Detroit: Ruin of a City - a reception diary (original) (raw)
On Thursday 18th July 2013, Detroit became the biggest US city yet to formally declare bankruptcy; an almost inevitable consequence of decades of decline, questionable governance and an unfavourable position in the fiscal and political hierarchy. It simply cannot raise the income to pay its bills and honour its crippling debts. It will possibly surprise many that metropolitan Detroit actually only has a population of around 700,000, similar to some medium-sized British cities like Leeds and Nottingham. Detroit arguably occupies greater prominence in the collective consciousness for two reasons: its population used to be much bigger -almost three times the size; and, more importantly, it played such a symbolic role in shaping industrial capitalism in the twentieth century.
Kritikos: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text and Image, 2016
The United States’ national conversation around the city of Detroit, Michigan, is shaped largely by photographs taken in the last ten years of interiors that are shells of their former selves. Depictions include abandoned hospitals theatres and symphony halls, alluding to the time when Detroit was a wealthy cultural center. These images serve to showcase the city’s deterioration since its golden era. Without context, these images can feel make a viewer believe Detroit has been suddenly deserted. Many authors fixate on the cultural conditions that led to such deterioration, but less has been written regarding the pursuit of beauty captured in pictures of a young city in the throes of decline. What is the line between beauty and decay, so often blurred in the context of Detroit? I will examine Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's photographs to analyze the degeneration of “The Motor City” through a formal lens. Furthermore, I will scrutinize the aesthetic and psychological rationales behind these images, the sheer popularity of which attests to their proliferation as a uniquely morbid mass preoccupation. I reveal what lurks uncomfortably beneath the viewer’s pleasure when confronted with urban decay, as well as what particular images of abandonment can adroitly give rise to a mixture of guilt and captivation. It is my assertion that the United States, as a fledgling country without many ancient sites, has instead created an internal tourist industry off of its postmodern ruins, thus allowing citizens and foreigners alike the opportunity to witness true anachronisms. The remains of Detroit are a manufactured artificiality that were created before their time was meant to be over, and despite their oxymoronic existence within a city that still functions as a cultural hub for many, these abandoned spaces are seen as emblematic of beauty inherent in the loss of the American dream. The media attention and vast dissemination of these photographs have allowed the conflicts within these images to be seen and consumed widely, thereby creating a perpetual motion machine feeding gratification to urban explorers and aesthetic hedonists lusting after decay.
Ghosts and Monsters in the Motor City: challenging the trope of Detroit’s decline
2015
In recent decades, the dominant narrative of Detroit has been one of decline. Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy write that this conceit has also become associated with the metaphor of monstrosity which shows the Motor City as a kind of urban nightmare. They write that while some of Detroit’s proponents have embraced this narrative, others have sought to reframe it as one where the city has been preyed on by federal and state neglect. By giving a greater voice to Detroit’s residents, they hope to challenge the city’s ongoing trope of decline.
Social & Cultural Geography, 2021
If there is one object that characterizes the rising interest of human geographers to study the ruins of the recent past, it is the Michigan Central Station in Detroit. While no city has more often been used as a blueprint for contemporary urban decline than Detroit, its ruined train station has become the global symbol for 'ruin porn'. Ruin porn is often criticized for stimulating the viewer's imagination instead of taking into account what "really" goes on in the city. However, in this article, I argue that ruin porn does not create a fantasy of ruination, but on the contrary eliminates the space for fantasy. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, I explore how local ruin gazers turn Michigan Central Station into what Jacques Lacan calls a "sublime object", a remainder of loss that triggers a strong nostalgia. Subsequently, I retrace how ruin porn "desublimates" the ruin by exposing its "naked" materiality, and how the first reopening of Michigan Central Station during its renovation "resublimates" the object by projecting a comeback of Detroit onto its dilapidated walls. In conclusion, I call for deeper consideration of the intertwining between fantasy and materiality in geographic research on urban decay.
