The matter of Detroit’s ground: Settler colonial urbanism after Ford

Keywords: racial capitalism, settler colonisation, urban
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In this brief talk, I dig into the ground in Detroit, Michigan to elaborate on the hinge points between sedimented conditions of racial capitalism and those of settler colonial urbanization. Detroit’s ground manifests the cumulative effects of empires—French, British, American, Fordist—and their aftermaths. In recent decades, conjoined processes of antiblack displacement and industrial transformation have created hundreds of thousands of empty buildings in the city. Reflecting the racist mythos of the urban frontier, municipal officials have long contended that demolishing these structures by the tens of thousands is the key to unlocking a brighter future for the city’s majority-Black populace. At the same time, however, some onlookers also credit the elimination of buildings and their supporting infrastructures with clearing space for the restoration of environmental systems akin to those existing prior to European conquest. In emergent proposals for recreation centers and apartment complexes, development firms present these so-called 'Indigenous' environments in efforts to speed along permitting processes and collateralize Detroit's landscape once more. Throughout the process, contaminated soils, waters, plants, and animals make apparent how the relationships of settler colonialism racial capitalism endure, even after their visible monuments are torn down. By attending to the changes that accrete in and through the ground, this brief talk reaches for the locations in which overlapping forms of coloniality make take hold. Disrupting them demands confronting ideologies that render land as a profitable fund, but it also demands attention to the material stuff of the ground itself.