Page - 131 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

131 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures man control, so the trope of the phoenix rising replaces effort (and the potential for failure) with the image of a fully real- ized success springing forth. It takes the story of one success- ful family as representative of a system that is, improbably, rebirthing itself — and it ignores the fact that the success of one family does not repair the situations of scores of oth- ers. If pockets of Detroit are already experiencing a renais- sance, such narratives imply, then one need not ask the hard questions about where the responsibility lies for the systemic problems that are not magically repaired by one successful new business. The great bird rising from the ashes highlights a mythos of rebirth rather than insisting on difficult, practi- cal, long-term, coordinated efforts, which are the only thing that will really enable a post-industrial city to thrive again. Ironically, though they may have roots in individual success stories, such narratives often also subtly privilege a vision of cities as buildings and economies, while deemphasizing that these are ultimately places full of inhabitants whose individ- ual lives matter — because they are narratives that take the single success as representative of the success of the whole. (Tange 2015, 10) While not explicitly naming de Certeau, she makes a plea to recognize space as practiced place: “as our current cultural mo- ment has made vividly clear, if one is tasked with budget-cutting and stop-gap measures, it is apparently all too easy to ignore the human element of cities in favor of statistics, systemic biases, or columns of accounts” (ibid., 10–11). Similarly, in reading Os- man Khan’s performative sculpture Come Hell or High Water, which was “part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s (MOCAD’s) show (in)Habitation: A Reconsideration of Domestic- ity (June 7–July 13, 2013), Judith Hamera shows how the slow, repeated flooding of a “quintessential American middle-class Rustbelt living room” on display in a see-through acrylic con- tainer “both evokes and disrupts images of Detroit’s crumbling residential infrastructure” (Hamera 2014, 12, 13), while David Shalliol draws welcome attention to how in Detroit Is No Dry