Detroit, Windsor, and the art of mapping urban space

Résumé Fr

Detroit and Windsor are adjoining cities situated on either side of the Detroit River, a geographic feature that lends itselfto the longest international border in the world, stretching across the continent between Canada and the USA. Today Detroit is a fabled city whose spectacular decline has become mesmerizing to a global audience, while right across the Detroit River the midsize Canadian city of Windsor struggles in a more prosaic way to define its post-industrial, post-Fordist identity. In both places contemporary artists have been confronting urban degeneration through cartographic re imaginings; this essays looks more specifically at Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, 2010, in Detroit, Kiki Athanassiasdis’s A Citizen’s Abandoned-lot Design Consultancy, 2014, in Windsor, as well as Lee Rodney’s collaborative and interdisciplinary Border Bookmobile, 2009, which navigates a territory encompassing both cities, and both sides of the border. And ifelaborate plans for “urban regeneration” are being plotted in corporate or government offices, these art projects insistentlywork with the urban environment as it exists in its present state.