It's the postindustrial revolution.

A place to discuss the intersection of cities and politics.

[postindustrialcity]

Actual sentence I just read while falling down a Google rabbit hole: 

No one will be reading Foucault by the end of the century. They'll still be reading Arendt. 

[postindustrialcity]

Before I went back to get my PhD, I worked as a social media manager for some very big brands you've probably heard of or used at some point. 

In my time working in this position, there were several instances where we had to make a call on how to react to crisis: the Boston bombings and Sandy Hook being the two most tense days. Generally, we would go silent for a day or two since we didn't have any business talking about these topics. 

I bring this up because the murder of Michael Brown would never come up as a reason to go silent on social media for a big brand. There were no frantic emails being sent from brand managers and project managers and creative directors, asking if we should go silent or say something. Because this type of tragedy and crisis does not even register. 

And that makes me very, very angry. 

[postindustrialcity]

1. This explains why parking tickets in the city of Detroit are now $45 (they used to be $10 if you paid right away). 

2. The solution is to monetize parking, which is a fancy way of saying they would like to privatize the system. Notice there is no explanation on how this actually makes the city money. 

[postindustrialcity]

[postindustrialcity]

We hold that the city used fuzzy math to make pensions work, which is why they are in this mess. 

We will use math too, but we promise it won't be fuzzy. 

[postindustrialcity]

In other words, the Plan allows money to flow into the city in the amount of $1.5 billion in order to:

Provide services, but not necessarily to the people who are most desperate as the most recent water shutoffs prove. 

Attract residents who we hope are white or upper-class black. Businesses that sell $950 backpacks would be great, too. 

We don't like crime. Especially crime that is the result of consistent oppression of black and poor people. But we won't do anything about that. 

We'd like to capitalize on the metaphor of blight as contagion and tear down houses that people who can't afford to pay for housing live in. We won't ask the neighborhood what they think about it, either. 

We won't provide lighting to the aforementioned "blighted" areas. 

Computers fix everything, right? RIGHT? Especially when there is a digital divide between the wealthiest and poorest residents. 

Speramus Meliora and Resurget Cineribus, meaning "We hope for better things" and "It will rise from the ashes."

[postindustrialcity]

Detroit's Bankruptcy Disclosure Statement

It's 440 pages of juicy opportunities for textual analysis. I will present quotes from this as I read it as it is fascinating. The full PDF may be found here.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

"This Disclosure Statement contains forward-looking statements based primarily on the current expectations of the City and projections about future events and financial trends affecting the financial condition of the City and its assets. The words "believe," "may," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described below under the caption "Risk Factors" in Section XII. In light of these risks and uncertainties, the forward-looking events and trends discussed in this Disclosure Statement may not occur, and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. The City does not undertake any obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise."

Translation: We will be talking out of our butts throughout this thing, so don't hold it against us when our data don't mean a thing. 

[postindustrialcity]

How to make a population controlled according to market logic

1. Find a crisis

2. Introduce a solution that is at no cost to the population under crisis

3. Teach the population how to use the solution.

4. Wait for the population to become reliant on the solution.

5. Sell them the solution.

Inspired by this wonderful talk by Wendy Brown about benchmarks. 

[postindustrialcity]

"A few ringleaders might be hanged, otherwise no harm was done."

The sass of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation

[postindustrialcity]

Lovely. Shinola now sells a $950 backpack marketed on the myth of made in America (but designed in Detroit, y'all). 

Because a $950 backpack is surely going to help pay people's pensions. 

[postindustrialcity]

Hanging out in the archives, listening to reel-to-reel tape of interviews

The best line, "The only integrated place was the white ladies' kitchen." 

[postindustrialcity]

I spent Sunday afternoon at the wildly fun Detroit City FC game. It's a fantastic experience with EXTREMELY passionate fans and held on the Cass Tech Football field. You really won't have a better time at a sports event. The team may be rough and tumble, but the fans are good fun. 

Though, as with many things known as "hidden gems" or symbols of Detroit's Revival, one can't help but notice that the makeup of the crowd is not your typical black city resident. These are hipsters. Mostly white. Yes, there are PoC in the crowd, but the crowd is majority white, the sorts of people you see at the bar in Ferndale or hanging out at your hipster watering holes downtown. Lots of beards for the men. ModCloth or thrifted sundresses for the ladies. Plenty of tattoos for all. 

Which leads me to a question that few people ask about Detroit and solving Detroit: Why are these pockets that are deemed life among the ruins so often mainly white? In a city with a demographic that is primarily black, why are there so many white faces at these sorts of events? Why do these become the symbols? 

I'm deeply troubled by this and I don't have a solution or explanation, though my first thought would be that progress is always defined on a white metric. Our rule of thumb for how to judge a city's health is how much fun the white people are having. 

Meanwhile, water is being shut off for the city's poorest residents, many of whom are black. I don't think they're having much fun. If a pocket of life is a soccer game, I think it's reasonable to call these areas that are completely ignored and intentionally denied basic resources pockets of death, a la Mbembe's necropolitics. 

This is just a bit of a first pass at this, a thinking through of Detroit. Because  one of the city's main problems is the narrative of decline and progress -- could applying an idea of necropolitics help us understand why progress in the city is so often white? 

[postindustrialcity]

Overheard at Astro Coffee, Detroit

"Carpetbaggers are people, too."

[postindustrialcity]

"What is perhaps most alarming about the trope of the black inner city and its equivalent, the “black ghetto,” is the degree to which both have served to block or screen alternative and, for want of a better word, ordinary ways of under- standing the lives of African-Americans. Narratives of black urban life in the mass media and scholarly research have tended to focus on poverty and its impact on the culture and social organization of the black poor. In pursuing this line of inquiry, investigators have addressed an extremely narrow range of social behaviors and relations: crime, teenage sexuality, family disorganiza- tion, and “ghetto street life” have dominated both the research agendas of academics and the imagery of the mass media. History, political organization, work and leisure, and other everyday dimensions of urban life that de rigueur have guided and informed the research of social scientists working elsewhere fade from view within the epistemological frontiers of the black inner city."

Gregory, Steven in Black Corona

[postindustrialcity]

Ed school dean: Urban school reform is really about land development (not kids)

Many key figures promoting broad efficiency-oriented reform initiatives [for urban schools] were whites who either lived in the suburbs or sent their children to private schools (Henig et al, 2001).

[postindustrialcity]

A pamphlet from the 1960s that refers to "The new industry of city rebuilding" in Detroit and across the nation. 

Fixing Detroit has always been business. 

[postindustrialcity]

This event happened to me this morning: I went to the Detroit Meijer on 8 Mile to pick up groceries because it's the closest to our Ferndale house and I wasn't in the mood to drive up to Trader Joe's in Royal Oak. I shop at Meijer stores a lot, but this was my first time at the Detroit Meijer. Apparently shopping at the Detroit Meijer will cause Chase to issue a fraud alert on your credit card, which leaves you with $100 in groceries, an increasingly angry mob at the end of the only line at the store, and some poor soul at some call center who (I am sorry to say) got snapped at by me to get the fraud alert lifted.

I was told that since I never shopped at that store, it issued the fraud alert. But I'm pretty sure shopping at a Meijer Ann Arbor (which I've never shopped at before either and is an hour from where I normally shop for groceries) would lead to no such thing.

I'm sure there's a politics of credit card fraud alerts in there somewhere. I wonder if the same thing would have happened if I'd gone to the Detroit Whole Foods.