Alternative Spaces/Transformative Places

Since the formal crisis and our research on the city, the Detroit landscape has transformed wildly in some places (e.g., Corktown’s gentrification, the new “Chinatown,” the Little Caesar’s Arena, state imposed “emergency financial management” and municipal bankruptcy) and has stagnated in others (e.g., nearly triple the national poverty rate, almost double the eviction rate, housing at hyper-vacancy rates). When we started our writing on cityscape, Detroit was popularly seen as an “unruly” place, as out of bounds or a frontier to be tamed, explored, and developed. Alistair Bonnett (2014), in his book Unruly Places, marshals this term to describe disorganized sites that people feel are peculiar, scary, or different. But Bonnett, like many self-described psychogeographers and urban explorers, approaches unruliness from a rather sentimentalist and exoticizing starting point. For instance, echoing popular and scholarly criticisms of suburbanization, sprawl, and corporate urbanism, Bonnett explains: “The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this [pervasive] dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us” (p. xiv). But one need only be a foreclosure processer to see that simply finding “off the map” places is a relatively dull edge for radicalism.

This was something intimated to us early in our Detroit work, the world doesn’t need more ruin pornographers. Coverley (2009) looks at things similarly in his Psychogeography, in which he notes:

If psychogeography is to be understood in literal terms as the point where psychology and geography intersect, then one of its further characteristics may be identified in the search for new ways of apprehending our urban environment. Psychogeography seeks to overcome the processes of “banalisation” by which the everyday experience of our surroundings becomes one of drab monotony. (p. 13)

But Coverley doesn’t stop there. Channeling filmmaker Patrick Keiller, he critically notes:

… psychogeography [is] increasingly preoccupied with its own practices as an end in themselves, no longer the tool of any larger political or even cultural project but simply a self-contained and self-immersed movement with little significant impact on the environment whose redevelopment it has so vocally denounced. (pp. 28–29)

Was it possible to simply wander (anymore or ever) in the city or explore urban ruins for the satisfaction of personal “surprise” or excitement? After the financial collapse? After gentrification? After the Detroit water crisis? After the lead crisis in Flint?

In a similar timeframe, Wark (2013) writes rousingly in the Spectacle of Disintegration about some of the main popularizers of wandering, drifting, dérive, or exploring the psychogeographies of cities, Guy Debord and the Situationist International movement:

Debord’s sometime comrade Raoul Vaneigem famously wrote that those who speak of class conflict without referring to everyday life, “without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” Today this formula surely needs to be inverted. To talk the talk of critical thought, of biopolitics and biopower, of the state of exception, bare life, precarity, of whatever being, or object oriented ontology without reference to class conflict is to speak, if not with a corpse in one’s mouth, then at least a sleeper. Must we speak the hideous language of our century? (pp. 4–5)

And perhaps we might say to those simply seeking excitement in the city, without contemplating the violence of capital’s circulation or of class conflict are engaging in a kind of celebration of suffering—though, certainly not as conscientiously contemptuous as the Baum firm’s Halloween party or as naively “self-immersed” as ruin porn. Still they are, so to speak, walking on corpses that were immiserated under capitalism by homelessness, food insecurity, and “austerity suicides” (Mitchell, 2018). Between 2007 and 2011, the Baum foreclosure mill filed over 50,000 New York cases (Morgenson, 2011). The New York Attorney General’s (2012b) office reported that, “an average of 1 in 10 mortgages [was] at risk of foreclosure. The approximate number of individuals living in homes that [were] either in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure [exceeded] the populations of Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse combined.” The stakes are high in our urban landscapes and we must always see the brutal within the banal.

Blyth (2013) notes in a Foreign Policy feature that “Austerity is a seductive idea because of the simplicity of its core claim—that you can’t cure debt with more debt. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough” (p. 43). In his book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Blyth (2015) invokes Quiggin’s notion of “zombie economics,” or “economic ideas that will not die despite huge logical inconsistencies and massive empirical failures” (p. 10). Blyth explains this in the following:

[Austerity] is a zombie economic idea because it has been disproven time and again, but it just keeps coming. Partly because the commonsense notion that “more debt doesn’t cure debt” remains seductive in its simplicity, and partly because it enables conservatives to try (once again) to run the detested welfare state out of town, it never seems to die. (p. 10)

Indeed, beyond the evidence that austerity doesn’t work, the inequality, the instability, and the asymmetrical burden it places on the poor, have, as Blyth notes, dangerous implications. As a case in point, amid the ongoing horror of Flint’s toxic water supply, to remark of austerity programs’ fiscal savings is not only obnoxious but misleading, given the additional health and infrastructural expenses it caused. And this is the key. Whatever impulse there is to tally up the balance sheets betrays the idea’s most dangerous play: its incessant rationality (e.g., how much money is a life worth?). But, the idea of austerity also feels good to certain segments of the capitalist world, or segments of the capitalist “mind” (whatever that might be). As we starve one beast, we feed another (Bartlett, 2007).

One of the key ideological contradictions of the neoliberal era, of the era of austerity and cruel pleasures, is the mismatch between the physical capacity of the world economic system and the deprivation experienced by so many. Why less, given our productive capacity? Who makes those choices? The National Conference to Defeat Austerity, held in Detroit in March, 2018, recently defined their counter-narrative as the following: “defeating the war being waged by the banks, corporations, and government against the workers and oppressed” (Ikonomova, 2018, np). When we look at the delight in contempt and cruelty that the Baum firm’s Halloween party represented, its mockery of destitute lives and its crass cynicism, we see the depth of the political crisis at hand. But perhaps we might even hold some sympathy for the employees whose livelihoods are beholden to making people homeless. Should we hold those office workers in a contrary contempt? Or do we see carnivals of that kind as expressions of the emotional repetitive stress injuries of neoliberal capitalism? Beyond marking enemies, it is out of austerity’s and neoliberal capitalism’s contradictions with concepts like dignity, equality, the commons, and even democracy that we find new meanings built for and into our urban resources. And it is on that platform against austerity and against the pleasures of cruelty, for abundance and sustainability, for equality and innovation, that new struggles for meaning can find the city as something to be remade along the path of their aspirations. That platform must target the force of the prevailing systems of cruelty—the rights to the city and to our very nature that banks, corporations, and political budget mongers currently occupy. It is on this platform that the struggle for democratization must proceed.

What is more, these studies initiated other research that explored rural communities, cities in Germany, telecommunication policies, and lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan. Those efforts were published in the following: