Ground Forces: Dirt, Demolition, and the Geography of Decline in Detroit, Michigan

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to the study of the production of urban decline by examining the process of demolishing. Recent research on the production of urban decline, by focusing on the property and real estate practices of speculation, foreclosure, and eviction, has provided an analytical framework for identifying and interpreting the persistent shifts in capital accumulation strategies that produce blight. The property and real estate practices of demolition extend beyond the site of a demolished building and reinforce processes producing urban decline. Demolishing depends on environments, logistics, policies, and resources that preserve regional geographies of uneven development. I investigate the Detroit Demolition Program (DDP) and efforts between 2013 and 2019 to demolish over 40,000 houses in Detroit, MI. I study this city and its program to question and interpret relationships between demolition and urban decline. In existing research, local public policy authorizes and pays contractors to deliver on-demand demolition to an abandoned building. Based on interviews and my analysis of public documents, DDP data, and sites, I show this focus on the practice of demolition erases the processes and effects of demolishing that extend beyond an address. Demolition is part of the production of urban decline and includes supply chains, forms of value, resources, property relations, and environments that conflict with demolition as an intervention against decline. The process of demolishing Detroit depended on the emergence of a consensus turning blight into an emergency and removal into a necessity. Public, private, and philanthropic interests linked demolition to revitalization but also used it served regulatory, political, and financial goals. The urgency around demolishing provided justification for DDP policies that accommodated the income-generation priorities of contractors. The DDP depended on contractors sourcing millions of cubic yards of dirt and rock to grade holes after basement excavation. Shifting DDP regulation on backfill ensured demolition was lucrative for wreckers and their networks. Backfilling Detroit meant millions of dollars in transactions that served contractors and suburban development agendas. Contractors sourced material from 444 unique sources, including luxury condos and retailer parking lots. The transformation of Detroit's built environment through demolition relied on continued regional expansion that converted wastes of growth into assets for destruction. Demolishing Detroit was not an intervention slotted between periods of decline and development. Instead, demolishing was a value-extraction process manifesting land uses and property practices that generated income without redevelopment. Contractors engendered a regional land regime that could produce and sustain demolition. Instead of an interruption in the production of urban decline, making land vacant and ready for profitable intensification, demolishing Detroit was the continuation of decline by a different means. This dissertation shows the limits of research on demolition that relies on the potential for reuse to evaluate consequences for neighborhoods. These dichotomies separate demolishing from the conditions and contradictions of its creation. By illustrating how demolishing is part of the process of decline I provide an alternative to research that conceals the operations of capital by relying on divides between global and local, between causes and interventions. Rather than managing decline or prompting redevelopment, demolishing is one process by which capitalist urbanization achieves the extraction of value in shrinking cities. Extending these insights beyond Detroit and demolition can identify local responses that may appear to manage decline but through their environmental and logistical processes reinforce regional segregation and produce decline.