2017, Pritchett 2003). In the following section, I will highlight a few historical instances in which the presentation of juxtaposed images of blight and care of single-family homes to the residents of Detroit attempted to mobilize aesthetic valuations toward social and political ends. In 1914, auto maker Henry Ford announced a “profit-sharing” plan that promised employees at his Highland Park plant a wage of $5 a day, an amount far exceeding the pay of his competitors at the time.4 Workers flocked to the area by the tens of thousands, but the wage came with several requirements, including that workers live in single-family homes. A small booklet called “Helpful Hints and Advice to Ford Employes [sic]” laid out the rules for eligibility and the “recommendations” by its Sociological Department. The company’s advice, enforced through personal, unannounced visits to employees homes, included mandates to refrain from drinking alcohol, to maintain a clean homestead, and to make regular deposits into a State or National bank account. The booklet and subsequent edicts showed images of “sanitary” and “insanitary”[sic] kitchens and bedrooms, and recommended finding well-lit and ventilated homes “in good wholesome neighborhoods […] free as possible from danger of disease caused by dark, foul, filthy tenements, and unwholesome localities” (1915:7). The Profit-Sharing Plan was a corporate welfare incentive program that clearly laid out the distinctions between “good and bad homes… [and] good and bad neighborhoods” (1915:7). This series of booklets contained images of crowded tenement housing juxtaposed with images of neat single-family homes with wellkept yards, with captions such as “This is the House that Profits Built” (1917:49) (See Figures 1, 2, and 3 from two different pamphlets both published in 1915). The company claimed that, in the first year and a half, the number of homes owned by employees taking advantage of the Profit-Sharing Plan increased by 99% (1915:49). Through this scheme, the company shaped the workforce into Ford’s idealized citizens, clearly demonstrated in the booklets which made an unmistakable connection between domestic cleanliness, good citizenship, and profit. This scheme placed a social value on the single-family home, extending it beyond a symbol of economic class by linking it to other social values such as employment, nuclear families, sobriety, and thriftiness. At the time, photographs had a particularly powerful sway over public opinion. Cameras were thought to capture images objectively, and present reality as it is (Chronopoulos 2014). Since the advent of documentary photography in the 19th century, which correlated with social reform movements, photography often illustrated a social moral mandate (Chronopoulos 2014), and the Ford pamphlets were no exception.5 Images of a lack of care can also be seen throughout the mid-20th century, as urban renewal programs sought public backing for major infrastructure projects by distributing photographs of urban “slums.” Examining the publications of the Detroit Citizens’ Housing and Planning 4 Domesticating Detroit Figure 1. “Undesirable Home Surroundings Found on First Investigation,” Factory Facts from Ford, 1915. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] Figure 2. “Representative Home of Ford Employee at Time of Second Investigation,” Factory Facts from Ford, 1915. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] Council (which operated from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s), Wes Aelbrecht found that the use of photography often persuaded the public that certain parts of the city needed “slum clearance” (2015). Albrecht adds that not only did photography play a crucial role in illustrating the image of slums—it also effectively bridged “the great vague gap between city planning and citizens,” thus “the creation of a community of shared interest depended on the success of the educational campaigns, and with it, the visual aids” (2015:314). The educational campaigns utilized 5 City & Society Figure 3. Before and after pictures of a Ford employee’s home illustrating the improvements as part of the Profit-Sharing Scheme, Helpful Hints and Advice to Ford Employes, 1915. Image from the Collections of The Henry Ford. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] before-and-after pictures of alleys, houses, and neighborhoods, allowing children and adults to see “what makes their own street good or not so good as a place to live” (Aelbrecht 2015: 316). These pictorial demonstrations of good house/bad house reasserted Ford’s illustrations of upright 6 living through an image of domestic care and laid the groundwork for a collective imaginary of good housing. Ford’s incentivized scheme, together with the increasing number of cars on the road throughout the first half of the 20th century, spurred the growth of Detroit’s built environment outward instead of upward. As the auto industries grew, Detroit’s population soared from 285,000 in 1900 to its peak of 1.85 million in 1955, spreading the city outward from 28 square miles to 139 square miles. Today, single-family homes make up 73% of the city’s housing type (Detroit Future City Framework, 2012: 54). Domesticating Detroit The Image of Detroit’s Single-Family Homes Today O nce the emblem of class mobility and financial stability, single-family homes now often symbolize disinvestment and urban decay (cf. Apel 2015, Kinney 2016). Today, Detroit’s 139-squaremile footprint encases a patchwork of vacant land, single-family homes, and old industrial buildings. The outward growth of the 20th century, discriminatory housing policies, a vicious cycle of foreclosure, speculative real estate, and overassessment all enabled the continued spread of blight and contemporary versions of slum clearing and redlining (cf. Sugrue 1996). A variety of media has popularized photographic images of blight today, including blogs (e.g. the feral houses project by photographer James D. Griffioen),6 numerous coffee table photography books (e.g. Marchand and Meffre 2011, Andrew Moore 2010, Austin and Doerr 2010), magazines, and newspapers.7 Many Detroiters refer to these images as “ruin porn” (cf. Millington 2013) as waves of amateur photographers or “ruin pornographers” continue to follow in their wake. Some of the data on Detroit’s devastation is, indeed, shocking. The American Community Survey found that