IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

This paper examines how people engage with sedimented industrial hazards to construct more livable worlds in the wake of racially unequal deindustrialization. It draws on a decade of ethnographic and historical research conducted in Detroit, Michigan. In the United States, Detroit is iconic of how racial capitalist economic relations saddle racially-marginalized, impoverished places with the fallout of twentieth-century industries. For example, factories that pumped out automobiles, making Detroit a household name also emitted lead and other contaminants into the neighborhoods that abutted production facilities. Since the 1950s, corporate owners have closed most Detroit’s assembly lines. But emitted contaminants linger on, especially beneath the surface of grassy lots in which Detroiters are encouraged to cultivate subsistence gardens. Significantly elevated rates of lead poisoning among city residents have been linked to consuming produce grown in contaminated soils. To this end, when Detroiters build up layers of compost and cardboard atop gardening plots to prevent sedimented hazards from entering their food supply, they model strategies for carving out more habitable prospects amidst the uneven fallout of deindustrialization. At the same time, the steps Detroiters must take to buffer against industrial hazards index unmet demands for environmental justice. This paper turns to Detroiters’ careful cultivation of contaminated soils to bridge political ecology with the question of rights to the city. It does so to suggest that building more livable cities demands reworking the material conditions through which historically situated systems of injustice continue to build up in the present.