Mark Binelli On Detroit: The Symbol, The City, the Place To Be

Mark Binelli recently published the acclaimed book about Detroit, “Detroit City is the Place to Be,” and on Thursday he came to the University of Michigan, his undergrad alma-mater, to promote the book. That morning I was unexpectedly invited (by an old GSI and friend) to have lunch with him and two other students in the Dana Building. I knew Binelli’s name but little else, and so I spent my time between classes reading up on him – Binelli had grown up in a blue-collar suburb in Detroit, and gone on to write for Rolling Stone, later publishing the historical novel “Sacco and Vinzetti Must Die,” a take on the controversial death sentence of two Italian anarchists. His new book explored Detroit as a capitalist ‘dream town’ turned urban failure, using interviews with Detroiters to disambiguate the symbolism and stereotypes associated with the city.

I walked into the Dana Building conference room and introduced myself excitedly to a bald guy with the backpack, who turned out to be not Mark but Ian, an intensely intelligent PhD student in the school for urban planning. Ian and I were early even by non-Michigan time, so PITE staff member Kimberly Smith unloaded the Potbelly catering onto the conference table and briefed us on Binelli’s whirlwind tour of his underground alma-mater, mentioning how heavily she had booked the acclaimed author for classes, radio interviews, lunches and lectures.

When Binelli poked his head in, confirming the room number, his appearance conformed almost exactly to my uninformed expectations of a 30-something Rolling Stone contributor (an imagined melding of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous and the only other employed over 30 year old writer I had ever actually met in my life, who happened to have black hair). He exuded the easy confidence of a writer whose worth has been given a kind of nod of confirmation by spheres of circumstance and reward, at ease, uneager to prove, but quietly engaged in the conversation.
I was nervous about being unprepared, but I asked questions about Binelli’s experiences with Detroit, gave some follow-up and commentary to the other PITE student’s questions, and listened to him and Ian exchange concerns about urban shrinking, suburban plasticization, and the potential for oligarchical control of ailing cities. Binelli also talked about promoting the book in Europe – Europeans are fascinated with the idea of a failed American city, and maybe, he indicated, not without a certain amount of glee.

Later that day during his lecture at the Grad Library, Binelli read from his book with the comforting tone of an NPR editorial commentator – laconic towards the audience, tender towards the subject material – and walked us through a short slide show about the city before responding to questions mediated by Angela Dillard.
Binelli read a segment from the chapter titled “The Fabulous Ruin,” in which he takes a driving tour with a Detroit native named Marsha Curic, and quotes her at length as she muses on the surge of artists and urban explorers. “Some of the people coming here bring a sort of bacchanal spirit – like they’re out on the frontier and they can do anything,” Cusic says at one point, and when Binelli concedes to a ‘degree of arrogance,” she corrects him, calling it white supremacy. For the University of Michigan students in the audience, at least the ones who hadn’t read the book, this segment seemed somewhat revelatory. Recent op-eds in the Daily have highlighted our lack of a presence in Detroit, intertwining our neglect or casual claims to the city with a similarly embarrassing lack of campus diversity. The rhetoric around the new bus line has framed it as a kind of response to the problem, an urge towards participation in the city. But as the University community tries to engage more with Detroit, we continue to wonder what ‘engagement’ really means – It’s certainly not just gawking and exploring, although many of us students don’t even take the time to do that, and it also can’t just be singular participation in once-a-year DP days.

The author appealed to this question as he implied throughout the day that the attitudes of the young, white hipster, can often be insulting on some level to the Detroit community. In Binelli’s book he elaborates on the problem: the issue isn’t the community engagement, it’s the underlying assumptions and attitudes that often accompany such engagement. The common characterization of Detroit by some as a ‘blank canvas’ is insulting; it ignores the people who already live in Detroit in the pursuit of the realization of some metaphoric dystopia or utopia. Binelli explains that many of these symbolic assumptions are based on the rhetoric that became popular after the 2009 financial crisis, when reporters and journalists flocked to Detroit to showcase the decay of the city as a kind of simplified symbol of a complicated, failing economy – the way, he elaborates, that a reporter covering a hurricane has to have the horizontal palm trees and crashing waves in the background, reporters covering the recession needed Detroit as a backdrop. This coverage made Detroit a symbol of American failure, and thus for many the most important symbol of renewal.

During the Q and A, audience members wanted to know how the University of Michigan community – or maybe, an underlying tone implied, white outsiders in general – could engage with Detroit effectively and respectfully.
Binelli didn’t offer any pro-tips about engaging in the right way, but he did give valuable observations and commentary on the dynamics of the engagement that’s already happening. Throughout his book there is a core tension between wanting to fix Detroit’s problems, and wanting to appreciate and preserve the culture that is already there. Binell I concedes that “raising any sort of gentrification fears at this earliest stage of Detroit’s would-be comeback feels like an academic luxury. And yet, when phrases like ‘the most potentially ambitious urban planning initiative in modern history’ are being bandied about…it’s hard not to grimace at the thought of the plasticized, deadening nature of planned communities.” It can actually sound like an academic luxury, but Binelli’s book doesn’t shy away from the city’s almost surreal crime rates – a chapter or so away from this quote Binelli describes a grisly murder and dismemberment that took place in his neighborhood. And he addresses this, saying “If you ask a Detroiter about saving the city, it’s unlikely that she will mention tech start-ups or urban farming. The first thing most Detroiters want to talk about is crime.” But the book also explores how amidst the crime and poverty, there exists a distinct, legitimate culture that deserves to be protected. In the chapter titled “DIY City,” Binelli explores the ‘Do It Yourself’ culture so prevalent in Detroit, where regular citizens “take it upon themselves to tauten the civic slack.” The chapter details the vigilantism of the Detroit 300, the community service provided by illicit dog-catchers, urban farming, and a series of weekly outdoor blues concerts held on a crude stage on St. Aubin. Detroit, Binelli argues, is more complicated than the symbolism that the recession has forced it to assume.

At lunch, Binelli had mentioned the problems that a ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ mentality poses – the idea that anyone with deep pockets can assume make important decisions with little public accountability. He talked about cities that he considered plasticized, such as Dallas or Atlanta, and he and Ian worried about Detroit’s prospect of being subjected to top-down renewal plans by private interests.

Later, reading the section on the blues street performances, I understood how powerful that performance had been to Binelli, and implicitly how powerful the stories, the culture and the will of the people of Detroit were to him as well. The book has been well received by Detroiters, and maybe for that reason – Binelli places enormous importance on disambiguating the symbols and the rhetoric that has been assigned to the city, and focusing on reality.