Old Detroit,New Detroit: “Makers” and the impasse of place change

Introduction

“Ever since Detroit’s fortunes began to change after years of decline, there’s been a persistent narrative that contrasts the revival of downtown and Midtown with the neighborhoods. It’s a split often cast as New Detroit versus Old Detroit, the favored against the forgotten; a fight between the privileged and the poor, who wind up outnumbered in their neighborhoods by outsiders who drive them out.” ¹

“The new Detroit shines downtown. Nearby areas like Corktown and Midtown radiate energy. But around this incandescence skulks the old Detroit, acres of decay and ruin, prairies where the remaining houses stand aloof from each other.” ²

The two quotes above capture the emergence of dueling imaginaries in the city of Detroit: an “Old Detroit” and a “New Detroit.” Each quote represents a commonly circulated characterization of “Old” and “New”: the former focuses on power dynamics and gentrification, whereas the latter traffics in a privileged moodiness “radiating” from Detroit’s physical appearances. Neither quote mentions race, but the former is suggestive of Detroit’s ongoing problems with anti-Black racism, whereas the latter glosses over them. Despite the dissimilarities, both characterizations depict an urban transition so palpable that the city is perceived to be two places at once. During the last decade or so, Old and New have become common representations of rapid place change in Detroit as well as other US cities such as Nashville, ³ Denver, ⁴ Seattle, ⁵ and San Francisco. ⁶ In some cases, as with the second quote above, New is (problematically) positioned as progressive, a move away from the “decay and ruin” of Old. In other cases, the perceived demise of the Old is saturated with lament – indeed, a theater group in Portland (OR) even staged a funeral for “Old Portland” ⁷ – and concern for who does or does not benefit from the shift from Old to New. The question of how shared attunements to rapidly shifting conditions introduce an impasse between the place imaginaries of Old and New Detroit is of central concern below.

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes an impasse as “what it feels like to be in the middle of a shift.” ⁸ This paper applies that notion of impasse to the experiences of small, creative craft producers – collectively known as “makers” – in a rapidly changing Detroit. The city’s maker milieu took shape roughly between the Great Recession (2007–8) and the city’s declaration of bankruptcy (2013), a stretch of time during which “Old Detroit” left a high-water mark. By the time of my research in 2017, “New Detroit” had become locally emblematic of the city’s changing imaginary. Makers generally described Old Detroit as creative and experimental; New Detroit, on the other hand, was impending, professional, and gentrifying. For makers, the transitional narrative of Old and New Detroit incited an intensifying uncertainty about how to live and work within the changing city’s contours and contradictions, especially as New Detroit stewarded a hyperawareness to the city’s longer arc of racial and economic inequality. Makers’ accounts suggested a roiling impassivity in the affective space between optimism and disenchantment, privilege and inequality, opportunity and subjugation.

The goal of this paper is to understand what gets taken up by Detroit’s “Old” and “New” representations through an analysis of makers’ perceptions of this affective, transitional space. I interpret Old and New Detroit to be unique-but-inseparable place imaginaries; they are the representational bracketing around a transitional lifeworld in which the optimism makers brought to Old Detroit has largely come unraveled in New Detroit. This unraveling, I suggest, is not only a collective melancholy associated with feelings of eroding creativity and autonomy, but also a percolating confrontation with the privileged fantasies of Old Detroit. In interviews, Detroit’s makers were collectively aware of the city’s history of racial and economic injustice. ⁹ Additionally, many makers had significant reservations about the direction of New Detroit, especially problematizing the role of billionaires such as Dan Gilbert and the dearth of benefits flowing to low-income and Black communities. Makers’ frustration with the unevenness of New Detroit, however, clashed with the reality that the city’s “comeback” narrative presented them with opportunities. New Detroit, as an emerging public imaginary, precipitated a greater number of affluent consumers, a bevy of new boutiques to sell goods in, and increased demand for local goods. But it also demanded a shift away from experimentalism and toward professionalization; a common option for makers in doing so was to rely on New Detroit’s dubious comeback narrative in their branding (e.g. “Made in Detroit”).

Investigating Makers in (Old and New) Detroit

The emergent discourse of Old and New Detroit is inseparable from the city’s history of racial and economic inequality. The city is roughly 80% Black, ¹⁰ a population that has been isolated, “deproletarianized,” and politically abandoned to the benefit of the more affluent white population in and around the city. ¹¹ At one point a manufacturing powerhouse, the combined forces of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and white flight during the 20^th century devastated Detroit’s manufacturing infrastructure and tax base. The city’s Black population have endured the brunt of the effects, as discriminatory housing practices, police brutality, and the slashing of welfare provisioning – not to mention the racist imaginaries that justified these practices – set a problematic backdrop for the emergence of the Old/New narrative.

To be clear, there were always Black artists in Detroit despite the oppressive conditions. ¹² But during the 1990s and 2000s, a wave of predominantly white “creatives,” ¹³ including makers, began moving to Detroit, apparently attracted to the city’s inexpensive and abundant housing stock. By that time the city’s population had declined 60% from its peak, and a variety of national newspapers and magazines had become attentive to the numerous abandoned structures in Detroit as well as this newly arriving creative class. ¹⁴ In 2013, the city filed for bankruptcy protection, triggering a flurry of investment in the central city. At that point, national news media shifted its attention away from the “ruin porn” narrative of Old Detroit to the city’s ostensible comeback, even if that comeback has been limited to a handful of central neighborhoods – the geography of New Detroit.

Old and New are certainly imperfect representations for Detroit’s changes. Cities are always amidst transformation and never truly old or new. As Deleuze ¹⁵ says: “One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle” (p. 123). Scale is another complicating factor. The imagined geographies of Old and New Detroit are indelibly organized by forms of power (e.g. capitalism, white supremacy) that benefit from reducing them to Cartesian representations. ¹⁶ The caveat for the rest of this paper, then, is that Old and New Detroit are gestures toward geographic, temporal, and epistemological borders. These borders necessarily lack definition; the concern here is with what is palpable, imagined, atmospheric. People that are drawn to a city for whatever reason – in my case, makers drawn to Detroit’s cheap rents – enter into a continual process of emergence that Old/New will always fail to adequately represent. Old Detroit should not be understood as a point of origin; perhaps many longtime Detroiters would consider it a point of disappearance. Likewise, New Detroit is not a destination and not necessarily progressive. The use of Old and New below is meant to bracket an ephemeral imaginative and affective commons among makers regarding Detroit’s transformation.

Like Old and New Detroit, the term “maker” needs contextualization before moving forward. In general, “makers” can be set apart from other producers in three ways: first is an emphasis on selling a product (i.e. making is not a hobby); second is an insistence on integrating design and fabrication processes; third is a values-based, collaborative approach to entrepreneurial work (notably the rise of “makerspaces” and open source design). ¹⁷ “Maker” broadly applies to one of two milieus; the first tends to work with computers, robotics, and engineered objects, whereas the second tends to value artisanal, craft-based work that emphasizes location (e.g. “Made in Detroit”) ¹⁸ – my work focuses on the second milieu. The makers I interviewed generally oppose the mandates of work often associated with globalization (e.g. outsourcing, low-wage work) and corporatism (e.g. rote “cubicle” work, micromanagement). Instead, makers tend to value slow, deliberate work and production transparency through social media engagement and open studio workspaces. ¹⁹ Makers also tend to prefer urban settings, ²⁰ particularly the type of old, red-brick manufacturing spaces commonly found throughout Detroit’s central neighborhoods.

As an identity term, “maker” is often embraced by those it describes, but it is not uncontested. I have focused elsewhere on “maker” as an identity; ²¹ one of my conclusions was that it is inherently ambiguous, and the valences that organize it into something perceptible are more affective than rational. My use of “maker” below should be read with the stipulation that some of my interviewees did not feel attached to the term, and some even rejected it altogether. However, all of my interviewees were familiar with the milieu that “maker” describes and had well-thought out feelings about “maker” and the broader “maker movement;” ²² this suggests utility in maintaining the term as a center of gravity (rather than a crystallized identity position). I refer to my interviewees as “makers” below not to force a blanket identity position on my interviewees, but rather to call attention to a particular organization of work and life within the wider context of urban transformation.

During the summer of 2017, I formally interviewed 16 Detroit-based makers and 3 affiliates of Detroit’s maker scene. The makers I interviewed produced a variety of goods including clothing, food, and home decor. I also toured businesses, makerspaces, educational spaces, and maker-affiliated nonprofits. ²³ All interviews were recorded and generally lasted between 1 and 3 hours. I sought interviewees that met the following criteria: small-batch design and production of a physical object (not software); production location within Detroit’s city limits (not outsourced, not suburban); and demonstrable allegiance to Detroit (e.g. “Made in Detroit” on their product branding). Potential interviewees were initially identified via their web presences and cataloged in a database; ²⁴ additional interviewees were identified through snowball sampling. Lastly, I traversed the city on foot as much as possible to visualize Detroit’s transitions as they were inscribed in space. Field notes and photography were useful forms of documentation.

Admittedly, the empirical case this paper draws on is relatively circumscribed. ²⁵ Limitations were primarily related to lack of funding, which affected the amount of time I could spend in Detroit. Given the project’s emphasis on site visits, distance was a factor. An additional limitation was a flaw in the research design. Demographic data was collected for gender (74% female; 26% male) but not for race; in hindsight, this is regrettable. In my analysis, I was able to extrapolate these data in some instances, for example when a respondent described being white in a predominantly Black city. Not all interviewees were white, but a majority appeared to be. Without having explicitly asked interviewees about racial identity, however, I cannot speculate on the overall racial demographics of my sample. Despite these limitations, I developed a clear sense that Detroit’s transformation has thrust the city’s makers into a sense of impasse; it is this sense of lived transition that I hope to capture analytically.

Having lived near Detroit in the past, I was familiar with the material and aesthetic conditions that molded the city’s popular imaginary as a dying or dead city. These allusions to death are not hyperbole: recent writing about the city has described its “last days,” ²⁶ given the city an “autopsy,” ²⁷ and considered its “afterlife.” ²⁸ A “shrinking city” ²⁹ in the age of global urbanization, Detroit has been studied intensely for the scope of its decline. ³⁰ Fairly or unfairly, Detroit has been inscribed with a range of post-isms, from post-American ³¹ to post-post-apocalyptic. ³² This mélange of post-isms is situated among a field of representations of Detroit ³³ – notably the well-circulated “ruin porn” narrative ³⁴ – all of which populate various corners of the Old Detroit imaginary. For anyone familiar with the city, however, it would be hard to argue that its recent developments are not new. Over the past decade, the central business district and surrounding neighborhoods – dubbed “the 7.2” for its 7.2 square mile footprint – have seen a meteoric turnover of space. Newly constructed apartment buildings line major thoroughfares such as Woodward Avenue; countless new restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and boutiques have emerged throughout the central city’s neighborhoods; and newly painted murals wallpaper many downtown buildings. The changes in these central neighborhoods have been so dramatic that no one I spoke with needed clarification about what Old and New Detroit meant. Even off-the-record conversations – with patrons at bars, tour guides, or taxi drivers, for example – used Old and New to frame the ways in which Detroit’s changes could be felt.

Makers, Gentrification, and the (Urban) Impasse

Literature describing urban transformation largely falls in the purview of gentrification studies, a well-developed tributary of which examines the role of art/creativity with influential accounts from authors such as Ley ³⁵ and Zukin. ³⁶ Drawing on Bourdieu, Ley argues that artists mobilize privilege in the form of cultural capital, which can be converted into economic or social capital through various channels available to artists but not necessarily to others. Zukin’s classic “artistic mode of production” (AMP) links economic restructuring to a complementary cultural strategy; her case tracks lower Manhattan’s spatial transition from low-rise manufacturing to loft-style housing – a strategic public-private campaign to implement “highest and best” land uses through policy instruments – alongside the emergence of Manhattan’s art world. The elicitations of Old and New I introduce below are fundamentally structured by the deindustrial/cultural transformation described by Zukin’s AMP, and the privilege mobilized by makers – for example, in their ability to capitalize on cheap space and access “Made in Detroit” branding – resonate with Ley’s work. Considering Zukin’s argument that the AMP marked the end of urban manufacturing by retrofitting manufacturing space for housing, it is interesting, then, that the imaginary of manufacturing – albeit in a relatively new formulation ³⁷ and tinged with nostalgia ³⁸ – has become so important to the urban sensibilities of the maker movement. Making is further entangled with urban consumption, specifically retail. Sullivan and Shaw ³⁹ argue that commercial districts in gentrifying neighborhoods, where many maker goods can be found in local boutiques, have undergone a shift from instrumental (needs-based) retail to reflective (lifestyle-based) retail. This shift, evident in what Deener ⁴⁰ calls the “symbolic ownership” over the identity of a specific space, formulates an aesthetic displacement of instrumental retail – and the people that use it – in favor of boutique-style consumption ⁴¹ and a new “aesthetic normativity” ⁴² that often affects (or is affected by) changes to cities’ zoning codes ⁴³ or the public re-branding of an area to conform with its new identity. ⁴⁴

