This Is What Makes Ruins: On the So-Called Post-Industrial City

Pidgin editors Cassandra Rota and Nigel Van Ha sat down with architectural historian, scholar, and activist Andrew Herscher to discuss the post-industrial city as an object of interest across pieces in issue 31. In the conversation, the “post-industrial city” is unpacked as a term, site, and history, as it intersects with the architectural discipline, artistic expression, and movement-based activism. Dr. Herscher, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, helps us reimagine the architectural discourse, education, and allyship in the “post-industrial” through the lenses of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and ongoing work in these urban sites.

Pidgin Editors: We thought that we could start by discussing the history of the “post-industrial city.” When did it enter your interests and scholarship?

Andrew Herscher: For me, it began in 2005 when I arrived at the University of Michigan and was quickly invited by colleagues to go on “ruin tours” of Detroit. That was the way Detroit was introduced to me–as a place of ruins. I was shown the Packard Plant, Michigan Central Station, Michigan Theater, abandoned houses on the east side of the city, and many other buildings that are now centerpieces of ruin porn. We never talked to anybody on these ruin tours and I don’t remember even stopping to get food–it was a purely specular, distanced experience of a city that was presented as no longer a city at all. I heard some light socio-historical framing like “post-industrialism” laid over what we were seeing but that didn’t seem to go very far.

At the same time, however, I started to show up in Detroit on my own and get involved with residents doing community-led work. This work seemed to have nothing to do with architecture; moreover, as a white man working within a Black activist matriarchy, there was nothing self-evident about my own presence, as well. In the midst of working with and through each of the preceding dynamics in several different community contexts, Detroit was declared to be in the midst of a financial emergency, an emergency financial manager was appointed to run the city, and a series of urban austerity measures were enacted. These measures were the latest iterations in the city’s long history of racially inequitable disinvestment and degrowth, a history that has continually extracted land and wealth from Black Detroiters. Given that history, I didn’t and still don’t find the concept of the post-industrial city to be very useful given its agnosticism with respect to the racially constructed and racially motivated bases of disinvestment, de-development, and degrowth that have shaped Detroit.

PE: One way that we are thinking about “post-industrial city” as a useful term is through your work on memory. You’ve approached memory in these sites through historicization and forensic methods, is there something about history and memory within the post-industrial city you’ve found helpful? Is the “post” in “post-industrial city” somehow active in that work?

AH: The salience of history and memory in the post-industrial city might be a question of who and what remembers and who and what is forgotten. If you look at the famous ruins of Detroit as ways into the post-industrial city, as many have done and still do, you can easily see only what you’re looking for—the city’s ruins, which solicit analysis and interpretation to understand, can easily become screens onto which observers project their own fears and desires.

A city of so-called ruins, for example, might immediately appear as a once-great city that has fallen on hard times. In fact, cities like Detroit and other cities framed as “post-industrial” are often understood in terms of this boom-and-bust framework. The industrial city is the great city, the city of growth, of development, and of construction, and the post-industrial city becomes precisely the opposite. And yet, the seemingly booming city was a city that depended on the exploitation of labor and the extraction of resources, which, in cities like Detroit, were labor and resources of Black communities.

One of the things that was really striking to me about Detroit during the “bust times,” before emergency financial management, was the way in which so-called abandoned buildings and vacant lots were being used in all kinds of ways by people who never could have access, either through ownership or rental, to these sorts of urban spaces. Some of those uses were illicit and some were licit; some of them had to do with economic survival and some of them had to do with recreation and entertainment–there was an entire continuum of uses, from the frivolous to the profound, that seemingly empty spaces hosted during the so-called “bust times.” And so, what’s worth remembering about times like those for the beneficiaries of racial capitalism is very different from what’s worth remembering for the people who are denied racial capitalism’s benefits. Detroit, supposedly a ruined city to many outside and mostly white observers, was home to around 700,000 people, the great majority of whom were Black, before emergency financial management was imposed in 2013. To call Detroit a “ruined city,” then, raises serious questions about whose history, memory, and lived experience is at stake and how racial ideology can be at once naturalized and invisibilized in claims about urban history and memory.

PE: The story you told about your introduction to Detroit still seems like a ubiquitous one: an introduction to the post-industrial city through the ruin, which really objectifies it and erases huge parts of its history and on-going presence. There seems to be a dedicated contingent of thinkers at Michigan working against this reading by lacing in more expansive histories of these sites. We’re thinking of your work, of course, as well as the work of other Michigan faculty like McClain Clutter and Anya Sirota. This seems to result in a fruitful and nuanced discussion of the history of Detroit within the school. At Princeton, the way we talk about Trenton is very different. It’s a lot more like how you described your introduction to Detroit.

AH: I’ve been in Michigan for 15-plus years now and, in that time, I’ve learned enormously from colleagues who have made profound contributions to understanding Detroit as anything but a ruined city. I would add my Architecture colleagues, Craig Wilkins and Emily Kutil, to your list, as well as colleagues from Urban Planning like June Manning Thomas and Margaret Dewar.

Your question also makes me think about the often invisibilized racial parameters that structure architectural thought and imagination. Detroit in the early 2000s often appeared as a city of ruins…

…the interview continues in Issue 31.

Andrew Herscher is co-founder of a series of militant research collectives, including Detroit Resists, the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, and the Settler Colonial City Project. As a scholar, his work endeavors to bring the study of architecture and cities to bear on struggles for rights, emancipation, and justice across a range of global sites. His books include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (2012), Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (2017), The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief, co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2022), and Under the Campus, the Land: Native Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (forthcoming). He works at the University of Michigan.