Visiting Detroit

For several years, I have taken urban geography students from the Netherlands to Detroit. I never have to work very hard to market the trip. “Detroit”; the very word evokes powerful images and strong meanings, especially to European urbanists. My students come to Detroit wanting to see the ruins; I take them there because I want to challenge them to look beyond them.

The trip is part of a wider course on North American cities. We start in Toronto, my hometown. When the scheduling permits, I like to cross into the US from Canada at Sarnia/Port Huron, 100 km north of Detroit. We drive south along I-94 through the quiet Michigan countryside. However, the rural nature of the interstate does not last long and the freeway is soon bordered by subdivisions, trailer parks, and medium-sized industrial warehouses. Exits become busier and contain more fast-food restaurants, strip malls, and gas stations. When we pass 24 Mile Road, we enter an unbroken zone of development that continues all the way to Downtown Detroit (see Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3).

Most people would continue along I-94 straight into Detroit. However, we head over to Gratiot Avenue in the northeast suburb of Roseville. Continuing our journey south on Gratiot, we drive through ordinary American suburbia (see Figure 1.4). To Americans, this landscape is commonplace and apart from local businesses such as Coney Island restaurants and the unique “Michigan Left” road system, such a drive could be anywhere in America. To my Dutch students, however, even this mundane landscape is foreign and intriguing.

After a short drive along Gratiot, we cross the famous 8 Mile Road; the first cameras appear trying to grab a quick photo of the street sign. As we enter into the City of Detroit, the students watch as virtually everything they saw in the suburbs literally crumbles before their eyes. The commercial businesses lining both sides of Gratiot disappear into abandonment, burned out buildings, and vacant lots. Down the side streets, many of the houses are abandoned or victims of arson attacks. Vacant lots proliferate. Trash litters the streets. Weeds sprout out from the sidewalks. Even most of the cars have gone elsewhere and traffic on this broad thoroughfare is minimal.

Listening to the voices of people like Grace Lee Boggs, it is easy to be inspired and filled with a sense of hope. Hers was a powerful voice projecting an alternative narrative to that of urban failure. The initiatives that have grown out of conversations at the Boggs Center, or through the passionate visions and tireless work of activists and community and civic groups, offer genuine alternatives for a more inclusive, fair, and socially just future. I am honored and privileged to have been able to share conversations with people like Yusef Bunchy Shakur, Malik Yakini, Sandra Hines, and the many others who are involved in initiatives that are making a real difference to Detroit and its residents.

These voices offer an alternative to the narrative that dominated Detroit for decades, that of decline and abandonment. But they also need to be placed in context. Contributions by George Galster, Ren Farley, Joshua Akers, John Gallagher, and others offer sobering reality checks as to the severity of Detroit's challenges and the inability of its current political and economic systems to tackle some of the city's biggest problems. Only by highlighting complex and diverse perspectives can simplistic narratives be challenged and the contradictions of Detroit's economic, social, racial, and political conditions be revealed.

Yet, Detroit and many other cities around the world are still portrayed in simplistic, one-dimensional narratives, which is why scholars, practitioners, and others need to continually challenge those messages by asking difficult questions and offer alternative ways of interpreting the city.

In Detroit, the dominant narrative for decades was as a metonym for urban failure. The peak of this narrative came in the years after 2008, with the global financial crisis, the US subprime mortgage crisis, and the bailout of the auto industry: Detroit's prominence as the poster child for urban decay took it to a world stage. Filmmakers, journalists, photographers, and academics from around the world put Detroit's problems into global limelight. It was in these years that numerous coffee-table books depicting the city's ruins were published (Austin and Doerr, 2010; Marchant and Meffre, 2010; Moore, 2010; Taubman, 2011), as well as films such as Detropia, which relied heavily on ruin imagery.