The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, a project founded in part by Taubman College Assistant Professor of Architecture Andrew Herscher, was featured in the most recent issue of FUSE magazine.

The Toronto-based quarterly focused on the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency’s unique perspective on new forms of urban practices.

An excerpt from September 2009 cover story, “Detroit is Our Future,” is below:

“The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency formed nearly two years ago in response to the question of value as a function of real estate speculation, specifically those values that have rendered the city of Detroit a failure within a post-industrial, globalized economy. The Agency has opened up an ongoing dialogue about Detroit as a model for exploring alternate forms of urbanism. Andrew Herscher, one of the group’s founding members, stresses that Detroit offers an immediate possibility to ‘…invest not in a better world to come beyond or after capitalism, but in actually existing enclaves within capitalism, enclaves where the extraction of value in economic terms creates space for the imagination and cultivation of other values.’ As such, the Agency’s website works to inventory, document and contextualize what is currently taking place in Detroit, to tap into existing creative communities and to attract new ones.”

To learn more about the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency project, visit http://detroitunrealestateagency.blogspot.com/