Dracula Urbanization, Smart Growth, and Making a New Flint, Michigan

Keywords: Dracula urbanization, Flint, smart growth, rust belt cities
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 22

Abstract

Flint Michigan, widely proclaimed as the quintessential decrepit Rust Belt city in the United States, today is the site for an elaborate policy experiment to forge “smart growth.” This paper examines this drive to create smart growth in a supposed place that exhibits extreme exceptionalism. I chronicle that this urban redevelopment, touted by the city’s growth machine, restructures tradition through an endeavor that I term Dracula urbanization. Drawing of Bram Stoker’s 1897 prescient book, I suggest that applying this monster metaphor to the Flint urban redevelopment case captures two crucial features as the core of this current restructuring. First, mirroring Dracula's interactive functionalism, Flint investment companies, builders, and developers implement an unprecedented parasitism rooted in forging alliances with broader institutions, particularly foundations (mega funders). Foundational bases of resources are hungrily seized upon in a social and economic trope that ensures the viability of these growth machine actors. Second, mimicking Dracula's gaze, death and destruction of people’s ways, not rehabilitating or therapeutizing these, is believed to be the only way to advance proper growth. Like Dracula, notions of rebirth must begin with the imposition of death. Subaltern residents – their activity spaces, habits and customs, traditions, belief systems -- become objects for institutional evisceration. The results suggest that the Dracula metaphor, as much as the Frankenstein metaphor recently recognized by urbanists, help us explain current drives to yield smart growth in Flint and perhaps beyond.