Urban Triage, City Systems, and the Remnants of Community

Abstract

Detroit’s long-range planning agenda—as articulated in the Detroit Future City (DFC) plan—is based on an innovative vision of a smaller, greener city. Implementing this vision rests on clearing the city’s most abandoned and deteriorated neighborhoods and transforming the area into vast green spaces. Eventually, therefore, the eighty-eight thousand people currently residing in this zone must (be) relocate(d). As services are phased out and infrastructure networks decommissioned, it is reasoned outmigration will accelerate; this strategy of “urban triage” geographically targets expenditures on the basis of viability, such that the flow of public resources to “nonviable” neighborhoods is constricted. This article explores one assumption that underlies triage-based policy and planning. Namely, it is believed that by removing infrastructures and services (“city systems”) from a given area, people will leave that area, a causal proposition that can be broken into two constituent parts. First, there is nothing unproblematic about removing, no matter how incrementally, the city systems that serve as the skeletal framework of the city. City systems are politically and institutionally embedded within a complex web of intersecting structures, processes, relationships, and interests—a “stickiness” that complicates efforts to dismantle them. The second half of the proposition is that removing city systems will provide the needed incentive for people to voluntarily move out of the targeted areas. This assumption, however, may not appreciate the degree of socio-spatial persistence that can be exhibited by groups occupying abandoned spaces. Thus, even if efforts to geographically shrink city systems are successful, there is reason to believe that social remnants of community may indefinitely persist in target areas even in the face of great hardship—including the cessation of basic services. The present analysis suggests that the burden of proof falls on those predicting that the withdrawal of city systems will succeed where decades of generalized deprivation have failed.