IS DETROIT DEAD?

ABSTRACT: An effective way to understand the slow death of the city of Detroit is through the prism of the course of a terminal disease, tracing the stages of symptom assessment, diagnosis, and curative intervention. This essay explores that notion by taking off from several recent books about Detroit’s catastrophic decline that employ the language of urban morbidity and mortality to describe the city’s condition. Urban death is a function of the withering or failure of crucial vital urban functions involving, principally, governance and economic opportunity. By that standard the essay concludes that it is becoming hard to call Detroit a living city anymore. There is no more compelling story today of the dark side of America’s urban experience than the slow death of the city of Detroit. In a host of recent books1 exploring the city’s political, social, and economic disintegration, all written before the city’s actual bankruptcy, an array of scholars and journalists cannot resist employing an anthropomorphic framework—a literal take on the body politic—in which the central task they set themselves is to explore the notions of urban morbidity and mortality. Thus, Brent Ryan, a professor of urban planning, uses “the analogy to a person in hospice ” to offer “palliative ” strategies for the dying city (2012, p. 204), while Charlie LeDuff, a journalist, says the city is on a “death watch ” and purports to conduct an “autopsy ” (2013, p. 3)