How to Imagine Detroit

As I mentioned in section last Tuesday, the Michigan Theatre showed a short run of a well regarded documentary about Detroit called Detropia.  Some friends and I saw it last week.  In an ensuing discussion about the movie, two of my friends blasted the movie for the way it portrayed Detroit.  Their argument, which I lump together and outline below, gets at something I'm interested in, spatial justice.  The basic problem of spatial justice goes like this: can a concept of justice apply to something abstract and non-human, like the places where we live?  

To the extent Detropia has a story to tell, it's a pretty familiar story of middle class decline and escalating poverty in Detroit.  A bar owner, a UAW local president, a blogger, an artist, and some demolition workers all share their experiences of Detroit's strange emptiness, reflecting on what Detroit's future might hold.  The directors suggest some familiar causes of decline, the movement of automotive production overseas and plummeting union wages chief among them.  Along the way, Detroit is supposed to stand for America writ large, a country making sense of its waning economic prowess.

My friends disliked Detropia not because of what it depicted, but because of what it didn't.  They argued that the standard story - Detroit as the symbol of middle class decline - is complicated by some elements of Detroit the directors left out. Thriving neighborhoods like Mexicantown, the Cass Corridor, Indian Village, and Woodbridge have seen lower rates of population loss, and even minor growth, over the past decade. The continued vitality of these and other Detroit neighborhoods paints a different picture: Detroit as unevenly developed; Detroit as a city with more depth, more creativity, more spunk than Detropia gave it credit for.  They resented that Detropia merely reproduced the standard story of decline for a national audience.  That national audience, who has probably never seen the other sides of Detroit, will get a one-sided, dilapitated story about Detroit.

Detroit neighborhood population change, datadrivendetroit.org

My friends echoed many residents of Detroit, who rightly have gone on the defense about cheap, careless depictions of ruin in Detroit. While I mostly agree with my friends' diagnosis of Detropia - it left out important elements of Detroit - I also think that the movie avoided the worst traps of so much lazy journalism about Detroit that fixates on decay.  Sure, the movie danced around the toughest issues in Detroit: race, real estate speculation, suburban flight, housing segregation.  But Detropia depicted urban crisis without exoticizing it, without emptying the town of its residents and lamenting some bygone era, which is so often the path taken by ruin journalism.  The directors of Detropia did a careful job telling the story of Detroit's undeniably tough situation, a commendable accomplishment.  Detropia can't be the whole story of Detroit, but it can be a reasonable part.

Whichever side of this particular debate you fall on, it seems to me that what's at stake is a question of justice applied to a place: how should Detroit be depicted? Do the directors of Detropia bear a burden to demonstrate vitality as much as crisis?  What kind of stories do we tell about cities, and what kinds of stories should we tell?  The answers to these questions are surely complicated, dealing as they do in race, class, and aesthetics. But these questions are further complicated by the fact that "Detroit" can't tell us what it wants.  It's a place, and it's not obvious what a just depiction would be.

This post only gestures at a concept that is really tricky to work through.  More than a story about Detroit, spatial justice is something to be worked out in practice, in places.  Spatial justice raises some big, difficult questions: what would a just Detroit look like?  How do stories like Detropia push Detroit closer or further away from justice?