Has Detroit stopped spinning ?

My left knee hurts. I have a vague but worrying pain in my right side and my back tooth seems to be crumbling. I shared these concerns with my depressingly young GP and was somewhat dismayed by her indifferent response. I paraphrase but in essence I am 52, over the summit of my life and now starting on the downhill slope. Bit of me are starting to fall apart and hey guess what ? this is how life is going to be from now on. 

This brief but profound conversation has had me brooding on the process of decay and how cities are different from people. Now although my knowledge of urban architectural history does not extend much beyond saying ‘that is a nice building’, I am now struck by how the built infrastructure of London is a living breathing thing which is in a process of continual renewal. Unlike my middle aged body, when bits of the city die, new bits spring up and replace them. I am going to live for another 30 years at most but people in London are cheerfully buying flats with 150 year leases. However this process doesn’t always work and cities that are too dependent on a single industry are very prone to suddenly dying when that industry either declines or is transformed by technology.

The starkest recent example of this is Detroit which has to be the most shocking example of sudden urban decay in our lifetime. In a nutshell, Detroit used to be the heart of the US car industry but now that industry has gone south to the cheaper and let’s be frank far less unionised and more malleable economies of Mexico and Brazil.

As a result the city population has declined from 2.6m in the 1950s to else than 700,000 today this has predictably led to an explosion of crime and social unrest. Detroit is now ranked as the most dangerous city in the US with a murder rate ten times that of New York. Over 70% of these are drug related and rarely solved. There are over now 100,00 abandoned house and buildings and in case you are interested, you can pick one up for about ￡500.  However it will be in euphemistically phrased ‘lively’ neighbourhood and you are unlikely to see yourself featured on “A Place in the Sun”.

This avalanche of a decline in employment and associated migration of the working population has had a knock on effect onto the City Council which recently declared itself bankrupt with debts of over $18.5 billion. However what was also telling is that a main cause of this was the fact that although the Council only employed 10,000 people it was paying the pensions of 21,000 and these liabilities were costing up to 1/3 of the budget.

What is unsettling about all this to us liberal interventionist lefties is that the rest of America doesn’t really seem to care either about the City or the Council.  The US is fundamentally a society of ex pats and people don’t seem to have the same attachment to physical spaces that we do. Detroit has failed as a city and it’s a bit well so what ? let’s all move to California.  

This wider apathy has liberated the incumbent Mayor Duggan  to propose bulldozing up to a quarter of the city. His thinking is that is that by this, how shall we say ? less than nuanced approach to urban regeneration, he can retrench public sector resources to focus on  smaller more manageable areas and improve the quality of life for the residents that have stayed behind. He is not alone in this thinking and America has quite a few towns in the north western rustbelt where because the steel and coal industries have collapsed, the population has pretty much all got up and left. This is how life is and the federal and state governments don’t spend a lot of time or money trying to stop it.

This begs the question of what we would do faced with a similar situation. There are lots of examples in the UK of big cites that were overly reliant on a single industry  and when that industry declines  or goes elsewhere  the local economy pretty much always goes into fairly rapid decline. And sometimes the industry doesn’t even move away, a change in technology can be decimating. There are quite a few communities in the UK that were originally built around employing lots of people on dockyards and the simple invention of the shipping container by Malcolm Mclean in 1956 wiped out huge swathes of these jobs almost overnight.

What we don’t do when faced with these situations is to concede defeat and call in the bulldozers. What we do do is throw lots of regeneration money at the problem and see if some of it sticks. Post industrial communities in the UK have had several billion pounds of regeneration funding over the last twenty years and despite the industry of academics, consultants and economists cheerfully spending the money, the results have been patchy at best. There have been some qualified successes such as Canary Wharf in London but there are depressing numbers of once thriving working class communities that are stuck in a downward spiral of economic decline that has gone on for decades.

I think this is because for some towns the reliance on a single industry is so intense that when that industry declines it creates a black hole that rips the heart out of the community pretty much forever. For some places you can build as many neighbourhood resource centres  and light industrial parks as you want but the energy and spirit that originally drove the economy is unfortunately never coming back.

So why not follow Detroit’s example and let the under populated parts of our towns return to the small farms and wild open spaces they were 200 years ago ? Accept that for some places in the UK the industrial age really has gone forever and move on. This may be an unpalatable truth but it’s a truth all the same. You can snort all you like but by refusing to acknowledge it, we condemn generations of economically trapped people to live on blighted estates waiting for a regeneration miracle that never comes.

So in conclusion Mayor Duggan is arguably the bravest politician working in local government today. He is prepared to let parts of Detroit wither and die because he know that sometimes when an industry catastrophically dies, state aided regeneration attempts to prop up the neighbourhood wreckage left behind are ultimately pointless. My knee and Detroit share one single fact, they are both broken, they will never be what they were forty years ago and there is nothing anyone can do to reverse this decline.  Mayor Duggan knows this but how many English politicians would be brave enough to say the same ?