Insofar as this paper is interested in gentrification, it is primarily regarding makers’ affective experiences in shifting places. Although gentrification – and artists/makers’ relationship to it – is a well-studied phenomenon, its affective dimensions still do not have a significant foothold in the literature. Previous scholarship at the intersection of affect/emotion and gentrification often points to affect’s lack of centrality in gentrification studies (and urban studies more broadly ⁴⁵ ). For example, Kern ⁴⁶ argues that gentrification scholarship has not had “substantial dialog” with the fields of emotional or affective geographies, and thereby cannot offer a “ready-made analytic lens through which to approach questions of emotion and embodiment in gentrification” (p. 29). Likewise, Valli ⁴⁷ points out that “feelings and emotions connected to gentrification – where they originate from, what their impact is, and why they are relevant – are questions that are still relatively underexplored” (p. 1194). This being the case, some notable work on “affective displacement” has focused on residents’ feelings regarding fraying place attachments amidst rapidly shifting material, demographic, and aesthetic conditions. ⁴⁸ In these studies, perceived gentrifiers (e.g. predominantly white hipsters and young professionals) play a spectral role in long-time and precarious residents’ feelings of unease regarding the local pace of change. ⁴⁹ Affective displacement resonates with Albrecht’s notion of “solastalgia,” ⁵⁰ which describes a form of anguish arising from the turbulence of local environmental (place) transformation, such that one is increasingly unfamiliar with their surroundings and becomes “homesick without leaving home;” indeed, Albrecht gives gentrification as an example.

More recently, Linz ⁵¹ and Addie & Fraser ⁵² have used Lauren Berlant’s work – which is central to my analysis below – to think through place transformation; incidentally, both focus on Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (OTR) neighborhood. Addie and Fraser use Berlant’s work to pose some critical questions about academic studies of gentrification and the tools brought to bear in doing so. These questions situate gentrification in an ambiguous state of after-ness; what adjustments might be necessary to gentrification studies when popular and academic efforts to affect place change in favor of the poor and longtime residents have been thoroughly frustrated? Linz mobilizes Berlant’s notion of impasse to describe an uncertain state of transition in OTR’s adjacent neighborhoods; Linz’s work is also situated in something of an affective afterward of OTR’s gentrification and the atmospheric spillover that has triggered impassivity elsewhere. My work also follows Berlant’s theories to track urban transformation: in the next section I will contextualize the optics of Old and New using the work of Berlant and Walter Benjamin.

Old Detroit, New Detroit

The thick moment of transition between Old and New Detroit is the space in which the city’s maker milieu took shape. In interviews, makers often described Old Detroit’s decay and crumbling infrastructure, sometimes noting how atypical or “nonsensical” the city was: no one ever got parking tickets, but there also were no streetlights. A home goods maker put it this way: “This is a town that wrote a press release just because we got street sweepers.” According an art professor, Detroit’s depopulation “exposed this space to do things, primarily because there was nobody there to stop you.” A jewelry maker told me there weren’t many places to work, so she and her friends started making things. Since rent was cheap, they only needed to work a little; this meant more “time to live.” Eventually, she continued, people from high-rent places like New York or California started visiting their friends in Detroit but ended up staying on account of the city’s affordability. She suspected there were many informal makerspaces around the city – groups of likeminded craftspeople could work on multiple projects in houses that cost them very little.

