Monthly Archives: March 2014

Detroit and the temptation of ruin

In Detroit, they call it “Ruin Porn”: images of a 35-acre abandoned automotive plant, the 18-story abandoned railway station (modeled, in turn, on ancient Roman baths), and other vast and decayed structures.

I can certainly understand why citizens of Detroit would object to the aestheticization of poverty and abandonment–to their city’s being used to produce marketable images of tragic grandeur. But the story of Detroit is tragic, in the Aristotelian sense. Recall the plot: the city rises from a few thousand residents to 1.8 million when hubristic men like Henry Ford invent forms of mass production that transform work itself. Black people migrate there from the South, face violent hostility, but manage to obtain political and cultural power. The city builds cars, weapons, and pop music that conquer the world. It becomes a model of modernity, vividly depicted by Diego Rivera on the walls of its world-class museum. And then Detroit collapses to 700,000 people who live amid the empty shells of its industrial past, while the nation looks away.

There is nothing new about treating a tragic fall as sublime. “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Or: “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

In fact, because the Detroit Institute of Arts is an encyclopedic collection, one can find on its walls many images of ruin. For example, Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael paints the Jewish cemetery of 17th-century Amsterdam falling to pieces in a wild storm, as a momento mori. I don’t know why he picks Jewish graves, but perhaps because their dead are dead for good (in his view), not subject to resurrection.

van Ruisdeal, “The Jewish Cemetery” (ca. 1654)

The American Frederic Church imagines the coast of Syria as a kind of museum or theme park of ruins: Roman, Gothic, and Islamic piled almost on top of each other.

Frederic Edwin Church. “Syria by the Sea” (1873)

Anselm Kiefer paints a vast three dimensional canvass, parts of it literally burnt by the artist. He means to represent a particular brick factory in India (one that manufactures its own walls and sells the same walls, brick-by-brick, to consumers) and also the ovens of Auschwitz–which was another kind of Jewish cemetery.

Anselm Kiefer, “Das Gewiert” (1997)

The DIA even includes a whole Gothic side chapel moved to Detroit from a chateau in Lorraine–reconstructed there from a real Old World ruin. When you stand inside it, with its streaked and burnished stone and stained glass all around you, you are in a late-medieval building, inside a much larger structure patterned on the ruins of ancient Rome, near the center of a modern American city that is partly falling into ruin.

The DIA itself is hardly ruinous. On a Friday night, it is packed with visitors of all ages and backgrounds who stroll through its magnificent galleries, listen to live jazz, or play chess. But the collection, whose market value might reach $1 billion, will likely be sold to make a small dent in the bankrupt city’s pension obligations. In the best case, the purchasers will be a consortium of foundations whose wealth derived from Detroit and which have pledged to give the art back once they buy it. It’s a strange twist that some of the objects they may buy and return to the city from which their endowments came will be “ruin porn” of other times and places.

the rise of urban citizenship

(Detroit) James Holston’s “current research examines the worldwide insurgence of democratic urban citizenships.” In this post, I’ll share what I took away from his excellent keynote talk about the recent uprisings in Sao Paolo and Istanbul. (I think he would tie the evidence together in a different way to support a somewhat different argument.)

Various cities are issuing formal identity cards to residents–regardless of national citizenship–that entitle the residents to services. Holston said that New Haven was the first US city to do this, and San Francisco now offers free preventative medical care to all its residents. I would add that Takoma Park, MD allows all residents (age 16+) to vote in municipal elections even if they are not US citizens.

Meanwhile, a whole series of great cities around the world have seen mass uprisings in which hundreds of thousands of people take over the central squares. They raise diverse issues (global, national/political, ethnic, religious), but often they talk specifically about their city. Thus the Istanbul protests started in response to a redevelopment plan for Taksim Square; and in Sao Paolo, the impetus was a bus fare increase.

The repertoire of protest acts (mechanisms and processes) used in these cities has not been particularly original. But one could imagine that a new form of politics and citizenship is arising. After all, the vast cities of the world have these features:

They are big enough that their policies really count. Their populations are larger than those of many nation-states, and they are global economic hot spots. At the same time, they are small enough that everyone can get to a central spot within a day, and you can visualize the city as a whole.

They have not traditionally had border-controls. Residents come and go at will. (I acknowledge exceptions, as in China; but even there, I think the border controls are pretty porous.) San Francisco’s citizenship is defined by the city’s residency card, but the city does not decide who has a right to it; people decide by moving in. That is a different kind of citizenship. And in the case of cities that are magnets for global migration, from Johannesburg to LA, many residents are not legal citizens of the surrounding nation-state.

Because of its density, the city’s population is interdependent. Maybe the top one percent can fly over the city’s crime and congestion in helicopters, but the middle class suffers in (loose) tandem with the poor. That is less true at the level of the nation-state.

The city is simply a locus of power that can change its policies and governing philosophy even if the nation-state is sclerotic or corrupt.

