'Detroit Isn't Some Kind of Abstract Art Project'

Detroit is now the largest city in the U.S. to lose self-rule. For the foreseeable future, the dead-broke municipal government won’t have control over its own finances, thanks to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s decision last week to place the city under emergency management. Yet at the same time, Detroit is hot — at least, that’s the impression you’ll likely get if you read major American newspapers or follow culture blogs. In 2011, The Los Angeles Times seemed to echo many when it took stock of the Motor City’s transition as a "haven for artists." A segment on NPR asked, "Is Detroit the Next Brooklyn?" Just as the city’s downtown seems to be poised to return to the living, it has lost its ability to participate and control its rebirth.

Detroit has long been a mythic city, a sort of metaphor for America. By the 1950s, it symbolized the American Dream, the power of industry, and our car-obsessed culture. It gave rise to a blue-collar middle class that helped birth a new political order: the so-called "New Deal Order" of urban liberalism. Then, in the late 1960s, it symbolized racial strife, riot and the limits of that same urbanism. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Detroit had become the poster city for urban blight. It lived the entire life-cycle of American cities within a mere 50-year period, complete with a rise and fall. There was a certain point in the mid-1990s when many wondered if what was happening to Detroit would soon, or inevitability, happen to most American cities.