Detroit has 365,528 housing units, almost a third of which are vacant (Detroit Future City 2012:56). The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force counted a total of 84,641 blighted parcels that meet their definition of blight or exhibit what they call “blight indicators” (2014). Geographer Joshua Akers reports, “In just over a decade, nearly one third of all Detroit properties have appeared in the Wayne County tax auction” (2017:108). In 2015, for example, nearly 25,000 houses were listed on the annual Wayne County tax foreclosure auction. Many of these made it to the second round of bidding, where bids start at $500. By April 2017, the Detroit Land Bank Authority, an entity formed to manage the public receivership of houses that remain for sale after the auction, became the largest property owner in the city, holding title to 98,302 parcels, 33,187 of which were residential structures.8 Tens of thousands of houses in Detroit linger in the ambiguous spaces between occupancy and demolition, leaving thousands of families in precarious situations, oftentimes unaware of the fate of their dwellings. Together with these devastating numbers, visualizations of blight circulated in popular media and by public-private partnerships such as single-family homes now often symbolize disinvestment and urban decay 7 City & Society the DLBA are utilized to construct a politicized and motivated image of the city. “Blexting”: new technologies, old tactics I n the years leading up to Detroit’s declaration of municipal bankruptcy in 2013, images of ruin porn saturated the media. Once the Emergency Financial Manager stepped down, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan prioritized the enforcement of regulations against absentee owners and tax-delinquent properties through a nuisance abatement program, perhaps motivated by these unattractive depictions of Detroit. In 2012 he formed the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) to manage the city’s residential property holdings, auctioning off a few properties per day, starting at $1000 each. According to its website, the DLBA is “dedicated to returning Detroit’s vacant, abandoned, and foreclosed property to productive use.”9 The nuisance abatement plan enforced by the DLBA mandates that owners of vacant homes bring those homes up to code, obtain a certificate of occupancy, and have them occupied within six months or risk forfeiture of the property to the DLBA.10 However, if a resident makes improvements on a home, they can apply for an extension by submitting “before and after” photographs to the DLBA. Once again, a comparative image of care is endorsed and rewarded through photographic measures (See Figure 4). The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force (hereafter the Task Force) stands as another example of a stakeholder in the contemporary elaboration of an image of care. In 2013, the Obama Administration convened the Task Force “to remove every blighted structure and clear every blighted vacant lot in the City of Detroit as quickly as possible.”11 The Task Force worked with local tech firms to create a survey of all of the parcels in the city and their current condition. It received funding from federal as well as private sources and was led by heads of local non-profit organizations and by Dan Gilbert, the billionaire chairman of Rock Ventures, LLC, parent company of Quicken Loans and the owner of over 80 buildings in downtown Detroit. The Task Force published a report of their findings in 2014 that began with this description: “Blight is a cancer. Blight sucks the soul out of everyone who gets near it, let alone those who are unfortunate enough to live with it all around them. Blight is radioactive. It is contagious. Blight serves as a venue that attracts criminals and crime. It is a magnet for arsonists. Blight is a dangerous place for firefighters and other emergency workers to perform their duties. Blight is also a symbol. It is a symbol of all that is wrong and all that has gone wrong for too many decades in the once thriving world-class city of Detroit” (2014). As architectural historian Andrew Herscher notes, the language of the Task Force Plan is a soup of “all but hysterical prose” that ultimately translates 8 Domesticating Detroit Figure 4. Before-and-after pictures submitted to the Detroit Land bank Authority to apply for an extension on the requirement for certificate of occupancy within 6 months of acquisition of the property. Photos provided and used with permission by an informant. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] “the inadequate housing of communities disenfranchised by racism and class prejudice into a menace to the health, security, property value, and prosperity of the entitled” (2015:40). Akers also notes the Task Force’s emphasis on blight as disease and threat, rather than addressing the issue as “a market failure with a chain of responsibility” (2017: 108). Beyond the discursive depictions of blight, the Task Force elaborated and reinforced a clear image of blight through its parcel survey and the mobile device app it developed to collect data on the condition of Detroit’s housing stock. To conduct the parcel survey, Data Driven Detroit and Loveland Technologies partnered to create an entity called Motor City Mapping. Surveyors, often local Detroiters who lived in the neighborhoods they surveyed, received training to identify blight solely by the appearances of the front-facing facade of a building (Davey 2014). The app and this process became known as “blexting,” a combination of the words “blight” and “texting.” Utilized as a way to crowdsource information on blighted properties, the blexting app allows users to report on the state of houses based on select measures of appearance: whether they appeared to be occupied, unoccupied, possibly occupied, or partially occupied; whether they were fire damaged, or needed boarding; whether there was dumping; and the general condition of the structure: good, fair, poor, or suggested for demolition. Motor City Mapping published a document called “Blexting Basics” to instruct lay citizens on how to use the app and accurately enter information. Similar to the Ford pamphlets, the document laid out juxtaposed images of examples of houses and buildings that are good, fair, 9 City & Society poor, and suggested for demolition. The description of structures that