Manufacturing Ruin, Manufacturing Revitalization: Displacement and Migration in Detroit

Abstract

In the past decade, migrants and refugees have been framed and celebrated as actors pivotal to reversing economic and demographic decline in deindustrialized cities throughout the United States. Reflecting on the idea of migrants as agents of revitalization, I build on the scholarship that views migration globally and relationally to ask: what are the global and human costs of revitalization? As such, I argue that processes of revalorizing urban space are historical and built on multiple forms of displacement and dispossession of marginalized people. They are part of processes of accumulation that link together seemingly divergent geographies.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Detroit, I focus on the emergence of welcoming initiatives and calls to revitalize Detroit with the resettlement of migrants and refugees from Iraq, Yemen, or Syria, among others. While these efforts aim to change the public discourse surrounding migration, they nevertheless obscure the very processes of accumulation and extraction embedded in their displacement. Simultaneously, Black Detroiters have been framed as makers of their own crises, resulting in the imposition of austerity measures, that have, under the banner of ‘revitalization’, resulted in substantial displacement and dispossession over the past decade. As such, I aim to highlight the converging processes of capital accumulation embedded and inherent in wars and invasions, as well as privatizations and austerity measures, that may become obscured during the broader calls to revitalize cities across the U.S. Rust Belt.