Of course, the question of who was able to capitalize on Detroit’s deindustrialized “rent gap” ⁶⁴ is critical to the imaginary of Old Detroit. The aforementioned art professor posited privilege and cultural capital as fundamental to Detroit’s transformation: as he put it, “a lot of white people with small trust funds” started to show up and buy cheap houses. A stretch of time followed in which inexpensive real estate and experimental art projects suddenly began to capture the adoration of the national news media ⁶⁵ and critical attention of scholars. ⁶⁶ In interviews, makers often criticized the perception of Old Detroit as a “blank slate” ⁶⁷ or postmodern version of the “Wild West,” but the language of experimentation consistently resonated, especially in the sense that such experimentation was endangered in New Detroit. Old Detroit was informal and nurtured playfulness, if one had the privilege to draw from this atmosphere; New Detroit was regimented and required professionalization, if one had the privilege not to be excluded from it.

I asked an apparel maker if she felt like the days of experimentation were gone. Experimentation, she replied, came primarily from a double sense of freedom: first, the city’s affordability meant that mistakes were not very costly, and second, maker businesses tended to be very small and thus not accountable to anyone other than the owner(s); she mentioned longing for what she jokingly referred to as her “dilettante days.” According to an employee of a maker-affiliated nonprofit, Old Detroit was sparse with places to congregate, so makers and artists generally hung out in the same places and got to know each other. Many ideas and projects emerged as a result, including a handful of businesses and organizations that were instrumental in the inauguration of Detroit’s maker movement. She told me that the recent explosion of small businesses in that area – restaurants, bars, boutiques – changed the sense of engagement: “it doesn’t feel as tight knit as it used to.” She emphatically agreed with my contention that perhaps experimentation had given way to professionalism; I followed up by asking her if New Detroit was weighing on her, to which she responded, “a thousand and twelve million percent.”

By many accounts, the shift from Old to New Detroit was mirrored by a shift in the popular imaginary of Detroit from repulsion and ruin to resurgence and renaissance. The “Detroit cringe” – a peculiar facial contortion that, according to a handful of interviewees, (white) outsiders made when conveying horror/pity/disgust at the thought of Detroit – has now abated, replaced with a general curiosity about New Detroit and its “comeback” imaginary. Most makers lacked enthusiasm about this shift in narrative. According to the aforementioned nonprofit worker, the same people that used to hate Detroit (e.g. white suburbanites) now visit Detroit all the time and can’t believe they ever hated it. “God,” she said, exasperated: “It took a white billionaire to give people permission to live in this city.”

This white billionaire, Dan Gilbert, was omnipresent during my time in Detroit. In fact, many Detroiters refer to a section of downtown as “Gilbertville” due to his massive accumulation of real estate in the neighborhood. And while Detroit has been ostensibly making a comeback for a long time, Gilbert seems to have changed the conversation around Detroit’s trajectory. Take this conversation with a clothing maker:

In many makers’ eyes, Gilbert’s presence has been almost frustratingly fruitful for the city, but only because of what he has added to Detroit’s revitalization that has never been there: significant outside investment capital. Makers were often irritated that the benefits of this investment were flowing toward the newly arriving and predominantly white middle/upper classes that have the cultural capital and mobility to capitalize on Gilbert’s investments. The effect was that Gilbert became wealthier while also being treated as Detroit’s savior, as captured by this maker’s comments:

What’s to hate? I mean, he’s been a pure and utter capitalist. He buys the buildings that his businesses are working out of, his employees then rent from him, and he makes money back on his money. It’s fascinating, right? Because that’s what development is, [. . .] you buy from me with the money I give to you because you work for me.

Gilbert’s involvement in New Detroit was complicated; many people I spoke with credited him with “activating space” (a phrase I heard multiple times), which stood in juxtaposition to other infamous Detroit developers long accused of accumulating properties and letting them decay while awaiting the closure of rent gaps. A number of interviewees, however, weren’t convinced that Gilbert’s presence was really what Detroit needed: “If it’s just going to be people who have acquired wealth to now come and find value in [Detroit], what are we really doing? [. . .] When the story revolves around Dan Gilbert it’s already wrong.” The treatment of wealthy investors and corporations as heroes appalled most interviewees, especially as the city’s changes made the intersection between race and class impossible to ignore. New Detroit meant that central neighborhoods like Corktown began to “feel like such white space[s]” and housing suddenly became scarce as out-of-town investors snatched up real estate. “We don’t really need more people coming from out of town,” said a jewelry maker, “because even my friends from Detroit are having trouble finding a house.” A food and beverage maker added: “A lot of [Detroit residents] are just trying to make a living and for some rich rat from New York to come in and say ‘I’m gonna save you all’ – we don’t need your saving. We’re doing just fine on our own.”

