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book: Demolishing Detroit
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Demolishing Detroit

How Structural Racism Endures
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025

About this book

Innovative field work reveals how infrastructural systems—buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins—maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape

  For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them.

  As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

Author / Editor information

Nicholas L. Caverly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Reviews

"In the face of institutionalized destruction, reducing things to rubble can sometimes feel like the only way forward. Nick Caverly explores this paradox through poignant and compelling stories of Detroit's demolition. His analysis reveals how difficult it is to tear down the foundations of racial capitalism, calling for more meaningful change that is structural and strategic." —Anand Pandian, author of Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down --- "Demolishing Detroit cracks the shiny facade of revitalization discourse in Detroit to reveal the messy detritus of cumulative racism and structural inequality. In addition to painting an intimate, ethnographic portrait of local residents and community activists, Nicholas Caverly convincingly demonstrates that Detroit is a cautionary tale about the stakes of tearing down without also building up." —Melissa Checker, author of The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice --- "Nick Caverly has written an intellectually provocative, original, and refreshing examination of Detroit. He skillfully foregrounds the stories and experiences of Detroit residents and demolition workers to provide an unexpected and nuanced view on how racism, labor, and urban redevelopment operate in contemporary American cities. Caverly's ethnographic sensitivity combined with his attentiveness to the relationship between structural racism and the built environment is not only innovative, but sorely needed in the present moment." —Andrew Newman, co-editor of A People's Atlas of Detroit --- "Nick Caverly has written a book for these mean times. Demolishing Detroit provides a history of the theory and practice of development by destruction. But, even more than that, it suggests and substantiates a notion of the ways that racism has been built so insistently into the material fabric of our everyday lives that it frames and determines the results of even the best-intentioned efforts of address it." —Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    CONTENTS

    v
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    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    ix
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  • INTRODUCTION FROM DESTRUCTION
  • PART ONE FOUNDATIONS
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    ONE EMPTY

    31
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    TWO BLIGHT

    59
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  • PART TWO MACHINERIES
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    THREE ALGORITHMS

    89
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    FOUR EXCAVATORS

    114
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  • PART THREE AFTERMATHS
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    FIVE ASBESTOS

    141
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    SIX SOIL

    169
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    CONCLUSION TOWARD REPAIR

    193
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    NOTES

    209
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    WORKS CITED

    241
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    INDEX

    259
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 31, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781503644687
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
280
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503644687
eBook ISBN: 9781503644687
Keywords for this book
Racial Capitalism; White Supremacy; Technopolitics; Urban Renewal; Demolition; Detroit; structural racism; zoning; urban blight; ethnographic research; ethnography; intersectionality; infrastructure; buildings; laws; algorithms; city planning; flight; disparities; American cities
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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