UC San Diego

Positioning Detroit's "post-industrial" landscape as anything but "natural", this work seeks to understand and engage the racialized production of Detroit in the urban spatial imaginary through public policy and popular culture. A review of the literature on Detroit either naturalizes Detroit's late twentieth century production as a "chocolate city" and its population decline as functions of "white flight" and de-industrialization. I argue that the narrative of the post-industrial city is linked in many ways to the production of a post-racial national ideology--wherein the process of de-industrialization impacts all Detroiters, making invisible the long relationship between racial formation and spatial formation in the city of Detroit and its metropolitan area. This work reveals projects of the institutionalization of race in public policy as a way to understand the contemporary narrative of Detroit as a continuation of its racialized past. This project analyzes the simultaneous production of structural racism and the discursive production of race to reveal a material and ideological understanding of how race happens to make visible and explicit the process of racial spatialization. The dissertation approached these ideas in two distinct parts to answer the following question: "How do racial logics simultaneously produce spatial logics and then disappear?" Part I serves as a historical analysis of the national and local policies that shaped Detroit from the 1920s-1960s in regards to public and private housing and slum clearance and shows the ways the City of Detroit, through the simultaneous enforcement and willful ignorance of national and local housing policies created a City, that to this day is one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. These chapters examine more than a statistical analysis and reveal how race, space, and the spatial imaginary are co-constructed during this time through the enactment of racialized policies. Part II examines the contemporary rendering of Detroit in popular culture as a dead and dying city through the use of cultural texts like Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2008) and an analysis of a popular website, www.city-data.com/forum/detroit to reveal that many of the ideas produced about Detroit are based on what is imagined by those outside the city. Ultimately this work reveals the layered process of racial formation through the material as well as ideological in order to link the continued production and construction of race in the current moment despite attempts to render the United States as a post-racial nation