What’s happening in Detroit? Exciting Things are Going On..

If you have lived far away from the United States, it is easy to have a distant and stereotyped view of the country. I certainly did: for many years I just could not imagine the existence of poor Americans. My sloppy thought process went something like this: the US is a superpower, Americans have put a man on the moon, they have Hollywood and big industry, and they have one of the most powerful governments in the world. Plus, the only Americans I have seen are tourists who don’t look short of a dollar or two. Poverty in the United States? No, I'm sure they eradicated that one years ago and ‘made it history” as the saying goes.

And the answer is well no, they didn’t. Poverty is actually a relative concept. You are poor – or well off – or even seriously loaded – only in relation to other people in the same community or country. The poor in the United States are clearly better off than, for example, the poor in India. But they definitely exist and successive US governments have proven no better at eliminating poverty than their equivalents in other countries. For some reason we tend to be less aware of the serious pockets of poverty in the US than maybe we should: it takes a big event – perhaps like Hurricane Katrina, which stormed into New Orleans and Louisiana in 2005 – to bring it back to our attention.

Which is why this blog post is about Detroit, a city we should be paying more attention to. You may be vaguely aware, like I was, that Detroit has had some problems. The big auto companies have been shifting their assembly plants to other places inside and outside the US, and things took a turn for the worse as the recession hit in 2009. And then in the middle of last year the city, with US$18.5bn in debts, filed for bankruptcy – which was formally declared by a Judge last December.  

It is only when you start looking at the details of this story that the sheer scale of Detroit’s fall from grace hits you, and you start to think: how come more hasn’t been said about this drama, particularly as it may be a sign of what could happen to other big industrial cities in a number of countries? So let me start by giving you a few facts and some flavour. ‘Iconic’ is a much over-used word, but Detroit is definitely that. This is where Henry Ford started making cars in 1903.

This is where Martin Luther King made speeches in the 1960s. Motor City, as Detroit is known is also the birthplace of that incredible Motown music. It was a key stop on the 19^th – century Underground Railroad used by escaped slaves on their way to freedom, and a proud participant in the Civil War (it also has a history of tense race relations, with major riots in 1967).  Detroit was part of the ‘Arsenal for Democracy’ churning out tanks and munitions in the Second World War. And, appropriately perhaps, Detroit is the fictional hometown of Robocop: a nightmarish Hollywood-created modern dystopia of extreme crime and extreme law enforcement.

Detroit’s population peaked at around 1.8mn in 1950, when its factories were in full production, and then it started declining, slowly at first, and then more and rapidly. The inner city effectively collapsed with middle class whites, and then middle class blacks, all emigrating to the suburbs. Among those left behind there is a poverty rate of 35.5%. By 2010 the population was down to around 714,000, a drop of 60% from the peak. The “hollowing out” of the city has reached dramatic levels. Last year Forbes magazine named it “America’s Most Miserable City”.

With tax revenue dwindling, public services – police and schools among them -  have been cut back again and again. It is estimated that around 124,000 plots of residential land have been completely abandoned – around one-third of the city’s area (some 40 square miles, equivalent to the size of Paris). In many places weeds and plants have grown through the abandoned buildings. Stray animals roam free (but reports of 50,000 stray dogs are apparently exaggerated: according to The Detroit News there are in fact less than 3,000).

There have been some compulsory purchases (using a legal mechanism called ‘eminent domain’) and occasional attempts to bulldoze and clear sites, as intermittent urban regeneration projects have come, run out of money, and gone. Mark Binelli, author of the fascinating ‘Detroit City is the Place to Be’ calls this desolate landscape the ‘urban prairie’.

Related video: Interview with Mark Binelli

www.youtube.com/watch?v=okDQ-8Cy8rQV

And indeed, although he describes his city in nightmarish terms (noting the crack houses and scenes of Baghdad-style war-zone desolation) he also points to a patchwork of new community-based regeneration initiatives. There are people farming in the urban prairie, here and there neighbourhood watches have sprung up, and there are some schools attracting students. There are even open-air blues festivals.

It maybe early days, but some strangely exciting things are going on in Detroit. Among the frontier-types coming into the broken city are artists and small-scale entrepreneurs. Land and houses, after all, are really cheap.  A number of small companies are beginning to claim that in branding terms “Made in Detroit” is now cool. They include Shinola, which used to make shoe polish but which now sells watches and bicycles. A healthcare company has come up with the slogan “Outsource to Detroit”.

Introducing The Detroit Urban Agriculture Movement Video

Chrylser has also taken to highlighting its Detroit roots, using local boy and star rapper Eminem for its advertisements. Olivier Francois, Chrysler’s chief marketing officer, recently told the BBC that Detroit “stands for a brand of determination and a general refusal to quit”.  Detroit isn’t the first and won’t be the last big city to go through very hard times: but there may be lessons there for the rest of us. 

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