Detroit Metaphoropolis

The Economist Oct 5th 2012, 18:04 by Y.F. | NEW YORK  http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/10/detroit

DETROIT'S demise was bred by the very conditions that made it the world’s fastest growing city in 1930. When its car industry boomed, Detroit was the American dream at its best, presenting a chance for working men to make a decent wage and to enter the middle class. But when the industry’s fortunes faded as demand dropped and competition from abroad intensified, Detroit was badly prepared. A city once bursting at the seams lost half its population. A third of Detroit lies abandoned. Its future is uncertain. President Obama bailed out the city’s auto makers and boasted at the recent Democratic National Convention that “Osama is dead, Detroit is not”. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, declared in a New York Times opinion piece in 2008 that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt. 

But Detroit is also representative of a new America as imagined by artists, entrepreneurs, urban planners and urban farmers. Cheap rent, arable land and the fading glory of a once grand city attract a growing number of young people who see it as the new Brooklyn or Berlin, full of creative possibilities. Matthew Barney, an American artist, staged an elaborate piece of performance art in and about Detroit. David Byrne, of Talking Heads, likes to bike around the city. And Tony Goldman, a developer who revived Miami’s South Beach and Soho in New York, saw great potential in Detroit.

A serious examination of these two competing narratives—Detroit as beyond salvation and Detroit as a canvas for a new, post-industrial America—has been sorely needed. Two recent works take on this task and mostly succeed. “Detropia”, a film by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, looks at the political and physical landscape of the city. “Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis”, a book by Mark Binelli, explores these themes in full, alternating between hard truths and rosy optimism.

Ms Ewing and Ms Grady provide the stark visuals that underpin Detroit’s realities in their beautiful and moving film. When planning the project, the directors intended to focus on the city’s revival. But as they began working, they realised “that the story of Detroit is not one of the future but of people dealing with decisions made long ago; a story of consequences”. Their camera records frustrating union meetings, tense confrontations between the mayor and the public about his plans to “downsize” the city, long rides past abandoned auto plants, and the somewhat surreal existence of artists attracted by the city’s cheap rents.

There is much discussion in “Detropia” of the American middle class and whether it is dying. China serves as the bogeyman to many of the people in the film, most poignantly in scenes of the annual auto show. Excitement about the unveiling of the Chevy Volt, a hybrid car, is dampened by the introduction of a significantly cheaper Chinese vehicle. The anxiety is palpable; the belief that globalisation has killed the middle class all too real.

Mark Binelli, who grew up in Detroit, returned in 2009 to see for himself the supposed resurgence brought in by young artists and idealists. He ended up spending close to three years there. The result is a book that attempts to look at both sides of the story. Mr Binelli does not shy away from the stark reality of the numbers. In 2009, half of all children in Detroit lived in poverty. Nearly half of all adults were functionally illiterate. Services have been cut drastically. Crime is so rampant that many residents think of the city as existing in a state of near-anarchy. In one disturbing scene, Mr Binelli visits a mandatory training session for people intending to obtain a license to carry and conceal a weapon. “What if a 12-year-old with a shotgun in his pants rolls up on a bicycle?” asks the instructor. “Would you have it in you to shoot him? If you are not prepared to shoot a 12-year-old, you should not carry a handgun.”

Mr Binelli is not all doom. He confesses to being seduced by the idealism of city’s new residents and the tenacity of those who never left. In one chapter, he meets Mark Covington, a gardener who has gained much attention for his urban farming efforts. He is only one member of a growing movement that has made Detroit a leader in urban farming in America. According to Grace Lee Boggs, a long-time Detroit activist, the city has enough unused land to become the first entirely self-sufficient city in the world. Yet while Mr Binelli is open to being convinced, he remains ultimately sceptical that any city can be saved by artists.

Detroit is a confusing place and it is to the film-makers’ and writers' credit that they admit to having to rethink the opinions they came with, sometimes with hazy results. As Mr Binelli writes, “It’s undeniable that Detroit feels like an extraordinary place, and at the same time, just as Greenland might be called ground zero of the broader climate crisis, Detroit feels like ground zero for…what, exactly? The end of the American way of life? Or the beginning of something else? Either way, that is why so many divergent interests are converging here right now. Who doesn’t want to see the future?” The decline of this once great city serves as a cautionary tale for the new industrial capitals of the world. It also provides a glimpse of what might be possible for the old ones.