Embracing the Ruins, Musically
Aaron Renn, the Urbanophile, has a brilliant post about how Detroit could embrace its industrial ruins. I agree with just about everything he says in it. Here are the key ideas:
What if instead of spending a huge amount of money to try to save one building, the city found a little bit of money to do basic maintenance to preserve the structural integrity of many buildings – and create a safe path through parts of them that tourists could walk through similar to how ancient ruins are displayed in Europe. Heck, don’t even clean the buildings up. That saves money and makes them even more impressive to visitors….
Imagine a Detroit with a light rail line on Woodward, bike lanes, art galleries, etc. That’s a nice vision, and those might do some good, but ultimately they are not really going to attract anyone to Detroit or create a unique offering there because there are plenty of places that already do those things better than Detroit ever will.
I’ve said before that Detroit is a big city with a powerful brand, the sort of place that can attract people. One possible way is to make Detroit the ultimate arena in which to prove out alternative visions of our urban future, a new American frontier where you can re-imagine and reinvent yourself and pursue wild and crazy urbanist dreams that would just plain be off limits anywhere else.
The concept of “embracing the ruins” goes right alone with this. What other city has such a supply of these or would dare step up to preserve them as ruins? I can’t name one. That’s distinctiveness for you, and distinctiveness that totally reinforces a possible brand image.
I want to reiterate and expand on this idea a bit, since I find it so compelling. I mean, how many people would visit Detroit for a) a new baseball/football stadium b) hip art galleries and bike paths c) warehouse raves or d) to walk through its industrial ruins. To me, it is not even close. Just fix up those old buildings enough so that the roof doesn’t cave in on anybody and hand out maps at city tourism offices with the title “Ruins of a Golden Age.” Let people, as much as is feasible, find their way to and around the sites on their own. You’ll likely see more hotel bookings downtown and new businesses along the routes. And you’ll get more people attending baseball games, frequenting art galleries, and going to the late night music offerings. But you need the distinctive scene of the decayed industrial buildings qua amenities to get the rest of those virtuous urban development cycles going.
Funnily enough, something just like this idea came up in some conversations we were having here about a potential comparative study of Detroit, Chicago, and Nashville vis-à-vis their respective urban fortunes since the 1960’s. Nashville became Music City and built a music economy that rivals that of New York and Los Angeles. Chicago used its Political Machine to build Mayor Daley II’s Entertainment Machine. And the wheels fell off the Motor City. What accounts for these fates, and what challenges and opportunities do they face going forward?
That question is too big for now. But one aspect of our conversation turned to the issue of turning Detroit’s industrial heritage/ruins into assets. The comparison with Nashville might be fruitful in some ways.
Think about it: if Midwest Rust Belt cities are in a bad way now, they are still far from the depths to which the post-War South descended. But since then, certain aspects of the South have come to symbolize a more authentic pre-urbanized and pre-industrialized America.
Here is Bob Dylan:
[In the South], there was a difference in the concept of time, too. In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells. Northerners had to ‘be on time.’ In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time….The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write
If the homeland of a bunch of former slaveholders could become a symbol of mystery and authenticity, surely Detroit could, as Renn suggests, make itself the focal point and embodiment of a kind of industrial age authenticity and post-industrial nostalgia for industrial times. But here is where the devastation of the Civil War might have actually proven, in a kind of twisted way, somewhat advantageous for Nashville. The humiliation of defeat left the South as “an other within” America, in search of ways of rising on new grounds that could be culturally separated from the legacy of slavery. Country Music was one way of doing that, distilling a kind of rural, rustic, alluring but vanishing pre-industrial rural agrarian life lived not on the clock but according to the rhythms of nature. Pour some gasoline on the fire with the sense of alienation generated by the inhumane factory and the anonymous city, and you’ve got a real bundle of cultural energy to work with. If your city can become the home base for producing and selling the musical expression of that experience nationally, you’ve got a cultural industry built out of sounds and symbols to rival anything that requires assembly lines or fertilizer to produce. Nashville pulled that off. The story of just how it “fabricated” its musical authenticity from out of the ruins of the Old South is of course a complex and fascinating one, some aspects which can be found here and here.
But I doubt that there is unanimity in Detroit that the industrial era together with its distinctive lifestyles and urban forms are truly dead, humiliated, and forsaken. How many are ready to embrace a Rust Belt version of Dylan’s idea: Detroit must die on the cross and become culturally resurrected in music and historical longing? Many in Detroit probably would not take too kindly to the label “Ruins of a Golden Age.” Detroit for them is not the Old Industrial “other within”; it is the home of Good Working Americans. There was no Great War fought to defeat Fordism, and a lot of people with connections, votes, money, and clout believe that its social and economic forms should be sustained, even on life support. Turning Detroit’s decaying buildings into a kind of industrial version of Berlin’s Gedenk Kirche or the Pathenon in Athens would mean giving up on this idea. And that will be hard to do, maybe impossible for this generation. Hopefully, Detroit’s leaders are wise enough to preserve the buildings long enough for that to happen.
The other interesting connection with Nashville has to do with the urban development potentials of music. The genius of Nashville was to turn “the South” into a cultural product that could be sold on a mass scale. That product is called Country Music. It is a music invested with the cultural meanings and values available there in Nashville, but not in its industry rivals New York and Los Angeles. This cultural brand is burned into the everyday experience of the cities themselves: using our amenities data, you can see that three of the top 5 most numerous types of amenities in Los Angeles are jewelers, commercial artists, and bakeries. In New York, it is jewelers, art dealers, and delicatessens. In Nashville: The Church of Christ, Methodist Churches, and Automobile Customizers. Bling, Art, and Lunch on the Go vs. God and Cars, there in the cities’ streets and strips. The Nashville music industry exists in this scene, so different from those of New York and L.A,; it has managed to pour its distinctive experiences into a music that gives millions of people outside of Nashville a set of symbols that allow them to express and share its pleasures. It has made itself into the primary and maybe sole city positioned to provide those symbols. 70% of the people who list themselves as fans of country music bands on myspace.com are fans of bands located in Nashville.
If Detroit could turn its old buildings into a tourist draw, that would be very beneficial from an urban development perspective, as it will draw in outside money and energy. But tourism only takes a city so far. Were Detroit also able to develop a kind of music that gave voice to a sense that there is something valuable, mysterious, complex, authentic, and worth remembering in the industrial era, it could become a culture industry center much like Nashville is, one that produces a kind of regional/historical music for a mass audience that has to be made there for it to be real.
Demand for this kind of music is likely to grow. With books like Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft and Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character, we can already see signs of an emerging, almost mystical nostalgia for the rhythms and experiences of the industrial age: the regularity of the 9 to 5 day, the security of the stable career pattern, and the embodied, immersed physicality of hands-on work. Just a few years ago similarly situated intellectuals would have derided these same phenomena as evidence of mind deadening routine, menial labor, and the conformity of the Company Man. It is not hard to imagine this re-coding occurring in popular culture as well. Could you imagine a hit song in 2020 called “Take Your Flex and Shove it”? I could.
If something like an industrialist nostalgia/post-industrial resentment version of the honky tonk bar could emerge in the Rust Belt, and if Detroit could turn its Motown music infrastructure toward becoming the center of producing and creating that kind of music, it would find an export market exponentially larger than the tourist market. And it would have a long-term home industry that will likely last for the foreseeable future, as America’s industrial period becomes defined as part of its cultural heritage and Detroit as the geographic embodiment of that aspect of our collective memory.
