Michael Peter Smith - Reinventing Detroit

REINVENTING
DETROIT

Comparative Urban and Community Research Series

Michael Peter Smith, editor

The Comparative Urban and Community Research Series is devoted to cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research in the social sciences on processes of urbanization and community change throughout the world. The series focuses on the key driving forces of urban change, including economic and cultural globalization, transnational-ism in all of its forms, and the grassroots politics of place-making. Each volume in the series is focused on distinct themes such as the regional development of cities along the Pacific Rim, the politics of urban social movements, the global restructuring of city life, and the agency possible in marginalized urban spaces.

Titles in this series include:

Remaking Urban Citizenship

Transnational Ties

The Human Face of Global Mobility

City and Nation

Transnationalism from Below

Marginal Spaces

After Modernism

Breaking Chains

Pacific Rim Cities in the World Economy

Power, Community, and the City

Copyright 2015 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, 10 Corporate Place South, Suite 102, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854. www.transactionpub.com

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015006289

ISBN: 978-1-4128-5693-5

eBook: 978-1-4128-5660-7

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reinventing Detroit : the politics of possibility / Michael Peter Smith, L. Owen Kirkpatrick, editors.

pages cm. -- (Comparative urban and community research ; volume 11)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4128-5693-5 -- ISBN 978-1-4128-5660-7 1. Urban policy--Michigan--Detroit. 2. Urban renewal--Michigan--Detroit. 3. Shrinking cities--Michigan--Detroit. 4. Municipal government--Michigan--Detroit. 5. Municipal finance--Michigan--Detroit. 6. Detroit (Mich.)--Economic conditions--21st century. I. Smith, Michael P., editor. II. Kirkpatrick, L. Owen, editor.

HT168.D45R45 2015

307.34160977434--dc23

2015006289

Michael Peter Smith and L. Owen Kirkpatrick

L. Owen Kirkpatrick and Michael Peter Smith

Mathieu Hikaru Desan and George Steinmetz

Margaret Dewar, Matthew Weber, Eric Seymour, Meagan Elliott, and Patrick Cooper-McCann

William K. Tabb

Jason Hackworth

Reynolds Farley

John Gallagher

L. Owen Kirkpatrick

Jamie Peck

Peter Eisinger

Gar Alperowitz and Steve Dubb

David Fasenfest

Peter Marcuse

Michael Peter Smith and L. Owen Kirkpatrick

Detroit, Michigan, has followed an arcing historical path that is as dramatic as it is iconic. The Motor City, once an industrial powerhouse, has been unsparingly beset by demographic shrinkage, economic contraction, and socio-spatial abandonment and deterioration since its peak in the mid-twentieth century. This slow, chronic pattern of urban decline culminated in an acute hyper-crisis in the wake of the Great Recession, triggering concerted efforts to restructure the forms and functions of municipal governance. Urban restructuring in Detroit has largely been implemented via institutional and political channels, such as the formal process of municipal bankruptcy, the State of Michigans emergency management of the citys affairs, and the increasing role of public-private partnerships in providing social services and shaping urban space. The rapid and far-reaching structural changes arising from Detroits hyper-crisis provide an apt occasion to fundamentally rethink the dilemmas facing the city and the range of political possibilities available to those collectively trying to address them.

Detroit is also ripe for reinterpretation and collective reinvention in ways relating to the lived spaces of the city. Detroit is now experiencedby both residents and visitors alikevia the targeted retrenchment of public infrastructures and services, the skeletal erasure of the built environment, and the percolating pressure of natural reclamation. And yet Detroit cannot be fully understood only in terms of loss, decay, and dereliction. Rather, urban decline and abandonment is uneven and intermittent, containing the embryonic possibilities of new and/or renewed forms of social integration and economic development. Some scholars insist, for instance, that abandoned industrial spaces be seen as both desolate and empty, and fecund and expectant. From this perspective, Detroit should be simultaneously understood as [v]oid, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation. Abandoned spaces exist outside the citys effective circuits and productive structuresa condition that presents residents with new modes of perceiving, and acting on, the city (de Sol-Morales, 1995, 120).

To reinvent, of course, is to create anew or remake something in a form different than its original. In the case of cities, reinvention often refers to the ways in which urban places, particularly those in decline, are remadetheir communities and built environments reordered and their histories and cultures re-brandedso as to be better positioned in the global economy. In the context of austerity and public retrenchment, as we will see, fiscal crisis can narrow the debate among policymakers by effectively funneling limited public resources into the citys commercial core in an effort to create spaces of mass entertainment, high-end residential enclaves, and entrepreneurial, high-tech innovation zones, while most of the citys residential neighborhoods are left to decay. But despite these trends, urban reinvention remains a contested and contingent process, and as such is a moment pregnant with emergent political possibilities. In order to best assess the political potentiality of the current historical moment in Detroita difficult objective given the indeterminate and multiform nature of the tasktwo analytic procedures are necessary.

First, alternative theoretical models and new epistemological insights are necessary of the Detroit case.

Second, reimagining the future of the city requires rereading its past and reinterpreting its present. Our substantive analysis begins, therefore, by explicitly making the past present as a part of the analysis. The two chapters comprising of national urban policy and the spreading ideology of market fundamentalism, respectively. By analytically presencing the citys past, these authors help us better understand the structural origins of current conditions.

Part III more fully fleshes out the present condition of Detroit as a baseline for thinking about the citys future trajectory. The four chapters in this section analyze: the politics of Detroit in bankruptcy; the tradeoffs between democracy and efficiency involved in the emergency management of the city; the ritual politics entailed in Detroits de-democratization; and the distortions and misrepresentations involved in common discursive framings of Detroits bankruptcy, which ostensibly justify the shift of costs and risks onto the city and its most socioeconomically marginalized citizens.