{"id":9342,"date":"2017-07-10T08:01:59","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T13:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9342"},"modified":"2017-07-10T08:08:40","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T13:08:40","slug":"detroit-as-template-for-urban-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/07\/10\/detroit-as-template-for-urban-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Detroit as template for urban change?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I recently visited Detroit (for the\u00a0ASLE “Rust\/Resistance” conference) and was interested in seeing how it’s changed since I wrote\u00a0this (brief) piece<\/a>. Given how little time I spent there, my impressions aren’t worth much, but here they are.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Compared to other cities, Detroit\u00a0feels “underpopulated.” The leading industrial center of the early 20th century U.S. — and global symbol\u00a0of automobilic modernity\u00a0— has lost over 60% of its population in the space of 65 years (down from 2-plus million to some 670,000 now).<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Above & below: The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative<\/a> “Agrihood”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0campus and Midtown cultural district’s relative commingling of skin colors.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Above & below: The Heidelberg Project<\/a> (below: or is it an Afrofuturist robot jazz band?)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Comparing it to other cities, however, I had the sense that Detroit provides a vision of a possible future — not a good one, but\u00a0not as bad as others either.<\/p>\n

Like it, other cities will collapse economically and get hollowed out, with wealthy folks fleeing to the suburbs and others eking out a living and even reinventing community economies in the ruins. Artists and urban gardeners and anarcho-communards might find their way there (though there are only so many such people to go around). Wealthy elites will try to get it all back under their control — through imposed states of fiscal emergency, as happened here<\/a>, or through other means. Sometimes they will, other times things will descend into chaos (and Detroit’s murder rate is still quite\u00a0high<\/a>); but somewhere in the ruins interesting things will happen, too.<\/p>\n

For all the likelihood of economic and technological collapse in the decades to come, there’s a certain from-the-ground-up inventiveness that one sees in Detroit today which offers hope that things could always be otherwise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

All photos are my own. Special thanks to the Detroit Experience Factory<\/a> for a bus tour that took me to the Heidelberg Project (#1, 4, 5, and 7 above) among other places.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently visited Detroit (for the\u00a0ASLE “Rust\/Resistance” conference) and was interested in seeing how it’s changed since I wrote\u00a0this (brief) piece. Given how little time I spent there, my impressions aren’t worth much, but here they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196],"tags":[4468,455051,628,455046,455045,313,123577,455044,455043,455042,455052],"class_list":["post-9342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","tag-anarchism","tag-car-culture","tag-cities","tag-collapse-of-western-civilization","tag-decline-of-western-civilization","tag-detroit","tag-eco-anarchism","tag-motor-city","tag-regeneration","tag-urban-agriculture","tag-urban-apocalypse"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2qG","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1058,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/13\/amidst-the-ruins-of-motor-city\/","url_meta":{"origin":9342,"position":0},"title":"amidst the ruins of Motor City","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 13, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"As goes Motor City, so should go the world - or at least eco-activists might like to argue that. The archetypal home of American car culture, Detroit, has been decaying for years. It's now collapsed from a city of two million to less than half of that, and in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"brush_park_5.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/04\/brush_park_5.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/02\/16\/the-ecology-of-syriankurdish-freedom\/","url_meta":{"origin":9342,"position":1},"title":"The ecology of Syrian\/Kurdish freedom","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Eco-theorists may recognize the title of this post as a variation on the title of Murray Bookchin's audacious and\u00a0deeply\u00a0influential (for many, including myself) 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (pdf here). What's little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/_38eVyMfag0\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8902,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/07\/12\/assessing-murray-bookchins-legacy\/","url_meta":{"origin":9342,"position":2},"title":"Assessing Murray Bookchin’s legacy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Damian White has posted an excellent review\u00a0of Janet Biehl's book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin at the Jacobin blog. Bookchin's legacy has undergone something of a revival of late\u00a0thanks to the\u00a0efforts of Kurdish eco-socialist communitarians in Rojava. As he did in his 2008 book Bookchin: A Critical\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9316,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/06\/23\/bioregionalism-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":9342,"position":3},"title":"Bioregionalism primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 23, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"When I began my involvement with environmental politics in the 1980s, the main currents of radical or critical thought were represented by deep ecologists\u00a0(or biocentrists), social ecologists (gathered around Murray Bookchin and his Institute for Social Ecology), and ecofeminists, and they seemed more at odds with each other than united.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5301,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/09\/13\/the-concept-image\/","url_meta":{"origin":9342,"position":4},"title":"The concept-image","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 13, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I love gex's simple, elegant, and beautiful graphic depictions of philosophical ideas. I'm waiting for more. (Like anarchism, process, and Daoism.) H\/t to Technoccult.","rel":"","context":"In "Visual culture"","block_context":{"text":"Visual culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/image_nation\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/09\/philo9-194x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":9342,"position":5},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9342"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9390,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9342\/revisions\/9390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}