The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring by Sherry Linkon

Author:Sherry Linkon [Linkon, Sherry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Fabulous Ruins: The Landscape of Deindustrialization

Critics of visual representations of industrial ruins often note that they tend to be depopulated. Apel argues that this erases the “victims of the city’s decline,” so that any “discourse about people and the effects of abandonment and decay on their lives” is “displaced” (76). Perhaps more accurately, depopulated images of the crumbling built environment, especially spaces that once would have thrummed with human activity, define deindustrialization and urban decline entirely in terms of loss. Empty landscapes invite viewers to imagine earlier times and people, but they largely ignore the people who live and work amid the ruins. While deindustrialization literature uses the landscape to remind readers and viewers of what was lost when American industry declined, it also offers an intimate look inside the ruins and, in the process, inside the half-life. In part because they imagine how individuals not only see but also interact with the deindustrialized landscape, these narratives put human experience at the center of the ruins. They also make connections between past and present, imagining how people inhabited these spaces in earlier times while also revealing how people live amid the ruins in the present.

The familiar trope of urban explorers leading documentary filmmakers and viewers through abandoned factories or schools invites us to marvel at the scale of decline, but the films only rarely tell us anything about the explorers’ experiences or motivations. The emphasis is on observation, by the filmmakers and viewers, rather than on the urban explorers’ subjectivity. In contrast, Michael Zadoorian’s “Spelunkers,” from his 2009 collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, foregrounds the perspective of a young urban explorer, a freelance photographer who runs a website called The Paris of the Midwest Is Crumbling (169). Like other young artists and adventurers, he regularly breaks into abandoned buildings and takes photographs of what he describes as “fucked-up shit,” which he posts with comments and stories about their history.2 The site is, he tells us, “uber-urban, echt-industrial, proto-apocalyptic, rustbelt cool, or whatever the underground magazines who worship Detroit are calling us these days” (170). The narrator is intrigued by the evidence of the past that he encounters in the buildings he visits, but he also disdains the idea that the past has become cool. He creates and posts images of decay but also mocks those who find meaning in his images. While, as Walter Benjamin suggests, this ambivalence is embedded in ruins (177–78), the narrator’s attachment to the past and his ambivalence about his uses of it reflect the contingency of his own experience as a freelance graphic designer. Although neither the character nor Zadoorian make the connection overtly, we can read the more stable industrial past as representative of a better but unattainable alternative. As geographer Bradley L. Garrett suggests, urban explorers are drawn to the deindustrialized landscape out of “an interest in trying to get back to what we have lost in late capitalism: a sense of place, a sense of community and a sense of self” (86).

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