DETROIT, USA Detroit’s Contested Urbanisms of Abandonment

Over the past several decades, a vibrant scholarly literature has addressed struggling post-industrial cities in decline as objects of inquiry in their own right. Yet while much has been written about abandonment in deindustrializing cities around the world, very little is understood about the “after-life” of these “leftover” spaces. Detroit is perhaps the quintessential exemplar of a struggling deindustrialized city in decline. The impact of disinvestment and job loss, the exodus of largely white middle-class families to the residential suburbs, shrinking municipal services, and widespread abandonment have left much of the urban landscape in tatters. This project critically explores what happens to leftover spaces after abandonment. We focus on three distinct Detroit’s neighborhoods with high vacancy rates, where over half the homes have completely disappeared. Unlike other struggling neighborhoods where city managers hope for recovery, these areas have remained in institutional limbo, with no official plans for rehabilitation. Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and an examination of visual and written records, our project uncovers how ordinary residents have taken it upon themselves to reshape the environment in which they live and, in the process, to imprint their own vision for the future of their neighborhoods.