should be suggested for demolition included such subjective indicators as “No longer shaped like a building,” “Damaged beyond practical repair or renovation," and “Uninhabitable.”12 Crucially, the guide relies on a shared understanding of what a building should be shaped like and what kind of features make it habitable for humans. The data of the citizen-surveyors is loaded into a growing database of information about the condition of Detroit’s housing stock, feeding directly into decisions being made by the city about which houses should be demolished each week. The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan reported findings from the initial parcel surveys in 2014. Additionally, the Task Force Plan included data on what it called “blight indicators,” such as property owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, thus extending the definition of blight to structures in danger of becoming blighted in the future. Herscher notes that this extension and the accompanied recommendations in the Task Force Plan “advanced the transformation of racially based socioeconomic disadvantage into public threat and legal offense” (2015:44). At the beginning of the project, Dan Gilbert vowed to remove all of the blighted buildings in Detroit (McGraw 2013). Notably, this clearing of the land was not accompanied by public dialogue about how to keep people in their homes or how to change the structural forces that led to this decay in the first place. The Task Force Plan states unequivocally that neglect, and nothing else, causes blight. images of The images of blight gathered through blexting serve to legitimate the city’s aggressive demolition program, as did the images used by the Detroit blight […] Citizens Housing and Planning Council in the mid-20th century. Though propped up by reports such as the serve to legiti- their reasons for demolition have been Detroit Demolition Impact Report13 (partially funded by Rock Ventures, mate the city’s and which reported a $400 million in aggregate property increase), the Task Force’s recommendations aim to increase property values through aggressive traditional market forces without addressing either the causes of blight or who stands to benefit from these demolitions. The Task Force touts the demolition removal of this “cancer” as a universal good that will eventually benefit all Detroiters. Yet some certainly benefit more than others, while others program bear the brunt of the risk. Highlighting Dan Gilbert’s complicity in cycles of blight and vacancy, The Detroit News reported, “52% of the Detroit foreclosed properties that had Quicken Loans mortgages are now considered blighted, demolition-worthy, or have been seized by Wayne County for the owner’s failure to pay taxes” (MacDonald and Kurth 2015). Importantly, the uneven effects of blight removal become possible in part through the strategic propagation of an image of care that appeases publics and obscures systemic structural injustices. Both Albrecht (2015) and Chronopoulos (2014) point out that visualizations of blight of the 20th century use aerial photography in particular to demonstrate a systems-level understanding of the urban fabric. However, both Ford’s pamphlets and the blexting images focus on facades of single-family homes. 10 This shift in scale from city to house represents a certain ideological perspective to the built environment and blight, in particular. The tens of thousands of images of single-family homes in the Task Force database create an atomized vision of the city: one that sees each case as a discrete island. Despite the cross-tabulations of the Task Force’s 24 different datasets, the images themselves seem to suggest that each house got this way by dint of its own neglect, rather than through the structural forces of long-term disinvestment, the collapse of housing markets, and an aggressive and vicious cycle of foreclosure. These images of blight as counter-distinctive to images of care contribute to what Jonathan Massey calls a “housing imaginary: a set of representations—texts, images, practices, performances—that shape the ways in which we understand and imagine housing” (2012). Within this housing imaginary, the art houses of Detroit are transformed and gain meaning. The two case studies addressed herein: the Heidelberg Project and Power House Productions, work within and against what Akers describes as the “blight-industrial complex,” a wellfunded conglomerate of “policy advocates, philanthropy, corporate elites, real-estate developers, financiers, and politicians” that seek to “remake the city for economic gain while rescaling patterns of residential segregation” (2017: 100). The blight-industrial complex not only draws upon the rhetorical patterns of previous decades that elaborate a metaphor of blight as disease to justify the protection of property values through mass demolition, but also utilizes emerging media technologies to visualize, design, frame, and illustrate the menace of blight. They target the visible material landscape that, if allowed to speak, would indict some of the processes which led to their current state in the first place (cf. Akers 2017, Chronopoulos 2014, Arnold 2015, Aelbrecht 2015, Safransky 2014). In the following two cases, an image of care is not displayed through photographic means per se, but rather through a wider figurative and discursive formation of public perceptions of each project. Both the Heidelberg Project and Power House Productions have had to learn to navigate the political and ethical positionality of their work vis-a-vis a number of actors (the city, their immediate neighbors, fellow artists in the city, local and national media, etc.). What comes into focus through these navigations are the ways in which the creators of these art houses craft an image of care and thus attempt to control the meanings assigned to their work in a city eager to utilize its creative talent toward seemingly restorative ends. Though both use Detroit’s single-family homes as creative substrate, the two art house projects are not being compared formally or typologically, but rather through an examination of their relationship to the state’s image of domestication: the mode in which it depicts its preferred capitalist urban development agenda through an image of care for single-family homes. Domesticating Detroit 11 City & Society The Heidelberg Project W an image of