Stalking Detroit

Author: Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim & Jason Young (eds.), with Jerry Herron, Dan Hoffman, Patrik Schumacher & Christian Rogner, et al.
Year: 2001 (Actar; work initiated 1994, Committee for Urban Thinking: Detroit)
Source type: book (anthology; file labelled "Herron et al 1994")
Raw file: raw/books/stalking-detroit.md
Note: a near-duplicate raw copy also exists at raw/articles/herron-et-al-2001-stalking-detroit.md (same body text plus title-page OCR noise); this source note covers both.

Summary

Stalking Detroit is an anthology by the "Committee for Urban Thinking: Detroit" (founded 1994) that "stalks" the city — recording its post-Fordist urbanism "in lieu of providing engineering solutions, ... nostalgic lament, or snap judgements." The editors position Detroit as "the most thoroughly modern city in the world" — the legible exemplar of Fordist modernism's assumptions and of contemporary post-Fordist, globally mobile capital urbanism. Jerry Herron's "three meditations on the ruins of Detroit" critique the touristic/nostalgic appropriation of the city's ruins (Vergara's "American Acropolis"/"Disneyzone"), arguing that "a ruin is not found, it is made: an anti-historical compound of nostalgia and merchandising."

The anthology layers photographs (Jordi Bernadó, Mónica Roselló, Alex MacLean), three primary essays (Herron; Dan Hoffman's "The Best the World Has to Offer"; Schumacher & Rogner's "After Ford"), photographic/documentary studies (Kleinman & van Duzer on the Michigan Theater parking garage; Hoffman's "Erasing Detroit"; Arens on Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project), three design projects (Daskalakis & Perez's "Projecting Detroit"; Waldheim & Santos-Munné's "Decamping Detroit"; Young et al.'s "Line Frustration"), critical responses (Joan Roig, James Corner's "Landscraping", Santiago Colas's "architecture how?"), and a posthumous afterword ("Impossible Urbanism") by Ignasi de Solà-Morales.

Key Claims

• Detroit as the "Capital of the Twentieth Century": "the most thoroughly modern city in the world," exemplifying "the assumptions of enlightened modernity" (belief that technological advance yields social progress) — and now its legible failure: "an extraordinarily legible example of post-Fordist urbanism."
• Fordist urbanism and mobile capital: Detroit's urban form mirrored production patterns; "Mobile capital rendered the city impermanent." Its "planned obsolescence" and the export of "these techniques of urban arrangement in service of mobile capital, temporary employment, and free trade" make it a global model.
• The ruins made, not found: "A ruin is not found, it is made: an anti-historical compound of nostalgia and merchandising." Against Vergara's proposal to preserve downtown Detroit as "an American Acropolis" / "a grand national historic park of play and wonder": "the poor and disenfranchised are reduced to souvenir extras"; the homeless "would prefer heat, shelter, and jobs."
• The urbanism of the simulacra: "an urbanism of the simulacra: the ongoing myth of Detroit's resurgence" — new stadia and casinos banked on Detroit's "historical name brand," "a-historical destination theme park," erasing "the material fact of the city's ongoing demolition."
• Modernity's ongoing vitality vs. nostalgia: Hudson's wasn't "a ruin of anything, except a sentimental wish"; "the freeway is not a superimposition, but rather ... a fulfillment of the modernity of which the city is the sight-specific expression"; "not everybody was allowed to come along for the ride." The task: "changing nostalgia into intelligence, ruin into history."
• Includes Schumacher & Rogner's "After Ford": on the relation of Fordism and Modernism and Detroit's glimpse of post-Fordist urbanism (cf. separate Schumacher & Rogner source).
• No monuments in the "Capital": Hoffman: "there are no monuments in the 'Capital of the Twentieth Century.' Things move too quickly. Survival is more a matter of forgetting than remembering"; advertising's image of desire replaces civic monuments, and "architecture is always one of the first casualties" of each new production idea.
• Unbuilding surpasses building: Hoffman's "Erasing Detroit": "'Unbuilding' has surpassed building as the city's major architectural activity"; demolition has become "a significant industry," and the processes are "neither anarchic nor critical" — hence "unbuilding," not destruction or deconstruction.
• The Vacant Land Survey and planned decommissioning: Waldheim & Santos-Munné: Detroit's 1990 Vacant Land Survey dared to articulate publicly "the very real fact that the city was already abandoning itself"; Detroit "was the only city that dared to publicly articulate a plan for its own abandonment."
• Terrain vague radicalized: Daskalakis & Perez, following Solà-Morales, name Detroit's vacated regions terrain vague — "Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation" — and warn that in our anxiety to analyze and contextualize these "expectant voids... will have been re-colonized" as strip malls, stadia, and convention centers; their "Projecting Detroit" answers with an "architecture of absence" using landscape as primary medium.
• Landscape as the medium of post-Fordist urbanism: "Decamping Detroit" takes the city's self-abandonment at face value and stages decommissioning in four phases (dislocation, erasure, absorption, infiltration), modeled on Tarkovsky's "Zone" in Stalker; Waldheim coined "landscape urbanism" to name landscape as "the most relevant medium for the production and representation of contemporary urbanism." Corner's response proposes "landscraping" — scraping the land of "symbolic, political, and material" residues rather than composing it — with the English Commons and Indian Maidan as models of managed, indeterminate void space.
• Media, emptiness, and indirect land value: Young's "Line Frustration": local TV coverage of Detroit "legitimiz[ed] the white middle class flight from the city"; emptiness carried an "indirect televisual value," so "the urban landscape was more valuable empty and mystified than developed"; broadcasting nostalgia "blunts the possibility of a serious rethinking of the city itself, and this blunting conserves."
• The dérive against media myth: "Line Frustration" uses Debord's dérive and psychogeographic mapping to walk three segments of the Federal Empowerment Zone boundary — a "gerrymandered spatialization of a political process" that "separates this from more of this" — finding architecture's potential in "the slack of the line" rather than in problem-solving buildings.
• Refusal of the solution posture: Colas's response reads Line Frustration through autonomist Marxism (Negri's "refusal of work," "self-valorization"), affirming the value of drifting and process over predefined remedies; the editors likewise "reassert the relative role and value of design and criticism" against "sociologically based models of research."
• Cultural production in abandonment: Arens on the Heidelberg Project: Tyree Guyton's assemblage houses (1986–) cultivated "the public's understanding of the inherently troubling realm of terrain vague through community involvement," in "the spirit of the Situationist proposals" — and were twice bulldozed by the city (1991, 1999).
• Ruin nostalgia as postmodern souvenir-taking: Herron, via MacCannell, Stewart, and Sorkin: the tourist "does not step into, but out of the historically negotiated drama of modernity"; Vergara's ruin-park proposals exemplify "post-modern souvenir taking" that reduces the poor to "souvenir extras."
• Colonialism and Fordism symmetrical: Waldheim & Santos-Munné, following Barry Lopez: "industrial production has been the continuation of colonialism by other means"; the military encampment (Rykwert, Le Corbusier, Hilberseimer's civil-defense decentralization, the Autobahn-proven interstate highway) is the ur-model of both fordist production and American urban arrangement.

