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John Marshall Presents at Mapping the Egalitarian Metropolis

Spaces of hope

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019, Stamps professor and MDes Director John Marshall will be presenting as part of Mapping the Egalitarian Metropolis: Spaces of Hope, an evening of presentations and exhibitions of work by research teams funded by the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis. The event will be held from 5 – 8 pm at the Michigan Research Studio (3901 Woodward Ave., Suite C, Detroit). Free and open to the public.

Mapping the Egalitarian Metropolis: Spaces of Hope features work by seven interdisciplinary research teams, each using techniques of deep mapping, critical cartography, and community engagement to reveal planned and unplanned places within Detroit that — despite the inequalities —have the potential to bring diverse people together to serve as loci for a more inclusive recovery.

Alongside project teammates Anya Sirota, Harley Etienne, John Marshall, and Cezanne Charles, Marshall will present Visualizing Detroit’s Emergent Cultural Infrastructure, a research effort that aims to produce an map of the relational network between the city’s artists, creative collectives, and their sites of intervention. The research will examine the most significant efforts made to date to create informal institutions, to augment the city’s civic assets, and to instigate public cultural spaces in the city. Through this project, the team hopes to reveal existing contributions and identify future potential for artist-led and artist-driven initiatives that will benefit Detroit’s cultural vitality as the city continues to transform.

According to the team’s project brief: Our project asserts that these emergent institutions are intimately connected to the health of neighborhoods and communities in Detroit and may be important indicators of community connectedness and enfranchisement. The project builds a visual means of assessing the relevance of these emergent cultural institutions in terms of their ability to catalyze and surface neighborhood interests, create novel forms of aesthetic and cultural capital, and for their ability to network and forge a kind of connective tissue or web throughout Detroit.”

Mapping the Egalitarian Metropolis: Spaces of Hope | Taubman College Event