Comeback Detroit : The return of whites and wealth to a Black city

Abstract: Since the 1950s, the city of Detroit has declined in terms of demography and economic prosperity.  Once among the wealthiest and largest cities of America, Detroit now continually ranks as one of nations poorest, Blackest and most abandoned urban areas. This dissertation studies urban change by focusing on the emergent reversal of the city’s long-term decline, exploring the period of time when both whites and wealth were returning to the city. As this moment of return is closely aligned to local notions of “comeback” and that the city was “coming back”, the thesis examines the reflections and contestations of the city’s contemporary comeback and the relations of power that frame this process. The first part of the thesis examines how the city has changed in the past, and the ways in which this past has furnished particular understandings of the present. Racial and class struggles have defined the city’s trajectory and these struggles have shaped a cosmology of division and separation, informing everyday life and mundane relations, while being mirrored and expressed through the material city. In the second part, the thesis concentrates on the temporal, spatial and demographic dimensions of comeback and the emergence of a “New Detroit”; a city that is whiter and wealthier than before. By examining the subjects said to be returning, and how both the city’s spaces and futures are molded around them, the study inquiries into how comeback and a New Detroit is made to emerge. The third part of the thesis explores how Detroiters come to labor collectively, through ritualized events, with a city that is changing. It is in ritualized events that Detroiters come to experience diversity and community, integrating what is otherwise divided, while articulating both morality and legitimacy in relation the city’s comeback.