The Construction of Emptiness and the Re-Colonisation of Detroit
2018
Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have been in steady decline since the mid twentieth century, when the industry that built it began to downsize and relocate production away from the United States. Decades of disinvestment and racial division left a city with central neighbourhoods sparsely populated and crumbling, while resources and services were concentrated in wealthier suburbs. In recent years, the city's landscape has come to be emblematic of post-industrial decline, urban blight and civic abandonment. My research adopts a mixed-methods ethnographic approach to argue that this framing of the city is in fact a deeply ideological one, with constructions of Detroit as empty and chaotic serving to lay the groundwork for a large-scale project of recolonisation, which draws simultaneously on discourses of greening and redemption. Narratives of abandonment and the re-emergence of urban 'nature' work together to reclaim the city in the interests of a mobile elite whose 'white flight', widely cited as the source of Detroit's problems, never flew much further than the suburbs. Drawing on news media, documentary film, television, photography, semi-structured interviews and extended periods of participant observation in Detroit between 2012 and 2014, I show how constructions of emptiness, a wilful fictionalisation of Detroit's recent history, narratives of greening and a pervasive investment in structures of white supremacy serve to create a Detroit in which wholesale gentrification may be put forward as a social good. (Alberta 2014; Segal 2013) and CEO, owner, or public face of online mortgage broker Quicken Loans, Rock Financial Ventures, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Bedrock Real Estate, is via these companies' de-facto owner of upwards of 100 buildings in Downtown Detroit. Alongside Gilbert, John Hantz's 2013 purchase of 1500 lots on the city's East Side for use as a tree farm; The New York Times' enduring fascination with Detroit; the movement of the city's tax foreclosed property auction online in 2010; and the existence of a mobile, young, college educated, affluent American elite looking for a place to make their mark, all provide not just context but a medium through which the re-colonisation of the city's space is articulated. Chapter two's literature review begins with gentrification. Looking at work within geography and the social sciences more broadly, I consider the possibilities for developing Smith's (1996) idea of the 'urban frontier' in a place such as Detroit, where discussions around regeneration draw not only on a frontier metaphor, but the material conditions of a re-imagined American frontier landscape. I then turn to Florida's Creative Class thesis (Florida 2003), not as a theory to inform my own work, but as a construct that has entered popular discourse around the regeneration of struggling cities and which appears particularly prevalent in more recent constructions of Detroit. I situate my research within the wider gentrification literature, as work which-while building on data about a particular middle-class consumer experienceseeks not so much to understand what gentrifiers want, but how these wants, and the narratives that support them, actively work to dispossess existing residents from both land and civic power. I also situate my research within the wealth of scholarship on the neoliberal city and the idea of urban crisis. Work drawing on Agamben to understand Detroit as 'the homo sacer of American cities' (Draus et al 2010:668) is particularly useful here, as is Peck's tracing of the origins of narratives of urban crisis to discourse produced by right wing think tanks (Peck 2006); and I look to Wacquant (2004,2007) for an understanding of the relationships between blackness, stigma, and the withdrawal of material resources. I then turn to scholarship on ruins, a cross disciplinary field emerging from work in art, architecture and anthropology. Beginning with Doron's analysis of the 'dead zone' (Doron 2000), an urban planning term for derelict and supposedly empty spaces which he argues are in fact host to a range of human and other activity, I move on to Edensor, and a consideration of ruins as sites of meaning and potential, even in their derelict status (Edensor 2005). I critique Woodward's (2004;2012) work, demonstrating the processes of fictionalisation inherent in ruin appreciation, and look to Masco and Yablon to understand the centrality of images of the ruined, 'post-apocalyptic' city to the US cultural imaginary (Masco 2008; Yablon 2004). 