Article:
Playing the City. The Heidelberg Project in Detroit

Author(s): Stein, Daniel

Abstract

This article reads the Heidelberg Project, an outdoor art installation created from found objects, abandoned houses, and empty lots in a primarily African American neighborhood in Detroit that was started by artist Tyree Guyton in 1986, as a prominent example of playing in and with the city: as an attempt to transform a bleak environment into a creative space that challenges dominant conceptions of urban decay and disillusion. The article uses various approaches from play theory – drawn, among others, from Huizinga's Homo Ludens, von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, and Sutton-Smith's Ambiguity of Play – to suggest that the project's playful transformation of castoff everyday items into culturally meaningful artifacts aims to redefine popular discourses about the failing American postindustrial city.

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BibTex
Stein, Daniel: Playing the City. The Heidelberg Project in Detroit. In: Navigationen - Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften, Jg. 16 (2016), Nr. 1, S. 53-70. DOI: 10.25969/mediarep/1584.
@ARTICLE{Stein2016,
 author = {Stein, Daniel},
 title = {Playing the City. The Heidelberg Project in Detroit},
 year = 2016,
 doi = {10.25969/mediarep/1584},
 volume = 16,
 address = {Siegen},
 journal = {Navigationen - Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften},
 number = 1,
 pages = {53--70},
}
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