Unreal Estate: a conversation about the relationship between architecture, landscape, and value.
March 21, 2013 / 12:30-1:30pm / Auditorium / School of Architecture University of Waterloo, 7 Melville Street, Cambridge Ontario.
Andrew Herscher, author of The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit
Chris Lee & Adrian Blackwell, editors of CURRENCY, Issue 04 of
Scapegoat: Architecture/ Landscape/ Political Economy.
Moderated by Etienne Turpin, Scapegoat Editorial Board
Scapegoat’s new issue CURRENCY, illustrates the foundation of architectural practices on money, presenting the opposition between currency’s strange immateriality – its uncanny ability to dematerialize space – and its stubborn foundation is sovereign territories and the value of land or minerals. Andrew Herscher’s new book The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit, looks at the new possibilities for urban life that present themselves when the value of urban property declines. This conversation will investigate the relationships between currency and land through the spatial and cultural practices that produce it.
The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility. The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work and play made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as “unreal estate”: urban territory that has slipped through the free- market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.
Andrew Herscher is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. He also co-founded the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, an open-access platform for research on urban crisis using Detroit as a focal point.
Currency is structured by a fundamental contradiction between its necessary circulation and its stubborn foundation in sovereign territories. On the one hand, it is designed to represent value and facilitate its exchange in standardized, fungible units; on the other, its relative scarcity generates a strong incentive to hoard it, withdrawing and storing its value, converting it into fixed assets such as property whose existence relies on the same institutions of coercion that maintain national borders. The diverse contributions to Scapegoat’s fifth issue, CURRENCY, investigate these contradictory tendencies within the spatiality of currency and present ways that they can be resisted. We follow a line that runs from the material to the immaterial, exploring divergent scales and topologies in the process.
Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy is an independent, not-for-profit, bi-annual journal designed to create a context for research and development regarding design practice, historical investigation, and theoretical inquiry.
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