Border Scenes

Abstract

A multi-layered artistic scene of site-specific urban interventions crosses the border cities of Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Consumption-oriented approaches to scenes as clusters of urban amenities would disqualify these cities as loci of scenes: Detroit's scattered hip enclaves have had little influence upon neighbouring acres of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, whereas Windsor has promoted a new downtown cultural district and university campus but remains dotted with empty storefronts and boarded-up structures. Yet, scenes are deeply engrained in their imaginaries – famously in Detroit's many musical scenes, but also historically in cross-border mobilities of peoples and goods. Simultaneously integrated and divided, Detroit/Windsor is riddled with tensions between cross-border circulation and the border's increasing impermeability, and between images of stasis and transformation. An experimental scene of creative collectives and site-specific projects has responded to these tensions, disordering the material character of urban spaces and the built environment, the people, things, and media that pass through them, and their legal and institutional frameworks. Empty spaces, low rents, the circulation of discarded objects, the shifting economic conditions of skilled labour and ‘making’ cultures, and the availability of academic institutions have all contributed to these creative initiatives. Projects to stabilize neighbourhoods within Detroit are complemented by projects in Windsor that address forms of urban crisis deeply linked to Detroit's future. Windsor art collectives enter into an asymmetrical dialogue with site-specific projects in Detroit as both insiders and onlookers, not in the sense of idle urban spectators but as an audience expressing its intimate knowledge of Detroit's history and current conditions. In opposition to each city's hurry to demarcate cultural districts and creative economies, the projects I describe are oriented to cautious and considered transformation grounded in dialogue, workshops, research and planning.