Detroit and Babylon

Saturday

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05 October 2009 issue of Time magazine featuring 'The Tragedy of Detroit' on the cover.

It is difficult not to be fascinated with the plight of Detroit, for Detroit is gaining a reputation as a poster child for urban decline, an object lesson within the post-apocalyptic landscape of the rustbelt, the failed city par excellence. Detroit’s decline has been a cover story of Time magazine. There are several websites devoted to the decline of Detroit and the faded glory of its architecture (for example, Forgotten Detroit). Several websites (like Weburbanist) dwell with relish and morbid fascination on empty ballrooms in shuttered hotels. It is undeniably creepy, like an apocalyptic film set, only it’s real.

Detroit in 1955 about the time of its population peak.

In the early part of the twentieth century Detroit was a booming center of commerce and industry. Its population peaked around the middle of the century at more than 1.8 million. Now its population is around 900,000, about half of its peak population, the result of several decades of steady decline. The the collapse of Detroit can be illustrated by a graph of its population:

In addition to the weird and creepy and spooky stuff, Detroit has some very basic infrastructure problems. For example, with groceries. Detroit is a major city without major grocery stores. People rely on small markets for their groceries. While I can imagine an urban enthusiast à la Jane Jacobs celebrating the culture of inner cities and calling for their neighborhoods to be preserved intact and not spoiled by gentrification and cookie-cutter development, people need to eat after all, and the delivery of sufficient food into Detroit’s downtown core has become an issue.

In what remains of Detroit, groceries are delivered under armed guard.

If the reader is skeptical about the photo above of groceries being delivered to Detroit under armed guard, the picture is from Hunger Hits Detroit’s Middle Class. This is how bad the food problem is in parts of Detroit. This is more than mere abandoned buildings and decaying factories, this is urban failure on a grand scale, an enormous experiment in gradual, incremental urban abandonment.

The Time Magazine article on Detroit, punning on 'Motown'.

The Time magazine article cites “Hubris, racial tension, myopic politicians and the woeful auto industry” as the “causes” of Detroit’s decline. Further on in the article, in a sidebar, there is a similar litany: white flight from racial tension and rioting, the “politics of retribution” of Coleman Young, the failures of the auto industry, and political pandering. In other words, there is no recognition whatsoever of the larger, structural forces at work in the decline of Detroit. Perhaps it has to be like this in democracies. Perhaps people need a scapegoat and someone at whom to point a finger. But finger-pointing, naming and shaming, and “showing the bums the door” is not going to “fix” Detroit. Neither are recriminations going to “fix” Detroit.

The 1959 Cadillac, with its spectacular tail fins, represents a different kind of hubris than the political hubris mentioned in Time, but it is a hubris no less implicated in the long term decline of Detroit.

Detroit was the Motor City, a city that tied its fortunes to a particular commodity at a particular stage of industrial development and employing a particular business model. The particular commodity was the automobile, the particular stage of industrial development was that of Detroit’s glory years of the 1950s and 1960s (big, proud chrome-laden chariots with large V-8 engines), and the particular business model was that of post-war corporatism of the sort examined in many films of the era (for example, one my favorites is Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, dating from Detroit’s heyday). The confluence of these three crucial factors at one time leading to Detroit’s meteoric rise and dominance over an entire industry could not last. Like the three legs of a stool, remove any one of the legs and the stool falls over. All it would have taken would have been for cars to change, for technology to change, or for the business model to change, for the synthesis that was Detroit to collapse. In fact, all three changed, and the collapse of Detroit has been all the more complete for it.

Gregory Peck as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The film is not about the automobile industry, although it does focus on the corporate culture of the middle 1950s.

