both sides learned how to listen to and learn from one another

However, the university owns several pieces of land associated with major flooding events and corresponding damage, and yet the city is unable to require the university to mitigate these impacts.

events

Climate adaptation is a growing field with limited internal funding by the city, and this new engagement provided the opportunity to explore an ongoing relationship with the university around climate adaptation. Second, small upfront investments of city staff time have historically created useful projects or developed stronger networks that are useful as future opportunities arise.

It demands integration across social, natural, and political science disciplines and the development of active exchanges and connections between decision makers and researchers.

Boundary organizations are important knowledge sources and brokers (Guston, 2001, Guston, 2007). They are agencies that stabilize the distinction between the production of science and its use in policy while facilitating supportive interactions between these two worlds (Kirchhoff et al., 2013). In this role, boundary organizations broker information between scientists and decision makers, often in an adaptable and relevant way that still makes the information acceptable and understandable for both sides (Lynch et al. 2008). This brokerage work is a resource-intensive process, and most of these organizations face limitations set by their available resources (Kirchhoff et al., 2013; McNie 2007).

Communication of usable climate knowledge is central to transformative action on climate adaptation

However, unlike many other cities, Ann Arbor is home to a major research institution and hub of innovation: the University of Michigan (U-M)

taking time to build trust among participants, the importance of proximity for being responsive, and utilizing organizational structures for supporting collaboration

Answer the Door

this guide offers a view of a different city, suffused with potential instead of oblivion

This state of emergency enables, however fleetingly, a community to experience its life, its experiences and realities, in their own terms: this is our life, nothing more, nothing less.

Needs create spaces and opportunities for alternative means of achieving viable urban lives

In the world of unreal estate, precisely those urban features that are conventionally understood to diminish or eradicate value (inefficiency, inexplicability, waste, redundancy, uselessness, excess) are what create possibilities to construct new values

In the frame of unreal estate, therefore, Detroit is not a problem to solve by means of already understood metrics of evaluation, but a situation to come to terms with, in terms of both its challenges and possibilities. In this sense, this guide does not presume to show a “solution” to Detroit’s problems; if anything, it indicates ways in which the city is failing better—more equitably, justly and beautifully.

unreal estate development undertaken by choice, by those with negotiable or flexible relationships to a place and a community, and unreal estate development undertaken by necessity, by those with non-negotiable or given relationships to where they live and who they live with

it claims a right: the right not to be excluded from the city by an inequitable and unjust system of ownership and wealth distribution

these authors tend to be self-organized, taking on responsibilities and functions typically displaced to institutions in functional cities

It tends to dissolve differences between work and play, as well as between art and other forms of cultural or symbolic production, from activism and political organization, through cooking, gardening, caretaking and teaching, to craftwork and social work.

This production can be insurgent, survivalist, ecstatic, escapist or parodic; it can also be recuperative, returning unreal estate to the real estate market.

not only by artists and architects but also by activists, anarchists, collectors, community associations, curators, explorers, gardeners, neighborhood groups, scavengers and many others—a heterogeneous array of individual and collective urban inhabitants. The political, social and cultural agencies of these inhabitants are diverse, but their skills, techniques and knowledge are specific, directed and often profound

It is constantly susceptible not only to further deterioration, but also to further “betterment” as defined by a value regime that equates improvement with profitability.

It also exists in a temporal interval, in a moment between the historical failure of modernist industrial production and the possible advent of postmodern urban gentrification.

Unreal estate provides a lens through which to see how a decline in the exchange value of property can yield the undoing of enclosures and the creation of possibilities for new sorts of commons—a commons that is neither designed nor intended, but one that is a collateral result of the extraction of capital.

property can assume use values unrecognized by the market economy

“unreal estate”: 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. The values of unreal estate are unreal from the perspective of the market economy—they are liabilities, or unvalues that hinder property’s circulation through that market. But it is precisely as property is rendered valueless according to the dominant regime of value that it becomes available for other forms of thought, activity and occupation—in short, for other value systems.

What if Detroit has lost population, jobs, infrastructure, investment, and all else that the conventional narratives point to—but, precisely as a result of those losses, has gained opportunities to understand and engage novel urban conditions? What if one sort of property value has decreased in Detroit—the exchange value brokered by the failing market economy—but other sorts of values have reciprocally increased, use values that lack salience or even existence in that economy? What if Detroit has not only fallen apart, emptied out, disappeared and/or shrunk, but has also transformed, becoming a new sort of urban formation that only appears depleted, voided or abjected through the lenses of conventional architecture and urbanism?

In Detroit, that is, urban crisis not only solicits skills of endurance, but also yields conditions favorable for invention and experiment—for the imagination of an urban realm that parallels the realm of concern to urban professionals and experts.

a condition of possibility for the emergence of creativity itself. In this sense, marginality allows for the formulation of new and innovative ways to imagine and inhabit the city

Sometimes this interest has yielded experiments such as the nighttime illumination of vacant lots by hijacked electricity; sometimes it has yielded the collaborative mapping of territorial incongruities with licit and illicit community groups; sometimes it has yielded the production and distribution of manifestos, atlases, postcards and other urban texts; and sometimes it has yielded the recruitment of art and architecture students for unreal estate agency via the teaching of studios in institutions of higher learning.

sublimated urgent expressions of longing

into the sky, into the space beyond sky, beyond space, into light, beyond light, into forever and then back down the stairs, all the way back, back to the land of American Homes, back to the source, back to the home. Welcome home.

Idea for American Dream House One in which you wake up happy. Every day you wake up happy. You wake up and you’re happy every day.

A really dreamy closet would be a place where, instead of storing your clothes and shoes, you could store your dreams—an archive of the unconscious mind. Last night I dreamed I turned my closet into a natural history museum and people came from all around to gaze at the bones.

All rooms are guest rooms in the end.

I believe it was astronaut John Glenn who said: “Let us go beyond Bed Bath & Beyond.” Yes, let’s.

American Homes is afraid of foreclosing. American Homes is location, location, location. American Homes is writing books despite the supposed death of the author.

See below: as above!

In the olden days, unpublished American authors used to toss their unsolicited manuscripts through the Transom Windows of unsuspecting editors’ American Homes. Now, we use online submission managers and email instead, which is a very good thing, because according to NACSA, from the years 1865 through 1996 nineteen innocent editors were blinded or crippled by unidentified flying manuscripts.

The word “fixed” implies past brokenness, as in repaired.  But in the case of Fixed Windows they are in need of repair.  They are “fixed” only in a corrupt sense. Try and open a Fixed Window sometime and you will see: the only way to open it is to break it. In that sense, a Fixed Window is not altogether different than the human heart.

Bay Window: A place where I don’t mind wasting time, alone or with you.

we typically do not look at the Windows in our American Homes—we look through them, beyond them, everywhere but at them. This is in spite of their aesthetic beauty. This is a testament to their functionality. This is also a sadness. Take a moment today and examine one of your Windows. What is it that you see? Smudges, fingerprints, watermarks, bullet holes? Look closer. In the right light, you might see yourself.

But when one door closes another opens.

Screen Doors. I could give a shit about Screen Doors. They’re always flapping in the American breeze and falling apart.

CELLAR DOOR

The Porch Swing is innocent. It is also a symbol of freedom in the book American Homes.