care is instrumentalized to define and police boundaries 12 hile the art world celebrates Tyree Guyton as putting Detroit art “on the map,” his most famous work, the Heidelberg Project, has occupied a space of controversy within its local community since it began in 1986. Its uneasy relationship with both the city and its most immediate neighbors has ultimately pushed the project away from its initial impetus of social critique and toward one of social engagement. The 32-year trajectory of this iconic installation chronicles the changing landscape of the arts in Detroit and sheds light on the power of the image of care to sanction specific art projects in the city. Moreover, the stark contrast in opinions about the piece—largely demarcated by adoring outsiders versus irritated neighbors and city officials—highlights the ways in which an image of care is instrumentalized to define and police boundaries between market and social values, economics and aesthetics, property ownership and governmentality, thus revealing the gatekeepers who police the borders of each domain. In 1986, Guyton returned from military service to find the neighborhood of his childhood home on Heidelberg Street consumed by blight, violence, and decay. As a form of protest to the realities of his environment, he began to transform the abandoned structures of the neighborhood into works of art. He gathered the debris from abandoned homes and, acting as a bricoleur, reassembled the refuse into sculptures. He covered one house entirely with vinyl records, another with stuffed animals, and painted his childhood home with brightly colored polka dots and renamed it the Dotty-Wotty House (Figure 5). He transformed other former homes into the House of Soul, the Party Animal House, the Baby Doll House, the Fun House, the Clock House, the Number House, the Penny House, the Obstruction of Justice House, and the People’s House, all within a few blocks. The Heidelberg Project has grown over the course of the past three decades, at times drawing close to 300,000 tourists a year. The Baby Doll House (Figure 6), one of the first houses he transformed, initially sparked the ire of his neighbors. Dismantled within a few years of its installation, the Baby Doll House had naked dolls and detached limbs of dolls nailed to its facade in what looked like a surreal massacre. On a sunny September afternoon in 2017, I met with a longtime Heidelberg neighbor on her porch, where she shared a shoebox of old photos of the neighborhood and tattered postcards of the early days of the Heidelberg Project. She reminisced about when the neighborhood was more occupied, but also recalled her dismay when the Baby Doll House appeared, causing her daughter to wake up with nightmares from the macabre imagery. Financially unable to move, and after decades of vocal opposition, she decided to embrace the project. She now sells water to the tourists and has turned her house into a guest book that visitors can sign for a $1 fee. Nonetheless, the contentions between the HP and its neighbors have never fully subsided. Domesticating Detroit Figure 5. Heidelberg Project: Dotty-Wotty house. Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] Much of the protest from neighbors, echoed by newspaper headlines through the 1990s, focused on the project as an “eyesore” (Chicago Tribune 1991, Hedges 1998, Beardsley 1999). On the prompting of disgruntled neighbors, the city demolished and removed parts of the project three times—in 1986, 1991, and 1999. Local media reports explained that neighbors did not appreciate the disturbing nature of the work, stating that it only brings attention to Detroit’s blight, and that they grow tired of the daily reminder of their dire conditions as well as the endless flow of tourists walking across their lawns and taking pictures of them as if they were animals (Hodges 2007:57). In 1991, shortly after Guyton had a solo show at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Mayor Coleman Young had four of the Heidelberg houses demolished. At the time, Guyton stored all of his paintings and sculptures in these houses. Seven years later, Mayor Dennis Archer ordered the demolition of all of the HP projects 13 City & Society Figure 6. Heidelberg Project: postcard of the Baby Doll House. Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] that stood on city-owned property. Having lost much of his artwork for a second time, Guyton decided to sue the city for the value of his art. Guyton did not own the demolished property—the city owned those houses and the land. However, Guyton had changed the houses from domiciles into works of art, for which he sought compensation for the value created through the transformation of the properties. When Guyton stated his case, Councilwoman Kay Everett, a vocal opponent, called his work “glorified garbage,” despite the fact that it was selling in art galleries for thousands of dollars. The denigration of Guyton’s work as “junk” marked it as outside the realm of sanctioned “domesticating” art forms. The city saw the HP as, not only highlighting the blight, but 14 also contributing to it and not conforming to an image of care that they deemed valuable.14 Jenenne Whitfield, Executive Director of the HP, explained that they train their staff “to care and think holistically” about the neighborhood. When asked what, exactly, was being cared for, she replied that the HP is intent on “recycling the minds of the people.” She described a philosophy that the Heidelberg Project has developed to explain its mission, called “Heidelbergology.” Domesticating Detroit “…Heidelbergology [is] the study of artistic material (i.e. found objects) incorporated into the fabric and structure of an urban community and the effects on that community. The community is geographically located but also a community of minds and anybody who encounters it. […] And an example of that: we had a squatter who was living in the community for 20 years […] and Steve’s worked for us for about four years now, and he said: ‘HP has taught me that I have the ability to change my circumstances, to change my life’” (personal communication, November 26, 2012). In this way, the gathering up of the discarded and displaced takes on symbolic value, whereby the rhetoric of the artist-as-healer is as much projective as it is an attempt to mend past relationships on a local level. Whitfield explained that