There is no reason that Detroit cannot re-make itself as a post-modern, post-industrial utopian paradise. But little vision is needed to imagine a better Detroit in the future. For example, a central complaint against cities of the high industrial age was the lack of green spaces, the barrenness of their industrial wastelands. A city the size of Detroit that has lost so much of its population such that many properties sit idle and vacant could embark upon a thorough-going greening of the city by having not one large park like New York (Central Park) or San Francisco (Golden Gate Park), but having its entire urban fabric consisting of empty lots converted into parks interspersed within functional structures. This would not only be attractive if crime could be controlled within the green areas, but it would also have practical benefits such as absorption of storm run off, temperature moderating effects, and the possibility of harvesting fresh urban produce.

That this scenario sounds so fantastical and unrealistic points out the all-too-prevalent lack of imagination in contemporary urban planning. It is controversial to develop, to gentrify, or to demolish, so stasis reigns supreme. This way, no one’s ox gets gored. But there is still hope, since wherever a large metropolitan area with existing infrastructure falls on hard times, market forces push down rents and real estate prices, and this can result in the young and the entrepreneurial moving in to the lowest cost offices they can find, and from such activities new jobs and new industries are created.

But all this pleasant optimism begs an important question: should Detroit be saved? Should Detroit enjoy a renaissance? Should Detroit get a second chance at life? Should failed cities be allowed to fail, as in a healthy economy failed businesses are allowed to go bankrupt? Should a healthy society be tolerant of urban failure? The very idea of the question is an affront to received wisdom, which holds that failed cities are a symptom on an unhealthy society.

I have argued several times that, despite the prevalent apocalypticism of contemporary culture, civilization is not about to collapse. Civilization is becoming stronger and more robust over time, not weaker. The refusal to allow cities to fail is a sign of this. In Failed Cities I observed that the world is scattered with abandoned cities, and I suggested that a rational way to deal with changing technology and cities based upon a single industry would be to create cities for a temporary purpose, with the plan of an orderly dissolution when they no longer serve this purpose. This is, of course, too rational to happen in a democratic society, just as the above scenario of Detroit as a post-industrial paradise is too good to be true.

Civilization has become so robust and durable that its chief cities are no longer allowed to die even when they become uninhabitable. Has civilization become too robust for its own good? Is the ultimate threat to civilization its own success? Is it a sign of weakness that we allow institutions such as cities to become too big to fail? Is it not a spectacular failure of planning to allow a manifestly unsustainable institution to become too big to fail?

Babylon's Ishtar gate, built during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II, is now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Is there anyone in the world who has not heard of Babylon? Babylon is a city more famous in its posthumous life in literature than it was while it flourished. Babylon is among the most famous of failed cities. It outlived its usefulness, and exists now only in ruins. Perhaps the world needs more Babylons. Perhaps we should facilitate the failure of cities that have outlived their usefulness with something like the urban equivalent of controlled demolition. Detroit, if allowed to fail, would not be obliterated. It would live on in the memory of man. Not only that, its flourishing automobile industry of the middle of the twentieth century, already legendary, would remain legendary. The legend and the memory of Detroit would not die with the city, but would live on like the legend and the memory of Babylon. And the argument could be made that the persistence of the empty husk of Detroit, its afterlife as an urban zombie, does nothing for the memory of the city. I imagine that the ruins of Detroit would be more of a tourist attraction than the city as it stands today.

Perhaps it's time for 'The Spirit of Detroit' to be carted off to a museum. The remainder of the city could be rented out for paintball games.

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Note added 23 April 2010

Today I happened upon another story on Detroit’s decline, Detroit: Can the once proud Motor City be saved?, complete with more pictures of apocalyptic urban squalor and no discussion of the larger structural forces that both created Detroit and then contributed to its decline. Even if the US automotive industry “recovers” (and to be thorough we would need to define what is meant by “recover”), Detroit is going to be a very different place than it was fifty years ago. A recovered automobile industry would employ different technology, different industrial processes, and a different corporate structure (which latter includes different labor-management relations). These are the three legs of the stool of big industry, and all three legs have been, shall we say, “re-tooled.”

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