As a recent and temporary transplant to Michigan, how have I experienced Detroit?  By parsing election-year political rhetoric or while watching local news broadcasts at 10 or 11?  Perhaps online through the hypnotic hints of the city's industrial past on the Web's "Fabulous Ruins" or vicariously via pixels of places courtesy of Mapquest and Google Earth? Maybe through the nostalgic lyrics of Motown, where I have been promised music swayin', records playin' and dancin' in the streets?

I landed in Ann Arbor, an urban historian up the road and on the periphery as Detroit attempts to reinvent itself in preparation for Super Bowl XL in 2006. As the local governments scramble to build bold blue bridges and to cloak abandoned buildings to conceal neglect, I am left to wonder what to make of this town to the east, a shrinking, post-industrial city that looms large on opposing teams' Jumbotrons and in rappers' rhymes.

Fortunately, I have been offered some glimpses of Detroit that didn't make it into the pre-game video in Sacramento or into "8 Mile."

On a sunny September afternoon, at one of the orientation events for new faculty and students in Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Eric Dueweke, a third-generation Detroit native, campus lecturer and the college's community partnership manager, acted as our docent, shepherding us eager Michigan arrivals in and out of tall buildings, past the University's new urban outpost. We circled stadiums, casinos, high-tech incubators and infill luxury loft apartments. Dueweke trundled us through Mexicantown, Eastern Market, Indian Village's annual neighborhood yard sale, and incidentally (and curiously) through the leather-clad crowds gathered outside a corner church for what seemed to be a very well-attended funeral of an evidently highly esteemed black motorcyclist. Crisscrossing the city, we, who hailed from five continents, students and faculty from urban planning, urban design and architecture boarded a pair of hired coaches and traversed the city - east and west, up and down, hither and yon.

Dueweke introduced us to some familiar tourist destinations including Belle Isle, the Renaissance Center and so on. But more importantly, he also insisted that we visit neighborhoods where members of local Community Development Corporations have been staking their claims with new housing units, commercial strips, and freshly laid infrastructure.

Through it all, Dueweke helped us see beyond what others might dismiss as "lost spaces" and "redundant retail." Amid these urban voids, the city simultaneously whispered what was and what might be for the people of Detroit. Some vacant lots reminded us of Detroit's glorious; others recalled protests and struggles; still others remained hushed.

Just off Gratiot, on Heidelberg Street, some lots refused to whisper. There, beginning at Ellery Street near an installation entitled "Doors of Opportunity," some residents and voids clamored for attention.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, when many of the nation's cities choked, local artist Tyree Guyton, inspired by his grandfather's stories, enlisted the help of neighborhood children in a project to remake the neighborhood. Using castaway remnants of consumer culture, Guyton transformed junk into art. Painting polka dots and epigrams on every available flat surface, Guyton arranged discarded household appliances, plastic dolls, forsaken sneakers, rusting automobile parts, worn plush toys and box spring mattresses to make whimsical sculptural pieces. He also made a statement.

Now, almost 20 years later, Tyree Guyton - a native son - is both notable and notorious. Despite ongoing tangles with the municipal government, he has amassed mountains of detritus in an effort, he explains, to reclaim a block of his neighborhood from neglect.

Visits to Heidelberg Street give me pause, pressing me to consider whether we can see Detroit's past, present and future all at once here?

Can these urban assemblages serve as oracle or are they simply lawn art?

Might they also be a "public nuisance?"

What we might learn if we imagine that art installations - at the neighborhood scale - can serve as a model of strategy for social change and urban protest?

Recently, on the evening news, we might have noticed young men in France burning automobiles in part, to protest the inability of the state to respond to their needs. What, then, are we to make of young men in Motor City who paint old auto parts for display on Heidelberg Street? How is the state responding to their needs?

There's a profound paradox here in that visitors love to look at the Heidelberg Project. It draws thousands of tourists annually.

For nearly two decades, outsiders have trolled the neighborhoods near the Project