While most art institutions have wound down for the summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has been busy cranking things up. The companion exhibitions now on view, “Vertical Urban Factory” and “Post-Industrial Complex,” are arguably the most timely and thought-provoking in recent memory. Running through it all is the simple yet profound question: “Who owns the future?” This question not only applies to Detroit, although arguably this is the place where its implications are most starkly presented, but to the United States and indeed to the rest of the world. The exhibitions capture a dialectic of opposing forces at work in the city as it looks to reboot for the twenty-first century.

One force is working from the top down and it’s what might be termed the “Techno Utopia.” The other works from the bottom up and can be called the “Postindustrial Arcadia.” The former seeks to catch the wave of postmodern capitalism; the latter exists if not in outright opposition then at least in resistance to it. One reinforces the typical gentrification model, the use of the so-called creative economy to drive speculation and investment, basically the purview of what post-OWS is known as the 1 percent. The other operates within the cracks of the capitalist system to open up new ways of thinking and living for rest of us. Tied together, the shows explore the potential for realizing what sociologist Eric Olin Wright terms “the real utopia.”

The summer exhibition (“Vertical Urban Factory” and “Post Industrial Complex” are a curatorial yin and yang and thus need to be discussed as a single case study) pick up a narrative that began five years ago with the “Shrinking Cities” project, exhibited at MOCAD in conjunction with Cranbrook Art Museum. In that exhibition and its surrounding research, Detroit was posited as an extreme example of the abandonment of the urban environment in the wake of the demise of the modern mass industrial system AKA Fordism.

“Shrinking Cities” . . .

Read more: Detroit Museum Debates the Future