Restructured City: Demolition and Racial Accumulations in Detroit

Abstract

This dissertation is a set of ethnographic and archival experiments confronting how structures of white racism that power racial capitalism refuse to be easily leveled. In particular, these experiments identify technical systems that maintain racist accumulations of land, wealth, and contamination through the physical destruction of late industrial landscapes. I bring these systems into focus by drawing upon five years of multimodal engagement with processes of vacant building removal in Detroit, Michigan. Since 1950, more than two hundred thousand empty buildings have been demolished without replacement in Detroit, including some twenty thousand between 2014 and 2019. Unused dwellings, factories, schools, and other structures materialize how the antiblack shape of Detroit’s present rests upon the foundations of indigenous erasure. For some onlookers, including city residents and demolition administrators, building removals appear to quite literally clear away the legacies of white supremacy. And yet, as this dissertation approaches building removals from front porches, excavator cabs, training facilities, meeting rooms, regulatory case files, and other locations, it finds that demolitions do not tear down the systems that codify white privilege. Demolitions restructure lived environments in ways that compound the racist status quo. For instance, legal statutes codifying demolition as ‘blight elimination’ allow unelected, predominantly white demolition administrators to determine the spatial futures of a majority-Black city. Algorithms that select certain empty buildings for demolition are coded to explicitly channel resources toward Detroit’s wealthier neighborhoods in the hopes of attracting white, upper middle-class professionals. White-owned firms who built Detroit’s segregated suburbs turn dormant excavators and precariously employed Black and Latinx men into a profitable demolition apparatus. Drafty building removal regulations transform asbestos-containing components from protective materials into airborne hazards into the breathing spaces of predominantly Black laborers. The working class Black and Latinx people who live closest to demolition sites encounter their lingering aftermaths through contaminated soils left in their wake.

By tracing how racism operates through technical systems, this dissertation elucidates how those systems structure — and restructure — racialized bodies and places. In so doing, it ultimately argues that people who benefit from the enrichment of whiteness are, willingly or not, complicit in the ongoing oppression of others. These complicities offer possibilities for eliminating structural inequities, including the intersections of racism and economic predation, through the construction of expansive systems for material repair.