Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures - Couverture rigide

Caverly, Nicholas L.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1503640256 ISBN 13 : 9781503640252

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Pioneering field work reveals how infrastructural systems—buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins—maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape

For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them.

As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Nicholas L. Caverly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1503640256
• ISBN 13: 9781503640252
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible