Mapping the death and life of a great American City
Review of A People’s Atlas of Detroit, Edited by Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky and Tim Smallman Wayne State University Press 2020
Phil Cohen
Detroit is the city where the great American urban dream of uniting technological and social progress finally and most spectacularly fell apart. A city built around the automobile industry, where the car was king, brought job security and prosperity to its working class during the twenty-year post-war boom. Now it has become a dramatic symbol of the fall-out from deindustrialisation and the political transformation of the US rust belt into a base camp of support for populisms of both the Left and the Right[1]. Today 25% of its population cannot even afford to buy a car second-hand. This is also the city where Black municipal power became institutionalised and where a sizeable population of African–Americans became middle-class home owners and in that sense were able for the first time to buy into the American Dream.
Just how quickly that dream collapsed into a waking nightmare is graphically mapped and documented in this book, put together by a group of Black community activists who have been at the forefront of the struggle to reclaim the city from the urban dereliction and bankruptcy caused by the flight of capital over the last two decades .
Jane Jacobs did not focus on Detroit, but in her famous book[2] she presciently identified the concatenation of factors that would lead to the destruction of a city’s civic economy. Detroit in its heyday was characterised by what she called ‘vacuum, frontiers’, scars in the urban fabric produced by railways, highways, industrial docks, mono-activity districts which cut inter-district pedestrian communication, and caused progressive decay of economic activity in the surrounding area. What she called a ‘death spiral’ was set in motion in Detroit by planning oriented to the outskirts, with well-off taxpayers progressively moving beyond the city‘s administrative boundaries and into suburbia while the city centre lost commercial activity and, of course ,its tax base.
Jacobs’s own solution to this problem was what she called ‘spontaneous un-slumming’, piecemeal neighbourhood renewal led by small community-oriented businesses, and aided by public investment in local infrastructure. As has been frequently pointed out, in many cases this formula can give legitimacy to a neoliberal agenda which accelerates gentrification in the inner city and casts entrepreneurs and middle class professionals in a heroic light as pioneers of culture-led regeneration, meanwhile turning a blind eye to the displacement of an urban underclass that this process entails.
Certainly this has been the dominant narrative informing Detroit’s partial recovery since 2008. As such it is the main focus of the critique which A People’s Atlas develops of what it calls the regeneration myth of downtown Detroit: its portrayal as an urban wilderness, a post-apocalyptic landscape, or simply a tabula rasa awaiting rediscovery and redevelopment by hippy entrepreneurs motivated by environmentalist and communitarian concerns. Against this storyline, the aim of the atlas is to provide a platform to raise up the voices of grassroots Black community activists who have been involved in campaigns for justice around the city’s food, transport, energy and water economies, the creation of affordable housing, and the achievement of racial equality. Inspired by the theoretical work of Cedric Robinson and David Harvey[3] the book seeks to draw the threads of these disparate struggles together around a comprehensive critique of racial capitalism and how it has shaped, or distorted, the American urban dream. In particular they draw on the notion of urban revanchism to depict the concerted backlash against gains made by oppressed and marginalised groups in the city. Using a rich mixture of oral testimony, interviews, analysis, maps and photography, the atlas documents both the workings of State and market in reproducing and legitimating spatial inequalities and the multiple forms of popular resistance that this has produced. They remain optimistic in the final chapter that ‘another city is possible’. They outline an alternative ethics of care that might guide a renewal of urban community life and offer a ‘build back better’ strategy with a green, post-capitalist vision of what Detroit could yet become.
The Atlas is the work of many hands. It lists 75 contributors, a third of them academics from local universities, a third community activists, and the final third local artists – a good mix. Many of them are involved in the United Detroiters network which is attempting to build links between different sectors of struggle. The urgent need to create a united front against the forces that are seeking to retrofit the city as the hub of already failed post-industrial economy was the prime motive force in putting the atlas together.
Therein lies both the book’s many strengths and some of its weaknesses. The Atlas is a handbook for community activists documenting the creative endeavours of dozens of campaigns and we have much to learn from it. It makes effective use of timelines in charting the historical unfolding of the city’s current crisis. I especially liked two maps comparing the process of racial and class profiling of neighbourhoods in 1935 and 1960s and a topographical series showing changing patterns of Black home ownership over an extended period. These folks were devastated by the subprime mortgage foreclosures that precipitated the global financial crisis of 2008, and many lost both homes and livelihoods in the ensuing recession. On the whole the maps provide effective visualisations of a range of social statistics, such as the spatial distribution of wealth and poverty, although a trick was missed in not providing a map showing the entanglements of White flight and Black displacement.
The chapter on the urban commons highlights the way White middle class activists have appropriated the term to justify their ‘re-imagineering’ of downtown Detroit as a kind of ‘frontier counter-culture’ while ignoring the issue of systemic racial inequality. This brought to mind the recent ironic comment by one Black Lives Matter activist that ‘wherever you see BLM signs go up in the windows of what used to be a Black neighbourhood, you can be sure it’s well off white folks who have just moved in and feel they need to indulge in a spot of virtue signalling’.
The frustrated aspirations of the Black middle class have made them into a new radicalising force which has become linked to the anger and despair of the Black underclass through the Black Lives Matter movement. Although the book went to press before the killing of George Floyd catapulted the movement onto a global political stage, it has been around for some considerable time in the USA. It is strange that a book which is otherwise a mine of information about the micro-politics of Black radicalism should mention BLM only once and in a footnote. The ideologically fraught fact that cross-class alliances are central to effective urban coalitions for radical change is fudged, or rather, dodged.
