Ruin tours: performing and consuming decay in Detroit

ABSTRACT

In the face of economic, demographic, and infrastructural decline, Detroit, Michigan, has become a destination for those interested in viewing the city’s iconic ruins. Paradoxically, such tours represent a form of economic development that takes urban decay as its object. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, this study examines how such tours operate in relation to broader practices of urban redevelopment. It argues that tours are not only a way of turning the city into a site of consumption, but also a more complicated response to failures of industrial capitalism in which tour operators suggest different political modes of responding to the city’s decline. This is demonstrated by tracing the development of ruin tour programs and examining three representative cases of ruin tours. Examining how local actors respond to urban decline in this way strengthens urban geographic understandings of the post-industrial city and its recapitalization..

KEYWORDS:

• Detroit
• post-industrial city
• place politics
• tourism
• urban redevelopment

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Sarah Elwood, whose comments on various versions of this work strengthened it immensely. I am also grateful to Kevin Ward for his direction as editor and to three anonymous reviewers. Further thanks to Victoria Lawson, Will McKeithen, and Jennifer Porter for helpful comments on a previous version of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Most interviews took place in-person. Two were conducted by telephone and one by video chat.

2. Some interviewees asked to be identified by their names, while others preferred pseudonyms. Pseudonyms are identified as such on first use.

3. In 2015, D:hive underwent another reorganization, as its tour and welcome center were rebranded as Detroit Experience Factory and its business development program became the Build Institute. It remains under the DDP.

4. I participated in this tour in 2016, rather than in 2012 when the rest of the fieldwork was conducted. In order to correct for ways the tour narrative may have changed in those four years, my analysis also draws on data collected in 2012 about the tour at that time, including the 2012 pre-tour introduction and information about the tour that was drawn from interviews and textual and photo documentation produced by tour participants and collected in the online session notes commonly produced for conference sessions at the AMC that are made available to AMC participants through the conference website.

5. Ellis (1899–2000) was the first black woman to own a printing company in Detroit. The parties she threw at her home were an important feature of the Detroit music and gay cultural scenes in the mid-20^th century.

6. A pseudonym.