Fanning the Embers

The third chapter examines the story of Detroit’s rebirth through both a reliance on its storied past and the possibilities of the future through an examination of a wildly successful commercial starring Eminem. It provides the connective tissue between the storied past of Detroitas as a location of workers and the contemporary narrative of a city on the rise. At its center is the mythic tale provided by the 2011 Chrysler “Born of Fire” commercial. The narrative tale of a rebirth of a city, and by extension the American auto industry, in the face of epic decline makes the story of Detroit the ultimate comeback tale—a phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction.

Feeding Detroit’s Rise

In the fifth chapter, the book examines the story of Detroit on the rise—the ultimate conclusion of most of the disparate narratives surrounding the city. The fascination with Detroit in the twenty-first century is due not to its ruin but to the evidence of Detroit as possible. This chapter looks explicitly at the narrative of the rise of a “new Detroit.” This rise is best seen in media portrayals of as the city’s “hungry” creative class, the billion-dollar investment of Dan Gilbert, and the media frenzy around the opening of a Whole Foods Market in Detroit and the company’s use of that store as a national platform against “racism and elitism.”

Flickers of the American Dream

The fourth chapter examines the story of opportunity in the face of hardship in two recent documentary films, Deforce and Detropia. The premise of the documentary film enables the narrative of possibility through the persistent belief of real Detroiters. The chapter turns to the ways in which the myth of the contemporary postindustrial frontier, much like the myth of the historical frontier in American culture, operates not only as a physical place but also as an ideological symbol to suggest the potential of hardworking and determined individuals against all odds. Even as the present is portrayed as bleak, the narrative resolution of Detroit’s uncertain future nearly always falls back on a retrenchment of the American idea of success through individual hard work and determination.

It’s Turned into a Race Thing

The first chapter examines a twenty-first century location of a public narrative, an Internet discussion board, in order to analyze the narrative of Detroit’s nostalgic past. The past is frequently remembered as not about race, even when there is the benefit of decades of research that shows the relationship between race and place in America. In one particular Internet forum, “I found my old house in Detroit today”, provides a place to study the narrative of a white exodus that is deeply apart of the city’s decline. It reveals the signification of the past as a way to illuminate the continuing significance of race in the twenty-first century.

The Strait

Beautiful Wasteland concludes by wrapping together the work of the narratives of focus into a final discussion of Detroit and its contemporary relationship to water. Detroit in the second decade of the twenty-first century is constructed by many as a place of beauty and possibility, in need of discipline. This narrative can be seen prominently in the water crisis that played out in the city of Detroit in 2014 and emerged as are sounding global narrative about the divisions between “new Detroit” and “old Detroit.” As the story spins between governmental incompetence and corporation and a corporate enterprise, the message becomes clear: metropolitan Detroit cooperation is hastened and easy to accommodate when it most benefits metropolitan Detroit.

Picturing Ruin and Possibility

The second chapter examines the story of Detroit’s ruin as a narrative of progress and decline through an examination of the photography of Camilo José Vergara in the late 1980s and 1990s. These images were central in producing a narrative of ruin. In his Detroit images, and in his statements about the city, structural racism and unequal access to the spoils of capitalism are written out of the narrative of postindustrial urban space, replaced with a simpler narrative of progress and decline. Vergara’s images of the landscape in particular suggest that Detroit’s ruin and potential for rise is a natural process, contributing to the common discourse that affirms the rise and fall and rise again of the city.