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of New Detroit is its perpetuation of the city’s legacy of racial subjugation; in addition to temporally extending historical racial exclusions, New Detroit also (re)spatialized them. New Detroit’s physical geography is roughly the city’s CBD and central neighborhoods, which only accounts for about 5% of Detroit’s 143 square mile footprint. These neighborhoods – Midtown, Corktown, New Center, Eastern Market – are the locus of Detroit’s maker milieu, and have become noticeably more white, affluent, and lined with the type of “reflective retail” ⁶⁸ – coffee shops, boutiques, cafes, bars – that signals the shift in race and class demographics so commonly identified in gentrification studies. This sense of being amidst a shift gestures toward the “affective displacement” ⁶⁹ that lurked under the rhetoric of New Detroit’s resurgence, an identity narrative which has been absorbed by a larger, well-financed national and global milieu that feeds on “cool, gritty, authentic” urban places. ⁷⁰ As many makers noted, New Detroit’s comeback narrative allowed investors to feel more secure about feasting on Detroit’s cheap space, all of which was made possible by Detroit’s history of racism, exclusion, and disinvestment.

Generally, makers were attuned to all of this: many interviews quickly wandered into discussions about Detroit’s changes regardless of my question. The affect in those conversations was an angry-but-melancholic sort of shock, as exemplified by this interviewee:

I am a white woman that grew up in the suburbs [. . .] that has lived in the city for 9 years. I am not an expert, but I’ve watched a lot of things change and grow and a lot of folks were just OK with the way it was. And a lot of folks were not OK with the way it was either. I just don’t think that this was the way we thought it was gonna change.

This comment captures a significant affective moment for makers in the shift from Old to New Detroit: she acknowledged a tension in Old Detroit between feelings of experimentalism (“a lot of folks were OK”) and the racial and economic inequalities that laid the foundation for such feelings (“a lot of folks were not OK”) before expressing frustration with the type of change New Detroit represented. I followed up on the language of experimentalism and “blank slate” as a function of Detroit’s history of racial exclusion: such things, she said, were usually uttered by “shitty bros being shitty” and influenced by racism: “If white people didn’t do it then it must be a blank slate [. . .] White people don’t live [here]. So is it empty?” The aforementioned art professor responded similarly to the same question: “Since the Second World War, white people have abandoned the city of Detroit. And now they want it back.”

These strong feelings about New Detroit – especially from those that had invested so much optimism in the experimentalism of Old Detroit – were typical among my interviewees, many of whom had grown up in Detroit’s predominantly white suburbs and had moved to the city with aspirations of doing something positive for the city with their business platform. ⁷¹ At the time of my investigation in 2017, these aspirations had fallen into a sense of impasse: makers had begun to understand their milieu in the context of a gentrifying (and increasingly white) urban core and a swath of outer (and largely Black) neighborhoods. It was also clear to most of them that the urban core was seeing significant effects of the city’s ostensible comeback while the outer neighborhoods were not. Whereas powerful actors such as Dan Gilbert had more influence on the shape of New Detroit, Detroit’s makers generally understood their exemplary status within it.

In interviews, makers often struggled with this feeling of complicity, exemplified by a conversation I had with a home accessories maker. I had asked for her perspective on Detroit’s changes; she said that when she moved to the city in 2010, there were probably six “cool” restaurants and she could afford to eat at all of them, whereas now there are hundreds and she “definitely can’t afford to eat at them.” But it was the specious comeback narrative of New Detroit and the heaping of public benefits on Detroit’s purported heroes, such as Dan Gilbert, that incited her exasperation:

This is what’s really happening here, you know, the big corporations getting tax breaks and whatever to buy all these buildings and do all this bullshit downtown that isn’t helping anybody. Like what about everybody else who’s still out in these corners of the city, you know, their lives aren’t changing. I’m more interested in hearing that story than the renaissance of Detroit, even though I know I’m part of it. So I struggle with this.

