Pataphysics City Project
The Pataphysics City Project book project is a satire of the city planning document created by the Detroit Future City organization in 2014. Detroit Future Cities was a temporary organization responsible for establishing an urban revitalization strategy for Detroit after a bad municipal bankruptcy and takeover of city leadership by the state of Michigan. Four strategies enabled their framework: land use, land and building assets, economics, and city systems. The DFC city planning project was quite controversial. One reason was its inability to address the sources of problems. There is no natural conclusion or abstract set of circumstances that led to Detroit’s negative conditions, like chronically overtaxing residents and an overreliance on bonds to finance city services.
Colonialism is a language of high planning. PCP continues that controversial line of thinking. It too takes city planning processes away from people and applies irrelevant and unusual solutions.
The Pataphysics City Plan dreams up answers to civic problems that ‘evade’ our understanding. Games and celebrity interviews have taken the place of standard design research methods. PCP embraces fake public participation while proposing dreamy solutions to real city problems, leading readers into looking, albeit indirectly, into the Real in the heart of the Unreal in Detroit, Michigan.
CCS Thesis Project