Connections

Concepts: Neoliberal Metropolis · Gentrification · Everyday Life · Spectacle · Terrain Vague · Dérive · Psychogeography
Authors: Jerry Herron and the Committee for Urban Thinking · Douglas Spencer · Schumacher & Rogner
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function · Postmodernism vs. Modernism (capitalism, urbanization & gentrification)
Related source notes: After Ford (Schumacher & Rogner) · The Enigma of Capital (Harvey)

Direct Quotes

"Detroit is the most thoroughly modern city in the world."

"A ruin is not found, it is made: an anti-historical compound of nostalgia and merchandising."

"[O]ne can see how ... new sports stadia and casinos ... recast the redundant city as an a-historical destination theme park banking on Detroit's historical name brand."

"[A]n urbanism of the simulacra: the ongoing myth of Detroit's resurgence."

"[D]espite its many imposing structures ornamented with the trappings of civic life, there are no monuments in the 'Capital of the Twentieth Century.' Things move too quickly. Survival is more a matter of forgetting than remembering." (Hoffman, "The Best the World Has to Offer")

"'Unbuilding' has surpassed building as the city's major architectural activity." (Hoffman, "Erasing Detroit")

"Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation." (Solà-Morales, "Terrain Vague," quoted in Daskalakis & Perez, "Projecting Detroit")

"Detroit's was not simple abandonment. Its empty spaces were consciously maintained so as to propel the myth that allows them to be covered again and again... the urban landscape was more valuable empty and mystified than developed." (Young et al., "Line Frustration")

"Rather than 'fixing' the city through architecture, or 'architecturalizing' the city in order to discipline its spaces... the work of deterritorialization simply establishes the conditions for the processes of urbanism to perform and unfold in more dynamic ways." (Corner, "Landscraping")

"Industrial production has been the continuation of colonialism by other means." (Lopez, quoted in Waldheim & Santos-Munné, "Decamping Detroit")

"Urbanism is capitalism's seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must remake the totality of space into its own setting." (Debord, Society of the Spectacle thesis 169, quoted in "Line Frustration")

Open Questions

• Is "stalking" (recording without saving/solving) a viable critical posture, or does it risk the same aestheticization of the ruins that Herron denounces in Vergara?
• The anthology contains multiple, contradictory disciplinary frames by design — does Schumacher & Rogner's socio-economic "After Ford" argument (which feeds Schumacher's later parametricism) cohere with, or undercut, the editors' anti-solution "stalking" posture and Waldheim's landscape urbanism?
• Does Colas's autonomist reading ("self-valorization" of the refused building) describe a transferable method for practice in shrinking cities, or is it parasitic on Detroit's exceptional legibility?