Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

Detroit: An American Autopsy (2013) is the chronicle in which the journalist Charlie LeDuff, born in the city and a Pulitzer Prize winner, told the collapse of the Motor City from inside, mixing reportage, family memoir and anger. The book appeared the year Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history, with debts of around 18 billion dollars, and describes a city that had gone from 1.85 million residents in 1950 to fewer than 700,000, with tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, firefighters without equipment, ambulances that never came and a corrupt political class. LeDuff offers no theory, but his account is one of the most cited documents on the decline of the industrial city.

How Detroit fell: relocation, white flight and segregation

The fall has causes LeDuff threads through concrete stories. The car industry, which had made Detroit the most prosperous working-class city in America, began relocating plants to the suburbs and the South from the 1950s and to Mexico and Asia from the 1980s. White flight to the suburbs, accelerated after the 1967 riots, left the city with a mostly Black and poor population and no tax base. The motorways that cut through whole neighbourhoods, mortgage discrimination and segregation completed the emptying. When the Big Three, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, went into crisis in 2008, the city had already been dying for decades.

Firefighters, coroners and corruption: LeDuff's chronicle

LeDuff follows firefighters who attend arson fires in empty houses with broken equipment, a coroner who stacks unidentified bodies, relatives of victims of everyday violence and the councillors and the mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, convicted in 2013 for corruption. His book is also a family autopsy: the death of his sister, his brothers' slide into precarity, the history of his own family between the white working class and the mixed ancestry Detroit denied for decades. That blend of the personal and the political gives the account its force and is also what critics hold against it: the lack of structural analysis and an occasionally sensationalist tone.

The shrinking city: contraction policies

For urban studies, Detroit is the extreme case of the shrinking city. The geography of disinvestment LeDuff describes, blocks with a single inhabited house, services the city cannot maintain across a territory built for three times the population, closed schools, dark streetlights, has forced thinking about contraction policies: the land bank that manages tens of thousands of lots, the mass demolition of abandoned buildings, urban farming on vacant land and the concentration of services in the neighbourhoods that still have density. None has solved the underlying problem, the absence of jobs and a tax base, but they have prevented total abandonment.

Bankruptcy, unequal rebirth and the open autopsy

The decade after the book brought a partial and unequal recovery. Downtown and Midtown were rehabilitated with private investment such as Dan Gilbert's, restaurants, technology offices and a streetcar arrived, and the city emerged from bankruptcy in 2014 with a plan that cut pensions. But most neighbourhoods keep losing population, poverty exceeds 30 percent and the rebirth is concentrated in a few square kilometres. LeDuff, who has kept reporting from the city, has pointed out that the new Detroit is built for those who arrive and not for those who stayed, and that the autopsy remains open.

The lesson of Detroit: An American Autopsy is that urban decline is not a natural accident but the accumulated result of decisions about industry, housing, race and taxation, and that its victims are those who could not leave. LeDuff's chronicle, with its limits, forces us to look at what statistics summarise: a city where the state stopped working and people kept living. For any declining industrial city, from Europe to Latin America, Detroit remains both the warning and the laboratory.