It's In the BOX!

INTRODUCTION +The People Left Behind A drive on a narrow two-lane street yields sights such as pheasant-filled grasslands exploding with wildflowers, two-story houses spaced generously apart, and sweet corn and other produce in neat rows.The people one sees are primarily African Americans or other minorities on the lower portions of the economic pyramid whose daily lives lack many of the products and services that most citizens of developed countries take for granted. This picture at first seems like the rural south but it is far from it. This is Detroit in the year 2012.

Jerry Herron, in his book, Afterculture, paints a vivid picture of Detroit that still exists nearly two decades after its publication: There’s no denying the power of the place, particularly at first sight. It is impossible to convey the eerie effect of so much real property—houses department stores, office towers, theaters, shops, schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, hotels, fire houses, mansions, streets, fountains, factories, whole neighborhoods—having simply been left behind, as if the inhabitants were carried off by some terrible natural disaster. Detroit is a worst-case illustration.

(Herron 1993, 204) Though it seems far from it now, Detroit was once the epicenter for the American dream. Those were left behind after industry and jobs moved to the suburbs, to other regions and other countries, after white flight following the civil uprising of 1967, have been trapped in an environment of social, economic, and environmental disinvestment with no more hope of escaping to something better than they experienced over forty years ago.

The remaining residents do not have anywhere to go and they are not going away. Detroit, despite images promoted in the popular press, is not a blank slate.

Figure 1.15 (opposite left): detroit east side-1950s Figure 1.16 (opposite right): east side neighborhood--present day 2