Unbecoming place: urban imaginaries in transition in Detroit

Abstract

The population of Detroit has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the imaginaries that shape the city are in constant transformation, changing with each successive government or regeneration initiative. Since 2010, downtown Detroit has been targeted by blight removal projects, real-estate speculation and redevelopment plans. These growth-oriented imaginaries shape the ways in which place is perceived and encountered – materially and conceptually – often responding to ruin and decay with erasures and evictions that play out through cultural geographies of precarity, simultaneously disappearing and reproducing conditions of inequality. The changes in the city are reflected in my own experiences of Detroit in 2009 and 2015, using walking and driving methods to support grounded and emplaced encounters with the ‘unbecoming’ ruins in the city. The city of 2009 is being replaced – in imagination, and in reality – by a new way of thinking about Detroit, which asks us to imagine differently, to positively re-envision the future possibilities for growth and change. This article interrogates the different imaginaries of regeneration in the city and considers, through urban ruins, places that are absent from the new way of thinking Detroit. Through Berlant’s ‘precarity’ and Massey’s ‘emplacement’, this discussion reveals a complex process of unbecoming that is typified in the unstable material, cultural and historical geographies that structure the experience of place in Detroit.

Iconic Architecture and Middle-Class Politics of Memory in a Deindustrialized City

“…The latter champion the narrative of a ‘New Scotland’ characterized by progressive post-industrial development but lack reflection on deepening socio-economic inequalities in the wake of deindustrialization. In her study of Detroit, Fraser (2018) likewise points out the disconnect between official urban development strategies, which follow market imperatives of economic and population growth, and residents’ imaginaries which foreground everyday routines, sense of place, and place memories.…”

“…Sklair (2010) has similarly analysed urban governments’ predilection for iconic architecture as a way to effect a break with the past and subvert earlier planning conventions. Case studies indeed suggest that industrial heritage is often erased or commodified as local governments seek to create new, forward-looking imaginaries (Clark and Gibbs, 2020; Collins, 2016; Fraser, 2018; Gómez, 1998). While Kaika (2010) sees this as primarily an undertaking of (transnational) economic elites, others have argued that the meanings projected by new icons are not merely the product of marketing strategies but are also grounded in the memories and lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ residents (Miles and Paddison, 2005; Richter, 2017).…”

Decommissioned places: Ruins, endurance and care at the end of the first nuclear age

“…Recent anthropological and critical work has provided a rich literature engaging with spaces of ruination on these terms, offering perspectives that not only acknowledge the colonial gaze implicit in them, but also arguing for the ruin as a site of inhabitation, for the burgeoning of emergent forms of life and as a mode of comprehending ways of living in and through planetary modes of violence. Indeed, it is in that apogee of ruin‐porn, Detroit, that urban geographers and political ecologists have paid attention to the political effects of ruin‐gazing, refocusing their lens on the city as lived place and engaging its inhabitants as interlocutors rather than spectacle (Fraser, ; Safransky, , ). In doing so, they value ruins as spatial articulations of habitation and abandonment amid ongoing economic and political processes, and highlight the political work that ruin temporalities do in supporting capital accumulation and green gentrification.…”

Geographies of deindustrialization and the working‐class: Industrial ruination, legacies, and affect

“…Also, since his formative work, Edensor () has seemingly revised his earlier aversion to more substantive historical knowledge, drawing on historical source material in later work. Nonetheless, Edensor's innovative approaches have inspired an accumulating body of literature on industrial ruins that largely leaves out their histories (DeSilvey & Edensor, ; Fraser, ; Hill, ; McClanahan, ; Wheeler, ). Productive work has sought to incorporate Edensor's methodological and theoretical innovations of affect and embodiment with more traditional ethnographic methods to repopulate ruins, highlighting their social rather than personal dynamics.…”