She told me that in Northeast Detroit, where she lived, there were no signs of gentrification or development and they had only recently got their streetlights turned back on. Those neighborhoods, in which residents are predominantly Black, were not benefiting from New Detroit’s resurgence. It was a double-edged sword, she said, because she wanted the city to have more people, a larger tax base, and new businesses:

But who are these new businesses for? Not the people who have lived here for forty years. So how do you do development that works for everybody? And where do I fit into that? Because I know I’m selling a luxury good, and – um – that’s hard, you know? Selling is hard because I’m like ‘you don’t need this, I think you like it, and I think you want it, but you don’t need it.’ Obviously I don’t say that to people but that’s kind of like how I really feel.

This atmosphere of discomfort among makers about their role in New Detroit’s emergence was the affective condition – the undercurrent that I couldn’t avoid feeling – during my research in Detroit. The above accessories maker is one of those that will benefit from New Detroit, and she knew it. There will be more stores for her goods to be featured in, and those stores will get more foot traffic as outsiders adjust to New Detroit’s imaginary and tourism picks up. A few makers admitted to marketing to affluent suburbanites for their ability to afford makers’ typically expensive wares. ⁷² White privilege was also present in the social and cultural capital circulated in “creative” networks, ⁷³ as expressed by this apparel maker:

Watch them white kids from the burbs come in here and make this sexy and get a bunch of press coverage about it, and that’s kind of what happened [. . .] it’s something I’ve wrestled with as a business owner because we had the privilege to have access to [her partner’s] 401K to tap into to start this. We had a social network of people that introduced him to [a central figure in Detroit’s scene] who got him started at [a local makerspace] with really low rent. We couldn’t have started without that.

This quote is indicative of a double bind that continued to resurface: most makers benefited from New Detroit and were often exemplars of the city’s “resurgent” wave of small businesses, but they also despised New Detroit’s reproduction of race and class inequalities. The overall sense of lament and frustration among makers was strong at times: “We have a chance to rebuild a city here,” one interviewee said demonstratively. “Detroit has an opportunity to get a bunch of weirdos to do crazy things that solve problems,” but she felt that opportunity was quickly eroding. Likewise with another interviewee, who noted that a few years ago he saw something of a utopian opportunity that he doesn’t see anymore: “In my heart of hearts,” he said, “I feel like we’re doomed, but you have to act as if there is hope just in case.” In most cases, makers appreciated new business opportunities and better access to markets, but they felt conflicted about exploiting a comeback narrative that perpetuated the marginalization of the city’s most vulnerable residents. A ceramics maker, for example, told me that despite working and living within the city limits, she had recently removed “Detroit” from her company’s name: “I’ve just been sensitive about calling Detroit mine because it’s not mine.”

Throughout my research there was an unmistakable tension organized around this double bind: on one hand, New Detroit’s imaginary of resurgence granted makers the consumer bases their businesses needed to survive financially. On the other, New Detroit did almost nothing for the people that needed it the most. On one hand, Detroit was becoming walkable in places and space was being “activated.” On the other, the experiment was over; like so many other cities, it was on to gentrification and uniformity. Many interviewees appeared to feel stuck between necessarily exploiting the city’s comeback narrative (e.g. by using “Made in Detroit” branding) and acting on their feelings of resentment about how development is actually occurring and who is (and is not) benefiting. I often sensed an underlying melancholia for the dreamworld of Old Detroit that had slipped away and frustration with the futility of re-gathering a grasp on it. In New Detroit, makers could not afford to be experimental; they had to be productive, efficient, and strategic, and one of their best options was to rely on the city’s problematic comeback story.

