f o r e i g n p a r t s where his plant stood, made into a separate ‘city’, so that the company’s taxes were not swallowed up by the wider urban need.
Binelli is clear-eyed about the greed and frailty that contributed to Detroit’s slide, and cynical about the planners who arrive with blueprints for restoration. Dystopia attracts utopians. He finds (in some cases literally) green shoots of recovery: urban gardens, a thriving school for pregnant teenagers, and artists, lured to the city by cheap property (some homes have lost 95 per cent of their value) and by a hunger for urban cool.
The term ‘ruin porn’ crept into the local language to describe the voyeurism of outsiders arriving to gape at and photograph the post-apocalyptic scenes. Models posed before the devastation; film-makers were lured with tax breaks – Detroit was to be the ‘Hollywood of the Mid West’ – but they rapidly departed once the tax regime changed.
Northern Europeans (though not Brits) have, apparently, a particular fascination with the city. ‘Why are you here?’ Binelli asks a German student. ‘I came to see the end of the world,’ he replies. Others come as ‘urban explorers’ (‘urbexers’), crawling their way into disused structures such as the vast, abandoned Packard car plant. Here they encounter post-industrial entrepreneurs, the ‘scrappers’, stripping from the buildings what their greatgrandfathers had so diligently installed.
Binelli is at his best when he reports what it is really like to live in his home town. There is a hilarious but terrifying account of a class for people applying for permits to carry concealed weapons. Students are eager to know when it is legitimate for them to shoot intruders. On being told that they should at least wait for the intruder to break in, one disappointed woman asks if she can shoot first and then drag the body inside. A cop had suggested the idea.
Binelli is rightly (and righteously) angry at the treatment of the city by the powers that be. Banks may be too big to fail, but not cities. He makes a telling analogy with the US practice of ‘isolating enemy states financially and then watching the leader whom we’ve labeled a tyrant act more and more like one as his regime begins to crumble … Detroit was the rogue state.’
Spending cuts lead inexorably to a spiral of decline, and those who impose them are either blind or wilful. Binelli spends nights in a fire station relocated, after the closure of the real firehouses, to an abandoned warehouse, learning the wisdom of the firefighters who, for paltry wages, put their lives on the line for their community.
The value of this book lies, however, not just in its compelling story, but in its lessons for all in the West. Detroit is not a faraway city of which we know little. It may be ahead in its fateful journey towards implosion, but it is not unlike many British communities (coal miners, shipbuilders, steelmakers) whose utility to wider society has now faded. There is no room for smugness.
Pulling together what encouraging signs he can find (and they are precious few), Binelli declares that Detroit does have a pioneering future – the first successful mass-production city will become the first successful post-mass-production city. ‘The truth is,’ he writes, ‘my optimism was proving tenacious. I couldn’t say why.’ Having followed him every step of the way, nor could I. After what has gone before, Mark Binelli’s optimism must lie in the DNA of a son of Detroit. The evidence, sadly, belies his conclusion. To order this book for £16, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 45
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