“Everyone moved away,” says the main character in Jim Jarmusch’s film “Only Lovers Left Alive” (2013) about Detroit. This laconic sentence testifies to the decline of a place that was once the undisputed industrial center of North America. Once known as the “Motor City” or the Paris of the Midwest, Detroit evolved over the second half of the twentieth century into a place plagued by deindustrialization, lack of infrastructure, municipal debt, unemployment, drugs and crime.The Austrian architect and architectural scholar Wolfgang Koelbl has written a book that offers a swansong for Detroit. If Hollywood is a film city and Silicon Valley is a technology city, then, according to the author, Detroit is a “minor city” where people “bathe in the disaster blues.” Powerful and with a penchant for exaggeration, Koelbl conjures up the image of a crumbling metropolis: wastelands, ruins, empty houses and ghostly parking lots – the opposite of a successful urban space. The fact that Detroit is a place that is abandoned in many ways is a well-known motif in urban research. The withdrawal of large-scale industry was followed by the dismantling of the city. A century ago, major automobile manufacturers such as Ford, General Motors and Chrysler began moving their production facilities from inner cities to the suburbs, where they benefited from lower tax rates and more space. People from the working and middle classes followed the jobs. There is a lack of inner solidarity here. In the 1970s, the number of orders fell dramatically due to the oil price crisis and general economic problems in the USA, while Japanese car manufacturers gained market share. General Motors laid off 30,000 of 80,000 workers in the Detroit area and moved some of its production to Mexico. As a result, a suburb like Flint, which had previously displaced downtown Detroit as the center of the auto industry, lost a number of jobs. Michael Moore made an enlightening documentary about it, “Roger & Me” (1989). Wolfgang Koelbl: “Detroit”. America’s defeat. About the rise and fall of the modern world capital.Transcript VerlagKoelbl tells the story of Detroit’s urban development in a wide arc from the first European settlement through the American War of Independence to the present. Detroit has been going downhill since the 1910s. The business location did gain a breather from the Second World War (General Motors became the world’s largest arms producer, and Chrysler built more tanks than the National Socialists). But many mistakes were made earlier, such as the failure to make downtown more attractive to wealthy middle classes. The riots of 1967 contributed to the further acceleration of the flight of the white and black middle classes to the suburbs. The author reads the history of Detroit as a lesson on problems in American society. His thesis is: If you want to understand America, you have to look to Detroit, because the city is “America’s defeat,” as the book’s title says. America’s economic rise was concentrated in the car factories of Detroit. The automobile paved the way for suburbanization and heralded the death of public transportation. But while more and more single-family homes were built in the suburbs, the inner cities became deserted. The construction of shopping malls emptied the streets, and errors in urban planning deepened the divides between neighborhoods. The basic problem, according to Koelbl, is that Detroit, like many other cities in the USA, does not show any internal solidarity. Detroit lacks a “reference place of perseverance in its central urban area.” In many places, nature is reclaiming what was once a city. Such an interpretation of American history, which is not new by the way, points to a larger question that Koelbl himself raises , but not really answered: To what extent does it make sense to measure the American city and its problems against the European ideal type of city (and its social-forming function)? To what extent can human coexistence also succeed in differently structured spaces? The book is particularly insightful when Koelbl discusses urban rescue projects such as John Portman’s Renaissance Center, urban planning experiments such as Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park or the spatial reorganization of working environments in Ford’s factories. Koelbl also sees Detroit as a prime example of the failure of the Modernism, which he differentiates from the romantic project. With quotes from Hegel, Fichte and Schelling as well as Peter Sloterdijk, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he tries to show that modernity in Detroit achieved great successes (keyword: Fordism), but suffered one of its drastic defeats in the wake of deindustrialization and urban exodus. This may be true, but the passages about the interaction between modernity and romanticism, with their whispering prose, are not one of the book’s strengths.More on the topicCan Detroit still be saved? Koelbl is skeptical. Impulses for cultural renewal such as Motown and techno music have repeatedly emerged from the rubble that is the city, and Jack White and Eminem were also inspired by the disillusionment experience typical of Detroit. Nevertheless, Koelbl doubts the possibility of revitalizing the city. In fact, the challenges are enormous: Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and in many places nature is reclaiming what was once a city. Nevertheless, municipal and private development projects give reason for hope. What does it say at the end of the movie “Only Lovers Left Alive”? “There is water here. This place will flourish.”Wolfgang Koelbl: “Detroit”. America’s defeat. About the rise and fall of the world capital of modernity. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2024. 680 pages, br., €45.
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