she and Guyton conceive of the art as medicine (citing the case of the neighbor who turned her house into a guest book as an example). Yet despite the mission of Heidelbergology, Whitfield’s measures of such care seem to default to understandings of “art as a catalyst for economic development” (ibid). She often cites impact studies that demonstrate the ripple effect of their work in dollars contributed to the local and regional economy. Such measures would presumably appease a city emerging from the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. Yet, this discrepancy seems to suggest that when it comes to an image of care, the city polices the boundaries of the appearances of domestication as separate from its notions of economic impact. The HP’s struggles made headlines again in 2013 and 2014, when over the course of 14 months arson attacks destroyed all but two of their houses (Figures 7 and Figure 8). After the arson they vowed to continue and eventually decided to dismantle the project, sell off pieces of the remaining art, and transform the space into “Heidelberg 3.0”—an “arts-infused community” (Stryker 2016) that will include new buildings dedicated to community activities, an artist residency, and studio spaces.15 However, their efforts have been thwarted again, as the city has twice refused to sell them the 40-plus lots surrounding the project currently owned by the DLBA. The HP failed to attain status as a “community partner”—a designation that would allow them to buy properties in bundles from the DLBA’s holdings (Detroit News 2017). Mayor Duggan responded: “I haven’t made any effort to dismantle the Heidelberg project. But there are a lot of homeowners in that area that have a lot of complaints with what is going on” (ibid). Whitfield labeled the city’s actions “unfair and 15 City & Society Figure 7. Stuffed animals placed on top of the charred foundation of the Party Animal House. Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] Figure 8. Heidelberg Project. Art filling the burned-out foundation of the Obstruction of Justice House. Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] exclusionary practices” (Guillen 2017). The HP has launched a petition to purchase the lots, claiming the city and Mayor Duggan have been “uncooperative” despite the fact that Guyton and his Heidelberg Project 16 collaborators have cared for this neighborhood for over 30 years (Dudar 2017).16 Clearly the care enacted by HP has not been recognized by the city as sufficiently legitimate to warrant their full cooperation. The HP claims to have been caring for the neighborhood for decades, citing drops in drug use and criminal activity as a sign of their positive impact.17 Additionally, Whitfield estimated that the organization spends about “$30,000 annually on maintenance of about 50 lots” (ibid). That these measures of community impact and care don’t equate to cooperation from the city suggests that the image of care HP visually displays doesn’t align enough with the city’s aesthetics of domestication, particularly the ways in which they have transformed the symbolically-laden single-family homes. Others have also pondered the city’s opposition to the project, suggesting that its discomfort with Heidelberg imagery may be due to the fact that the city does not share the vision of the neighborhood promoted by HP’s aesthetics (cf. Walters 2001, Beardsley 1999). Walters posits that Guyton’s art was “not welcomed as sites of positive change […] because the art effectively excluded the city from performing its power over the communities in which [the] works [are] situated” (2001:82). Over its more than 30-year lifespan, the HP has adapted its organizational structure, its programming, and its messaging to fit more neatly into the zeitgeist of social-impact arts in Detroit. As the HP has changed, its mission has also shifted, “from protest to people,” as one HP employee summarized.18 Yet, as Herscher asserts, “the capacity of art to critique urban conditions seems to relate inversely to its capacity to enlist the collaboration and participation of urban collectives” (2013: 68). This leaves us to wonder whether the HP will lose its critical edge as it seeks the approval of its neighbors and the cooperation of the city. Despite these efforts, HP seems to have been unable to master the image of care that would classify their work as properly “domestic” in the eyes of the state. Domesticating Detroit Power House Productions M itch Cope and Gina Reichert founded the nonprofit Power House Productions in 2009 in part to “develop and implement creative neighborhood stabilization strategies to revitalize, inspire, and advance the community.”19 The neighborhood in which they work has long been a destination for new immigrants. Once a thriving Polish and Ukrainian enclave, many Bangladeshi, Yemeni, and Bosnian families now make their homes there. Since Cope and Reichert moved into the area in 2005, they have become the unofficial custodians of the neighborhood buying over twenty abandoned properties in the past decade in attempts to stabilize the area. Neighbors often alert them to abandoned houses in the neighborhood, hoping PHP can 17 City & Society secure the houses against the subsequent usual opportunists: decay and drug dealers. Funded by a plethora of public and private grants (amounting to over half a million dollars in 2014 alone) Power House Productions has built the Play House, the Sound House, the Squash House, the Skate House, the Yellow House, the Power House, and the Jar House, amongst other projects. Some of these houses act as residences for visiting artists, while others resulted from art projects undertaken by artists working in affiliation with the non-profit. The Squash House, for instance, turned a fire-damaged home into a squash court and a squash garden. Notably, all of these art houses adapt structures for re-use, as opposed to the HP houses, which to date operate primarily as spectacle. PHP’s reverence for the material of the houses is key to understanding their stance as artists. In a promotional video, the artists explain their work as collaborating with “artists, residents, and houses” in the neighborhood.20 And on several occasions Cope has spoken about his desire to honor the material refuse left behind, even going so far as to hold funerary ceremonies for the caches of local hoarders who have died in their homes.21 