What Remains: Building Removal, Worker Retraining, and Toxic Materials in Detroit (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)
Creators: name: Caverly, Nicholas
Publisher: name: (:unav)
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Detroit
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/geographic-keyword/44835/detroit
subject: United States and Canada
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/geographic-keyword/85623/united-states-and-canada
subject: Racism
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/other-keyword/48914/racism
subject: Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/other-keyword/166866/dissertation-fieldwork-grant
subject: Capitalism
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/other-keyword/10709/capitalism
subject: Built Environment
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/other-keyword/48901/built-environment
subject: Socio-Cultural
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/other-keyword/166855/socio-cultural
subject: Archival Research
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/other-keyword/1161/archival-research
subject: Ethnographic Research
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/investigation-type/14/ethnographic-research
subject: Ethnohistoric Research
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/investigation-type/17/ethnohistoric-research
subject: Historic Background Research
valueUri: https://core.tdar.org/browse/investigation-type/18/historic-background-research

description: This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines how the destruction of built environments reconfigures economic and environmental inequalities in the postindustrial United States. It does so by investigating the demolition of vacant buildings in Detroit. Estimated to number between 70,000 and 100,000, vacant buildings index decades of racially motivated population decline and deindustrialization. Such structures are concentrated in poorer, minority inhabited neighborhoods, where they become targets of arson and sites of crime, emit noxious fumes, and reduce property values. Hundreds of millions in public funds have been committed to demolish 50,000 vacant buildings by 2020, with funds directed to private enterprises that sell land to developers while they demolish buildings and train welfare recipients and recently paroled convicts to do so. Municipal, state, and federal administrators credit removal as a means of 'developing a financially stable, decontaminated city.' Still, as hazardous built environments are removed from Detroit's landscape, public health advocates and occupational health regulators contend they produce new hazards, including emissions of toxin-laced demolition dust. Using ethnographic methods, this project asks: (1) How does the removal of polluted buildings become a process of selling land? (2) How are marginalized people made into a demolition workforce? (3) How does the removal of contaminated built environments generate new claims to toxic exposure, from whom, and to what ends? By bridging literatures on cities and built environments, economic transformations, and toxic matter, this project asks how processes of removal give rise to new formations of value and inequality through intersecting configurations of land, work, and contamination.