'internal Other', and as a 'source of distinction, reminding middle class white Americans of their own status and superiority, of that which they are not and do not wish to become' (Draus et al 2010:664). Ruin Googling the term 'ruin porn' in 2013, I was presented with 6,880,000 results, ranging from photo blogs dedicated to the appreciation of landscapes of abandonment and the personal experiences of urban explorers, to more critical, journalistic accounts lambasting the recent fashion for 'staring at abandoned buildings', and the absence of political analysis it allegedly stands for (Binelli 2012). The term is used largely pejoratively in the latter; a label to apply to art or film that designates is inauthentic and exploitative (Piiparinen 2012, Johnson 2012). At the less professionalised end of the spectrum, where tumblr accounts, personal photography, 26 and urban exploration blogs did use the term they appeared to embrace it as referring to a guilty pleasure, a fascination with something illicit and hidden. Indeed, as Johnson (2012) notes, attaching the word 'porn' to the end of a noun has become both a way for commentators to condemn particular kinds of photography as fetishizing, and as a way for fans to refer to the visual enjoyment of any 'guilty' pleasure, from food to architecture, and even crochet (Johnson 2012). The idea of 'ruin porn' was noticeably absent from academic analysis however, possibly because this ubiquity was a relatively recent phenomenon. A number of journalistic sources cited a 2009 VICE Magazine article on Detroit as originating the term (Johnson 2012, Binelli 2012), and on (admittedly unscientific) research it does appear to be the earliest use (Morton 2009). Internet and news media discussions seemed to approach the issue with a number of concerns in common, and Detroit was at least referred to, if not focused on, in the vast majority. In all cases I encountered, the term 'ruin porn' applied specifically to the appreciation of modern ruins, particularly industrial and institutional architecture, but also abandoned theme parks, transport infrastructure, and domestic structures. Several made use of frontier imagery, particularly in reference to Detroit, describing a 'gold-rush mentality' (Morton 2009), or a 'bacchanal spirit' in the city's 'nothing left to lose Frontier' (Binelli 2012). These accounts invariably shared a running theme of competition for authenticity, and the various routes through which such claims are asserted; opposing art and political engagement, and variously positioning urban explorers, photographers, 'locals' and political activists in a moral continuum that shifts according to the particular point being made (Greco 2012, Binelli 2012, Mullins 2012, Piiparinen 2012). Such writing also continues to participate, to various degrees, in the construction of Detroit and other post-industrial landscapes as empty and even 'post-apocalyptic' (Morton 2009, Mullins 2012)-places where tourists and photographers come to witness 'the end of the world' (Binelli 2012). Many link the aesthetic appreciation of contemporary landscapes of decay with a wider history of ruin contemplation, referencing nineteenth century artistic preoccupations with ancient Greek and Roman Ruins (Binelli 2012, Greco 2012), in one case alongside practices of slum tourism (Mullins 2012). Dereliction, 'ruin porn', and disaster zones as spaces of interest and creativity is a significant and emerging field within art and architecture. For the purposes of this review however, I limit my discussion to studies that are directly relevant to either the neo-colonial dimensions of the production of urban emptiness, or the specifics of Detroit's landscape. Gil Doron's work is concerned with the idea of the 'dead zone'; a standard term in urban planning, and used to refer to spaces understood as empty, derelict, or awaiting development speculation in the Motor City. University of Michigan Press release, May 9 th 2016.
Detroit: the fall of the public realm
Detroit, once a "symbol of industrial dynamist", moved in the post-war era to "a byword for economic decline and urban decay" (AIA 2008). Today, the vacant plots and thinning population in the city have contributed to its characterization as "urban prairie" capturing a dramatic transition of some American cities from economic urban centers to urban deserts, devastated by disinvestment, unemployment and racial segregation. In this paper we analyze the urban network of Detroit and explore how the morphology of the city relates to the economic and socio-cultural forces that took place over from 1796 to 1952, and from 1952 to the present. The first stage captures Detroit's growth to a manufacturing city and a center of industrial power. The second period corresponds to the gradual decay of Detroit in terms of population decline, erosion of the car industry, and class and race segregation. We argue that the physical patterns of the city acted conjointly with social and economic activity to produce different outcomes in the two periods of study. More specifically, the spatial network that once helped to build the interconnected city of industrial manufacture, was gradually expanded and altered facilitating the emergence of the segregated city, based on a different model of spatial accessibility and economic production. The significance of this observation is in showing that the urban fabric possesses social, economic and environmental potential more than what is usually credited for by policy makers, urban designers and planners.