Likewise, Reichert’s background in architecture influences their approach to the material substrate of the homes. She and Cope demonstrate the possibility of renovating and reviving even severely dilapidated houses for new purposes beyond spectacle. Their perspective toward the materiality of Detroit’s houses became clear in their public outrage with another art house project called Flower House, in which a florist installed 36,000 flowers in an abandoned house, sold tickets for $15 each, and led spectators through the installation over the course of a weekend in 2015 (See Figures 9 and 10).22 Claiming that it would take a million dollars to renovate the house, the florist stated the intention to deconstruct it after the event and plant a flower garden Figure 9. Flower House, Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] 18 Domesticating Detroit Figure 10. Flower House, Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] in its place (Jackman 2015). The Flower House did not sit well with Cope, who expressed his outrage in a public letter, stating: “So many unfortunate and salvageable houses in this city are being torn down with hopes to raise property values. This is […] cynical, lazy and something we really need [to] move past. I can assure you that it will never take a $million dollars$!! to repair your house. […] If you are working in the house and having visitors walk through the house, it is totally salvageable. […] I know this because our organization actually has spent a million dollars in the past five years, not only on substantially renovating and reconfiguring six houses but also a skateboard-sculpture park, public programs and grants for artists, investments in green technology and admin costs—all within a million dollars. […] Detroit houses are unique in their architecture and their history. Tearing them down simply because it costs more to fix them up is not a sound argument for removal. Property values work a little different in Detroit. Because property values are so low, you actually have the opportunity to create your own value by doing new and unique things. You are not tied to the customs that build beige suburban cul de sacs and strip malls or sports arenas. Thinking this way is a zero-sum game, culturally and, yes, financially. It is validating the real estate market that brought us to this point. We must change the dynamic of what real estate means, what properties mean to neighborhoods, to the community, to the city” (ibid). Cope’s argument against the tearing down of the Flower House underscores the ways in which he and Reichert see their art houses as working 19 City & Society against the notion of demolition as the most economically responsible decision for what to do with Detroit’s abundance of vacant houses. Cope’s response exposes a critical orientation of stewardship that they believe artists should have over the use of Detroit houses. While PHP works to protect this “resource,” their own practices of stewardship through adaptive re-use projects produce an image of care that largely substantiates—rather than diverges from—the state’s practices of domestication. Though many of their art houses subvert typical development strategies by being built off the municipal power grid and using sustainable materials, their work, both materially and conceptually, begs the question of the creation of (property) value, and to whom this value—both economic and cultural—ultimately accrues (Herscher 2013: 82). Writing about the flagship house, the Power House, built as a model of sustainable architectural renovation, Herscher wonders to what extent physical renovations facilitate social interaction (a stated claim of the project) and between whom. Questioning who PHP addresses when they speak to "members of the community,” Herscher posits that “the purpose of the project is to consolidate the property relations of this [entitled, property-owning] public, rather than to transform these relations more generally or more radically” (2013:81). Indeed, Cope and Reichert’s kitchen contains a peg-board crowded with the keys to the many art houses they own and manage—the houses are still private property, not, as some critics assert, a space of the “commons” (cf. Carducci 2015). However, the significant sociality brought about by projects such as the Play House and the Jar House point to a more expansive purpose for their work than the one-way broadcast of artist to an audience. Through a foreclosure auction, PHP bought The Play House, a vacant, former drug house, gutted it, and turned it into a performance and rehearsal space. Notably, its facade continues to look like a typical house in the neighborhood, even though its interior has been radically altered to new purposes (See Figures 11 and 12). A local performance ensemble manages the Play House, and the Bangla School of Music utilizes it for regular performances. This project directly involves the residents of the neighborhood through its programming and events, which seems to be PHP’s primary means of engaging members of its community.23 Through at-times unwanted media attention, PHP broadcasts an image of care as seen through projects like the Play House. These images of care, depicting the engagement of diverse community members, tidied up facades, and painted picket fences, read as beneficial to PHP’s local community. I am not suggesting otherwise, but only that the appearance of domestic, residential harmony and beautification is critical to their ability to be seen by the city as contributors to a state-sanctioned image of care. Though they have certainly had frictions with municipal ordinances (such as blight tickets), PHP has largely been shown favor by the city.24 PHP bought a house in their neighborhood from the DLBA. It had some 20 Domesticating Detroit Figure 11. Play House, circa 2014. Photo by the author. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] fire damage, as do many of the homes in the neighborhood, but Reichert said it was not a total loss. At the time, they were working on six other houses and unable to devote the resources to bring the DLBA house up to code within the time period required to maintain ownership. They decided to board it up and wait until they had the capacity to renovate the house fully. It has been over a year since they acquired the house and the DLBA has not delivered a notice of seizure. Reichert surmised that perhaps the city overlooked PHP because the city was using images of their art houses as a “selling point in the listings for the [DLBA] auctions.”25 In this way, the DLBA conscripts the PHP art houses into an image of care that reflects the city’s vision of urban revitalization and approved forms of creative transformation of single-family homes.26 This approval from the city comes despite the fact that Reichert has been vocal in her opposition to market-driven development strategies. 