Detroit’s New Urban Renewal: Rebecca J. Kinney and Andrew Herscher in Conversation

Please join us for a not-be-missed evening of conversation about urban “renewal,” racial capitalism, and resistance in contemporary Detroit. To mark the Detroit launch of Kinney’s Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (2016), the author will be in conversation with Andrew Herscher, member of the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective and Detroit Resists and author of The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (2012). Together they will discuss the logics of racism and capitalism that have structured Detroit throughout the 20^th century and into the city’s current “renewal.” They will explore how the branding of “New Detroit” as an “exciting” and “amenity-driven” landscape relies upon a simultaneous representation and destruction of working-class black neighborhoods—the displacement of the very people and the destruction of the very spaces that the branding of New Detroit relies upon. In so doing, they will ask if and how the narrative of Detroit’s contemporary “renewal” ought to be troubled and what narratives might open onto a truly inclusive and democratic city.

Rebecca J. Kinney, who grew up in metropolitan Detroit, is assistant professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University.