Nevermind Brinks, try art. Razzle Dazzle security sculptures are popping up in the Davison-Conant neighborhood thanks to Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert. As Cope says in the article, thieves tend to stay away from anything too "arty."
Excerpt from the
New York Times:
The most famous Detroit precedent for this strategy — and the one Cope
points to as another inspiration — is the artist Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project.
Dating to 1986, this involved practically encrusting vacant houses with
found objects from abandoned lots, creating a surreally vibrant sense
of life. I first encountered the Razzle Dazzle security sculptures,
interestingly enough, on a blog called Aesthetics of Joy, which
described the "joyfully uninviting" tension of a thing that looks lashed
together from junk but is deliberately decorative: "It offers the
promise that a space will be inhabited by people who will care for it
and restore it."
Another previous contribution to the semiotics of abandonment, with
different aims, was the project Detroit, Demolition, Disneyland.Sick of
waiting for follow-through on demolitions delayed for years, an
anonymous group painted properties a single, brilliant color from widely
available paint lines. "Every board, every door, every window, is caked in
Tiggeriffic Orange," its manifesto declared, inviting others to join
in. (A number, though not all, of the orange houses were promptly
demolished.)
Design 99's work echoes the exuberance of the Heidelberg Project, but
the Razzle Dazzle devices could easily be replicated elsewhere. Cope
muses about making plans available online (they're a bit more
complicated than they look), but the real power of the objects isn't so
much in duplication as in inspiration: here is something new, practical
and aesthetically pleasing that could start a conversation about the
visual language of unused property — not just in one city but all over
the place.
Read the entire article
here.
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