21 City & Society Figure 12. Play House interior during performance by Bangla School of Music. Photo by Liza Bielby. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] Writing about the mission of the re-emergent Detroit Culture Council, which she helped found, Reichert states: “We do things. We make things. But this is not about creating objects of commodity. This is about art and culture as a fundamental component of being. Our neighborhoods do not follow real estate market logic in part because, after decades of systematic disinvestment, who would? Just because there is nothing here to make money from does not mean there is nothing here. We are not a blank slate waiting for anyone to fix or solve or save. We are not the tools of your development project or your financial agenda. We are not your next Brooklyn, and to say so erases the identity of this place, our history and culture. It is mere market speculation, and we will not let your dollars take our identity. We are not bottom-line driven, although we do mean business” (Reichert 2017:77). Reichert’s statement articulates the resistance to the instrumentalization of their work. However, the extent to which they can deny their complicity in “domesticating” forces remains unclear. While their public statements decry the machinations of neoliberal market-driven development, their art houses still produce an image of care commensurate with the city’s. Once again, these delineations between stated intentions and the optics of an art house project highlight the significance of an image of care. PHP’s anti-capitalist rhetoric makes no difference to the city, which utilizes its image of care to define and police boundaries between market and social values, economics and aesthetics, good art houses and bad. 22 Conclusion Domesticating Detroit T he politics of visualization of care versus blight work in the service of a “domesticating” force, bolstering the power of the state over The the built environment. The state-sanctioned image of care defines the acceptable forms of use of Detroit’s housing stock. The state lauds state-sancbeautification and adaptive re-use projects while it bulldozes visually disturbing work and ultimately transforms its aesthetic and social values. tioned image Conversely, artists working on the ground, often through bricolage of the material debris of deindustrialization, have a different working knowl- of care defines edge and understanding of their surroundings. They see the built environment as a source of material substrate that they can form, wield, and the acceptable shape into new purposes both spectacular and functional. The domestiforms of use cating vision of the “blight-industrial complex” (Akers 2017) fails to see the built environment in terms other than assets and liabilities to propof Detroit’s erty values, blind to the ways in which artists have managed to rewrite housing stock value systems through the reworking of materials. Though the single-family home serves as their scale of immediate intervention, HP and PHP operate with intentions to effect change at the neighborhood scale—exposing a networked and relational understanding of the houses. They seem to know through living and working in the spaces that the intertwined houses and the people that occupy and use them constitute the relational fabric of a neighborhood. This relationality is not about shifts in property values of proximal houses—it is about what makes a collection of houses into a neighborhood. This understanding of the experience and agency of materials and place-based aesthetics reveals the “relational and contingent, situated and reflexive” nature of Detroit’s houses (Feld 2015:15). This presents a distinctly different image than that of the atomized database of the Blight Removal Task Force. Though concurrent with Herscher’s assertion that projects allowing wide participation seem to deputize artistic practices in the service of the development agendas of the city (2013:83), the observation that there exists little room for art of social critique would oversimplify the complicated navigations between competing regimes of value. The blight-industrial complex conscripts creative transformations of the affectively-laden former homes into a hegemonic image of care that valorizes the optics of stewardship to the detriment of a more diverse expression of the built form. An oppositional understanding and visualization of blight versus care reflects this. So long as blight is conceived of and imagined as the absence of care, instead of the end result of decisions made, laws passed, and policies enacted, the racial and economic segregation of the 20th century will continue to shape our urban spaces. So long as artistic and creative interventions are conscripted into this image of care as a domestication of blight, social and aesthetic innovators will continue to be instrumentalized in market-driven regimes of value. 23 City & Society William Cronon writes, “There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny” (1996:16). Processes of domestication enacted by the city reaffirm the invented dichotomies of nature versus city, blight versus care. Today’s discourse on the effects of humans on our “natural” environment makes it hard to understand why the ecological metaphors of urban spaces do not solicit the same sentiments of complicity in, responsibility for, and understanding of the effects of our daily actions and decisions on the urban environment. The blight/care opposition strategically hides behind a moralizing discourse, essentially abdicating the bourgeoisie from any sense of accountability, while they cheer the countdown of demolitions as necessary improvements to a devastated landscape. In this way, the state-sanctioned image of care erases and obscures the extant structural legacies that indict the historical and political causes of blight in favor of isolated and segregated ideals of domesticity. Notes Acknowledgements. I would like to thank all the artists in Detroit who have shared their work with me over the years as a part of this research. A special thanks to Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope for their candid, thoughtful, and engaging reflections on the joys and struggles of their work. I am grateful to Mary Steedly, who guided me through early writing phases of this research, may she rest in peace. Thank you to two anonymous reviewers who took the time to offer insightful comments on drafts of this article as well as the editors of City & Society for facilitating this process. The research on which this article was based was supported by The University of Michigan’s Michigan-Mellon Humanities Fellowship in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, and a Dan David Prize Scholarship. All errors and omissions are my own. 1 See: Ernest Burgess, 1925. