The Detroit Future City

Abstract

This article critiques the Detroit Future City (DFC) strategic framework concerning municipal service provision and land use over the next few decades. Relying on policy and media documents, we show that the DFC exhibits narrow, market-oriented logics characteristic of the pervasive hegemony of neoliberal urbanism in American city governance. We address the corporate orientation of the Detroit Works Project, the public–private partnership behind DFC, and argue that the plan may exacerbate the racialized spatial injustices produced in Detroit by 20th-century exclusionary metropolitan growth, ineffective governance, and decades-long flawed approaches to economic development. Furthermore, DFC not only advances previous planned-shrinkage attempts but also seeks to repurpose major areas of the city for global investment, reversing their zoning for agriculture and green space. Our analysis of census data shows that Detroit’s most disadvantaged residents disproportionately reside in areas designated as future “innovation landscapes.” Exploratory spatial data analysis indicates that these zones are not internally homogeneous and engulf resilient residential land usage. Moreover, greening serves the symbolic purpose of reconstituting problematically racialized “Black” areas as purified, investment-ready spaces. We urge neoliberal urban research to continue tracing its global embedding and relational evolution, but also to reorganize the pernicious sociospatial reality on the ground.