“After the Good Life” ⁷⁴

My contention is that makers, in general, have discovered an impasse at the dissolve from Old to New Detroit. These Old/New imaginaries emerged from shared attunements to the uncertainties of a rapidly transforming place; naming them suggests a common desire to make sense of the situation from which these uncertainties have arisen. For makers, Old gestured toward a space of possibility, a catalytic optimism imbued with the freedom to be experimental in crafting worlds that eschew the anxieties associated with the exigencies of capitalism. But the valences that made Old sensible to makers were saturated by race and class inequality and privilege, a fact that had become unavoidable to my interviewees. The resulting confrontation – hastened by the suddenness and breadth of capital investment in the central city – interrupted the daydream of experimentalism. As the city’s material changes intensified, a chasm opened between the inequalities that structured the material conditions of Old Detroit and the privileges that structured the unfolding of New Detroit. In my experience, makers acknowledged the tension this divide introduced: on the one hand, they really did want Detroit to change; but on the other, New Detroit had all but vanquished the playful and egalitarian form of change they envisioned. The double bind makers faced had to do with their role in shaping New Detroit; they stood to benefit from Detroit’s comeback, but at what cost?

Temporally, my focus has been on makers’ hyperawareness to shifting conditions in the present. Old Detroit stretched that attunement toward makers’ collective memory, whereas New Detroit stretched it toward an unfolding and uncertain future. For Berlant, ⁷⁵ this vigilant affective attunement to the present can arise in a number of ways, for example as one increasingly feels detached from or thwarted by the norms and institutions that scaffold their good life imaginary. The impasse is marked by one’s recognition of the present as a space of overwhelming formlessness; the geographic imagination of such fluidity might evoke Deleuzian smooth space, ⁷⁶ but Berlant doesn’t seem persuaded by the practicalities of untetheredness. Being in the impasse means being without anchors; people will seek a sense of groundedness, even if that means remaining attached to hierarchies and privileges, if the alternative is bewilderment about one’s social location. ⁷⁷ These remnant attachments resonate with the renewed energy invested in “Made in Detroit,” a branding strategy that economizes New Detroit’s comeback narrative while also suggesting the desire for an anchor that might steady the disorientation of being without a roadmap in a rapidly changing city. It is an adjustment to the impasse, even if that adjustment conjures a shrug or a grimace in resignation to the “way things are” after the optimism of “what could be” has eroded.

A final point on the impasse: it would be disingenuous not to implicate the broader political and economic forces that make impasse such a powerful and affectively necessary term for describing the present. Berlant reimagined the concept to account for precarity as an atmospheric attunement to structural transformation, such that the normative meritocratic recipe no longer yields security for anyone, let alone long subjugated people to whom those promises were never available. According to Berlant, the sustaining narrative of an aspirational good life based on upward mobility – the imaginary of which serves as an anchor in moments of felt precarity – has come apart. This being the case, the impasse conceptually situates Detroit’s transformation – as well as the entire project of “making” and the maker movement – within the tectonics of modern racial capitalism and the meritocratic crises of liberal democracies. The double-binds that makers find themselves in are configurations of a comprehensive moment in capitalism’s historical present that weaves together gentrifying cities, racial exclusion, heightened ethical awareness (e.g. demand for locally made goods), inseparable global economies, and an emerging national(ist) politics that senses institutional collapse but lacks a collective affective infrastructure capable of providing a sense of mooring in the tempestuous present. Without anchors, work and life are mostly concerned with maintenance within the tempest, an orientation reminiscent of Benjamin’s angel being hurled backward into an uncertain future while unable to reconcile a catastrophic past. “The haunting question,” Berlant writes, “is how much of one’s creativity and hypervigilant energy the situation will absorb before it destroys its subjects or finds a way to appear as merely a steady hum of livable crisis ordinariness.” ⁷⁸

The goal of this article has been to unpack the entangled place imaginaries of Old and New Detroit through the perspective of Detroit’s maker community. I argued that makers have been confronted by an impasse – an affective sense of the present in which the fantasies that sustained makers’ optimism about Old Detroit have come apart in the transition to New Detroit. This impassivity has compelled makers to locate themselves within the unequal sociopolitical and economic forces that made their optimism possible. To be clear, much remains to be seen about how (or if) the maker milieu adjusts to New Detroit and whether those adjustments look more like allyship or augmented forms of privilege. It stands to reason that the Old/New impasse may leave some makers exhausted and looking for an exit. But others will consider – as some already have – how they might stay and operationalize their privileges in new, collective forms of resistance that organize against the perpetuation of inequality in New Detroit.