immanence

I recently visited Detroit (for the ASLE “Rust/Resistance” conference) and was interested in seeing how it’s changed since I wrote this (brief) piece. Given how little time I spent there, my impressions aren’t worth much, but here they are.

Compared to other cities, Detroit feels “underpopulated.” The leading industrial center of the early 20th century U.S. — and global symbol of automobilic modernity — has lost over 60% of its population in the space of 65 years (down from 2-plus million to some 670,000 now).

This means there are plenty of vacant lots, empty spaces where there used to be homes, boarded up or hollowed out buildings, midwest-scaled wide open spaces (like 8-lane roads with very little traffic). But also urban farming and market initiatives (with apparently over 1,400 plots of urban farmland in the city), tech and ecopreneurial startups, busy cafes, impressive museums, a new street car line (free for the rest of the summer), and plenty of colorful graffiti.

Above & below: The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative “Agrihood” 

Neighborhoods are very different from each other (I only saw a smattering of them, most of them while traveling through them, so this is overgeneralized). Some are moneyed from decades of having it pumped into them, others are complete economic deserts, and most are probably somewhere in transition, in one direction or the other. 

Racially, the city felt very segregated to me, and I did experience one moment of fear (a verbal death threat — wrong place, wrong time), so comments I have heard about a growing sense of “apartheid” in the city didn’t strike me as unreasonable. (That despite the Wayne State university campus and Midtown cultural district’s relative commingling of skin colors.)