We conspicuously make the city with our labor and our bodies.  The physical evidence of our effort is all around us, taking the concrete form of buildings, cars, signs, crowds. Thus the right to citizenship can be grounded on people’s creation of the city (and workers can have pride of place as citizens). In contrast, we didn’t literally make the United States, so it’s hard to claim that our labor gives us the right to it. God made Brazil; people make Sao Paolo.

Those were the unique features of cities that occurred to me while Holston was speaking. From the floor, I asked him what made big cities special, and he added:

  • The sheer “density of opportunity” for political action.
  • The fact that poverty, isolation, and anonymity sometimes spur urbanites to act politically, whereas the same factors suppress action in rural areas and small towns. (This sounded to me like the reverse of Mao’s doctrine that the revolution would begin in the countryside.)
  • The city is a seat of power. Traditionally, the city houses the cathedral, the parliament building, the castle, the university–all the concrete locations of power over the larger polity.

two conversations about citizenship

(Detroit) I’m delighted to be at Wayne State University for my second visit to the Center for the Study of Citizenship’s annual national conference. I have just arrived, but the titles and abstracts reinforce my view that there are really two discussions about citizenship.

In the first discussion, citizenship basically means membership in some kind of political entity or regime. The opposite of a citizen is an alien or outsider, but there are various possible conditions between belonging and being fully alien–states that Elizabeth Cohen calls “semi-citizenship.”  Questions arise about who does or should belong to which kind of regime, what rights and obligations membership brings or should bring, and what members feel or should feel (subjectively) about themselves and their fellow members.

In the second discussion, citizenship means civic engagement, or taking action of some kind in the public sphere. One opposite of a citizen, in this sense, is a bystander or a consumer. Another opposite is a policymaker or officeholder, if we choose to divide the state from civil society. (In Harry Boyte’s view, it’s important that policymakers are citizens.) In this second discussion, the issues that arise include: who engages, what makes them engage, whether civic engagement is good, and what active people achieve.

The two conversations do relate to each other. For instance, you cannot engage as an active citizen by voting if the state deems you ineligible to vote by virtue of age, a felony conviction, or immigration status. But even then, you can act in many other ways. Overall, I would say that the two discourses of citizenship are pretty separate.

the big lessons of Obamacare

For what it’s worth, I support Obamacare as a health reform strategy. To the best of my limited understanding, it makes sense as an approach to broadening insurance coverage and controlling costs. Whether or not I am right, the law will have a long-term impact on public views of government and politics. For instance, as I recently told NPR’s Tamara Keith and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, young people will draw powerful and lasting lessons from their perception of this initiative. In turn, that may affect their political orientation for the next 50 years.

I can see public opinion of Obamacare crystallizing in three different ways:

1. It is a fiasco that proves the government can’t be trusted. Just when we were learning that the feds can collect private information from anyone in the world (even the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, our ally), we watched the Obamacare website fail to capture data that people wanted to give it. That crisis has passed, but the whole reform could be seen–rightly or wrongly–as an emblematic failure of government.

People would ask whether more government is better, and their answer would be: No.

2. It is a demonstration of Clinton/Obama-era technocratic liberalism. The government pulls together some experts, mostly employed in universities and industries, and develops a clever set of tweaks to the existing insurance market. By offering individuals new choices in carefully designed market exchanges (while sparingly employing money and regulations), the government nudges employees and employers to act better. The key relationships are all private and transactional: I go onto a website, make choices for myself and my family, and get economic benefits for us. If that approach is seen to work, it strengthens the case for a certain kind of technocracy in which behavioral economics is the reigning discipline.

People would ask whether smarter government is better, and their answer would be: Yes.

3. It is an illustration that we the people can address problems together, using a combination of laws and the state, business and markets, and voluntary collective action. To be sure, that is not the way that Obamacare is being presented, either by its supporters or by its detractors. To its enemies, it is state-centered socialism. To its most prominent friends, it is the government helping individuals. And indeed, it was designed in a basically individualistic way. But the act has provisions that strengthen community health clinics that are governed by public boards. Lawrence Jacobs argues that the $11 billion in new funds for them is a huge investment. This investment could boost civil society and develop new leaders. Meanwhile, Health Access California has been outstandingly successful at signing people up for Obamacare by combining community organizing, education, research, and advocacy. A significant reason for the success of Obamacare, if it succeeds at all, will be this huge collaborative effort in California’s nonprofit sector.

If these aspects of the law were (a) publicized and (b) strengthened in the years to come, people might ask a different question: Can we address social problems together? And the answer would be: Yes.

my upcoming talks

Detroit, March 21: lunchtime plenary at the Center for the Study of Citizenship’s 2014 Conference, Wayne State University

Florida, March 28, lunchtime plenary at the “Democracy in America: Participation and Social Justice” conference at Stetson University, 

Chicago, April 5th 2014, panel on “best practices in civic engagement across two- and four- year colleges,” Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting

Charlottesville, VA, April 9: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America, the Rotunda, University of Virginia.

Champaign, IL, April 17: keynote speech at the city’s STAR (Service Together Achieves results) Expo/Awards Program.

Nashville, May 3: the Southeastern Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA)

Mexico City, May 28-30 (private seminar for professors)

Dallas, June 9, League of Women Voters National Conference