The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency Hosts International Students at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

The DETROIT UNREAL ESTATE AGENCY hosts international students at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to present new ways of thinking about the city, its values and uses.

Join Taubman College’s Detroit Unreal Estate Agency Detroit Studio, hosted by architecture professors Andrew Herscher and Mireille Roddier, for a short presentation of work from two student groups (Taubman College and the Dutch Art Institute) that proposes a number of new ways to understand, value and use the city of Detroit. Students will present their predictions and findings at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The event is open to the public.

Following President Obama, leaders in Europe, China, and elsewhere promise financial stimulus packages to rescue our cities and our way of living. But will this money do the trick? Tax foreclosures, social fragmentation, budget crisis at every level of government, a dearth of leadership have intersected to create a growing state of emergency.

There is a need to catch up with the credit crunch and find means to influence the economic forecast and determine its urban outcomes. History shows that the recovery of society depends for a great deal on individual inventiveness and collaborative resourcefulness. Stimulus packages put together by communities themselves and based on local commitment have shown to be more sustainable and resilient.

The collapse of the free market ideology creates a sense of emergency and the opportunity for a new kind of artistic agency. Decline and decay is also creation and growth of something else if we can reframe our expectations. Detroit, in many ways the schoolbook example of the residue city, is often framed as a leftover space after the neoliberal economy considered it unworthy as a working space. We, on the contrary, see in Detroit how a new movement of artists, farmers, activists, musicians, and other are developing and producing a culture of and on its own.

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency has the goal to turn the story of Detroit and the ways of evaluating and developing the city’s potential upside down, and create alternative practices to work in her empty urban space. Instead of dismissing the city as a place of shrinkage, decay and poverty, we intend to learn from the ways in which its inhabitants are using its space and how they qualify it.

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency has received media attention by The New York Times and The Detroit Free Press.

About MOCAD: http://www.mocadetroit.org/upcomingevents.html