| This dissertation is an examination of planning, democracy, and temporality in the city of Detroit, Michigan. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and 63 in-depth interviews, I argue that the "future" emerges as an important site of intervention and produces a kind of blank slate narrative that erases the city's complicated and racialized past. The empirical chapters of this dissertation complicate the discourse of a blank slate, revealing the contradictory and contingent ways that residents in the city share physical space while occupying different temporalities. I select various facets of the built environment as a lens for understanding the contradictions in the redevelopment process as it provides the most visible site for accessing hopes, desires, and senses of a future city, as well as connections to the past. The built environment reveals the contradictions in representations of a future Detroit created largely by outsiders and the realities experienced by long term residents. Specifically, I examine three particular sites through which we can untangle the relationships among past, present, and future. Within each of these sites, we are able to see the complexities of different temporalities and by looking closely at them we can see what focus on the future distorts or erases.;First, I examine the technical documents that propose a "new" Detroit, unearthing the kind of exclusionary future they propose - a future that is white, middle class, and entrepreneurial, and one that erases the past. Second, I use the city's infrastructure---both that which is decaying and that which is being created---as a privileged site to understand how the ideas from planning actually unfold in the social world, how new spaces are created and destroyed, and how the fantastic imaginings of a futuristic Detroit come to be, even if only in small ways, and how this signals new forms of spatial ordering and control based on exclusions. Third, I write about housing as a specific infrastructure that, in many parts of the city, is being destroyed. The project and process of demolitions in many of Detroit's neighborhoods is perhaps the clearest lens through which we can see a new city and new spatial ordering being produced. The material loss of home, via eviction or foreclosure, as a physical place also maps onto a loss of belonging to a temporal space, a future Detroit being built for someone else. This dissertation traces the conditions that have shifted the nature of planning and urban governance in the city. |