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project.” In The City edited by Robert E. Park et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 47-62, and Roderick D. McKenzie, 1925. “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community.” In The City edited by Robert E. Park et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 63-79. 2 Peter Eisinger notes the difficulty in resisting this “literal take on the body politic,” stating “anything less dramatic than the language of pathology, curative intervention, and death seems inadequate for understanding what has occurred [in Detroit]” (2013: 1). 3 Domestication as an analytic metaphor brings together two inter-related discourses: the ethics of care and the frontier rhetoric, thus exposing palliative measures as a taming of the wild/unwieldy city, where 24 cultivation and convalescence euphemize settler colonialism. Detroit has been depicted as a paragon of postindustrial decay, a ville sauvage, a space in which nature has reclaimed the ruins of modern industry. These depictions not only serve to naturalize processes of urban decay and depopulation, but also reaffirm classical nature/culture binaries that present social processes as inevitable causalities. Safransky furthers the frontier analogy laid out by Smith (1996) by describing efforts to “green” the city as part and parcel of “settler colonial” approaches to urban space that depend on erasure (2014: 237). Indeed, the bureaucratic machinations through which tens of thousands of homes are foreclosed upon, auctioned off, and demolished comprise what performance artist Katie Grace McGowan has called the “management of emptiness.” The perceived emptiness of the postindustrial frontier ostensibly needs to be tamed, (re)domesticated, and brought back into the fold of normative municipal governance. 4 Highland Park is a city completely surrounded by the present-day boundaries of the City of Detroit. Ford opened his factory there in 1909 to avoid being taxed by the City of Detroit. 5 See, for example, the photographic work of Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). 6 The original website that housed Griffioen’s photographs seems to have been taken down, but his work can now be seen, for sale, on this website: https://20x200.com/products/james-griffioen-feral-house-13, accessed February 5, 2018. 7 Time and Forbes ran special stories covering Detroit’s decline. The New York Times and The Guardian have also run several stories on Detroit’s ruins over the past decade. For a more extensive analysis of these images of ruin, see Rebecca Kinney’s Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (2016, University of Minnesota Press), as well as Dora Apel’s Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (2015, Rutgers University Press). 8 According to the DLBA’s quarterly report to the Detroit City Council, April 14, 2017 9 https://buildingdetroit.org/overview/, accessed February 5, 2018.s 10 Because nearly 50% of the properties in the tax foreclosure auction were falling back into the hands of the city or county, Mayor Duggan sought to stymie this cycle of foreclosure by enforcing a stringent attack on absentee ownership (Detroit Future City Strategic Framework). 11 http://www.timetoendblight.com/faq/#1 12 Blexting Basics, Motor City Mapping, downloadable pdf, https://motorcitymapping.org/blexting-basics.pdf, accessed February 5, 2018.s 13 http://www.demolitionimpact.org/ 14 Guyton’s lawyer recounted that over the years he has been charged by the city on everything from being a fire hazard to harming the trees, littering, and public nuisance (personal communication, October 2014). Domesticating Detroit 25 City & Society 15 Personal communication from a HP docent, February 03, 2018. http://helpheidelberg.org/ 17 A HP docent claimed that, since the project began, there has been an 87% drop in criminal activity in the neighborhood, (personal communication, February 03, 2018). 18 Personal communication, November 17, 2014. 19 http://www.power house produ ctions.org/suppo rt/missi on/, accessed March 15, 2016. 20 https://vimeo.com/163712494, accessed Jan. 15, 2018. 21 Personal communication, February 21, 2016. 22 See Cowley 2015 for the florist’s framing of the project. 23 Reichert is often at pains to explain that PHP’s work has never claimed to be “participatory” in the sense of gathering and utilizing input from the public on the material interventions of a particular house. Their projects come from the vision of artists and architects, but they have modest intentions of local public use (personal communication, February 21, 2016). 24 Notably, PHP managed to secure the coveted “community partner” status with the DLBA. Though Reichert admits that what this means is unclear to her, she said the person running the partners program at the time would let them know when the timing was right to acquire lots in the neighborhood (personal communication, Nov. 28, 2017). Clearly different than the response given to HP, this suggests that PHP demonstrates an aesthetic of care that the city supports. 25 Personal communication, February 21, 2016. 26 This is reinforced in part through media coverage. PHP has a very different media presence than HP. News articles and art reviews about PHP highlight things like “building community” (Kavanaugh 2010), building “safer, stronger neighborhoods” (Clark 2014), and “neighborhood stabilization” (Eler 2013). 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