There are other glaring omissions. We are promised a multi-vocal narrative, but this is a People’s Atlas in which the voices and experiences of some people are conspicuous by their absence. We do not hear from Detroit’s LGTBQ community or from the local Asian or Latino communities. It should be more accurately entitled An African-American Peoples Atlas. To be fair, 80% of Detroit’s population is Black , and these lacunae are openly acknowledged by the editors in their introduction, but the justification for them remains weak. There is a thread of separatism which runs through many of the contributions, especially in the chapter on Globalisation from Below which graphically documents the growth of Afro-centric groups whose identity politics focus on the global African diaspora.
It was refreshing and inspiring then to learn about the life and work Grace Lee Boggs in the field of political education, labour and community organizing.[4] Her numerous projects were informed by a theoretically sophisticated model of urban social movements as agencies of coalition for radical change, coupled with a profound humanistic sensibility to what people need to nurture their capacity for personal growth and social fulfilment.
It is important to highlight and celebrate the achievements of such community activists. Their work is scarcely ever referenced by academic writers about urban conflict, even and especially by those of a radical disposition. Nevertheless I could not help feeling at times that the voices we heard were mostly those whose words or actions supported the perspectives and arguments being developed. We were not allowed to hear the internal debates that give a political culture its vitality, nor the perspectives of community inactivists, both of which have a place in the critical self-understanding of social movements, and which the late David Graeber called for and practiced, before his recent and untimely death from Covid-19.[5]
But perhaps the greatest weakness of the Atlas is the way it sidelines the cultural politics of Detroit and in particular its music industry. Detroit is the birthplace of Rhythm and Blues, the home of Tamla Motown Records, and it continues to be a vibrant centre of rap, hip hop, house and techno. In a word it is the heartland of Soul. This is after all a music whose evolution traces the trajectory of Black politics from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. African-American music produced in the city has transformed popular culture, not only in the USA but across the world.[6] How was it possible to produce a People’s Atlas of Detroit that ignores this contribution?
One reason perhaps is that the editors of the book are suffering from an acute anxiety of influence which has resulted in a certain foreclosure of its scope. The atlas is haunted by the ghost of William Bunge, author of Fitzgerald: Geography a of a revolution, published in 1971. The book broke new ground in combining social cartography, visual ethnography, photo-montage and oral testimony to portray the lives and struggles of ordinary Detroiters caught up in the rebellion of Black ghettos across America. The editors of the People’s Atlas explicitly claim to be following in his footsteps in conducting their own version of Bunge’s ‘expeditionary geography’. For instance, the map on page 191 is directly based on one in Fitzgerald and shows the extraction of wealth from Detroit 1960-2010, just as Bunge’s map dramatized the flight of capital to the suburbs in the 1950’s. There is a lot of controlled and righteous anger in A People’s Atlas, but it tends to iterate on a single note of indignation and there is precious little of the wit, imagination and humour to be found in Fitzgerald, or, for that matter, in some recent radical community based countermapping work.[7] Of course the political conjuncture has changed, even if many of the structures of socio-spatial inequality linked to class, race, gender and generation have not. Perhaps what is missing now is the hopeful sense of local struggles belonging to a wider political movement, as a counter-hegemonic force bridging some of these divisions. Although in principle the planetary environment crisis does provide such a frame as articulated in the Green New Deal.
Perhaps the editors, in their desire to emulate Bunge’s project in its revolutionary message, missed one of the key elements of his method. Bunge makes a crucial distinction between what he calls skeletal maps, those which visualise statistical information, and life maps, those which tell stories that bring this information to human life. The first kind of map is static, providing a fixed framing of social reality, whereas the second shows that reality in movement. Bunge thinks that both kinds of cartography are necessary. They complement one another, the scientific mapping of the geo-politics of urban life and its structural and spatial inequalities guaranteeing the verisimilitude or authenticity of the personal geographies through which those inequalities are experienced and sometimes resisted.
The maps in A People’s Atlas largely belong to the first kind of cartography and very good they are too. What is missing are the second kind of maps, portraying personal geographies. The editors did run some participatory community mapping workshops, but none of this material is reproduced in the Atlas. So for example, there is a section devoted to young people and educational reform, but ,apart from an interview with a student activist, there is no exploration of how this generation of young Detroiters is making sense of the changes they are living through, the role of contemporary youth culture, the impact of the drugs economy, the opioid addiction epidemic, or above all the collapse of stable transitions into adulthood, all of which are just asking to be represented through participatory mapping methods.
Despite these reservations this is a book which radical cartographers, environmentalists and community activists alike will want on their shelves. It is beautifully produced with full colour photographs and maps. Chapter three ‘Growing the Revolution’, which details a number of brilliant community based environmental projects, is worth the price of the book alone.
Author
Phil Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London and a research director of Livingmaps Network. He is also the project co-ordinator of the Young Citizen’s Atlas of London., a new initiative by the network.
Notes
[1] See for example Jennifer M Silva We’re still Here: Pain and Politics in the heart of America Oxford University Press 2019 and Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat Donmar playtext 2019
[2] Jane Jacobs The Life and Death of Great American Cities originally published in 1961.
[3] See Cedric Robinson On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of resistence Pluto Press 2019 and David Harvey ‘The Right to the City’ new left review 53 2008. Also Neil Smith The New Urban Froniter: Gentrification and the Revanchist City Routledge 1996
[4] See Grace Lee Boggs The Next American Revolution: Sustainable activism for the 21st century (2011) and her autobiography Living for Change(1998)
[5] See David Graeber Direct Action: an ethnography AK Press 2009
[6] Suzanne Smith Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit OR Books 2009
[7] See for instance This is not an Atlas: a global collection of counter cartographies published as Volume 26 of Social and Cultural Geography in 2018