Detroit: trade unionism's Pripyat?

Julien Temple visits Detroit and paints a vivid picture of what he kindly calls urban decline, but which really sounds more like urban failure. Read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

The drive along eerily empty ghost freeways into the ruins of inner-city Detroit is an Alice-like journey into a severely dystopian future. Passing the giant rubber tyre that dwarfs the nonexistent traffic in ironic testament to the busted hubris of Motown's auto-makers, the city's ripped backside begins to glide past outside the windows.

Like [Iggy Pop's] The Passenger, it's hard to believe what we're seeing. The vast, rusting hulks of abandoned car plants, (some of the largest structures ever built and far too expensive to pull down), beached amid a shining sea of grass. The blackened corpses of hundreds of burned-out houses, pulled back to earth by the green tentacles of nature. Only the drunken rows of telegraph poles marching away across acres of wildflowers and prairie give any clue as to where teeming city streets might once have been.

Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. … Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city have already been reclaimed by nature.

It is not a relentlessly bleak picture, but the silver lining Temple identifies—"[u]nable to buy fresh food for their children, people are now growing their own, turning the demolished neighbourhood blocks into urban farms"—recalls nothing so much as the Trantor of Asimov's Second Foundation:

Time had been when the insubstantial ribbons of control had stretched out from its metal coating to the very edges of stardom…; the mightiest capital that had ever been.

Until the decay of the Empire eventually reached it, and in the Great Sack of a century ago, its drooping powers had been bent back upon themselves and broken forever. In the blasting ruin of death, the metal shell that circled the planet wrinkled and crumpled into an aching mock of its own grandeur.

The survivors tore up the metal plating and sold it to other planets for seed and cattle. The soil was uncovered once more and the planet returned to its beginnings. In the spreading areas of primitive agriculture, it forgot its intricate and colossal past.

Or would have, but for the still mighty shards that heaped their massive ruins toward the sky in bitter and dignified silence.

(I came to it independently, but should note that the simile has been thought of by others.) Now, I've never been to Detroit, and found this picture hard to believe, so I asked some Michigander friends; they thought the portrait too flattering if anything. One cited this, which has some before-and-after pictures, and interesting (if radical) thoughts on moving forward.

One gloss that I want to add to Temple's report is that Detroit, so far as I can tell, didn't decline because the Big Three had a "blind belief … in the automobile as an inexhaustible golden goose, guaranteeing endless streams of cash…." Nor was its "destiny fatally entwined with that of the car." Cars remain a trendy consumer item. It would be more precise to say that Detroit's destiny was fatally entwined with the Big Three, and perhaps fairer to say that its destiny was fatally entwined with the deadweight of trade unionism.

Granted, if the big three didn't loose the arrow, they held the bow. I don't have any expertise in the automotive industry, but friends who do tell me that the big three exacerbated their situation by clinging to moribund paradigms for far too long. Cf. John O'Sullivan & Edward Keuchel, American Economic History: From Abundance to Constraint 241 (2d ed. 1989). Simply if exaggeratedly put, they kept building cars that America didn't want to buy. Even if they had wised up sooner, however, the structural problems would have remained. Locked into an ossified labor structure, with its attendant costs and work rules, there was no way for the big three to be as agile as their foreign competitors. This provides an illuminating excursus on this point. Had a supremely competent management team arrived, I imagine that they would have echoed Jim Lovell's frustrated panic: "It's like flying with a dead elephant on our back."

All of which makes me think of Pripyat. Detroit, "the Motor City, was once the symbol of our national industrial prowess." Reynolds Farley et al, Detroit Divided 1 (2002). Similarly, until the wee small hours of April 26, 1986, Chernobyl "was a symbol of the [Soviet] nuclear industry; by 1988, it would have been the largest nuclear plant in the USSR, and it was visible proof that the industry could provide a short-cut to success…." David Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR 32 (1986). The disaster turned Chernobyl into "a symbol of Soviet managerial and technical incompetency," Stephen Cimbala, The Politics of Warfare 170 (2004), an emblem of the shortcomings of the system that built it, and I would venture that the abandoned city of Pripyat is its visible memorial. Built within eyeshot of the Chernobyl plants (as shown by the picture above, which depicts the view of the Chernobyl plant from a Pripyat apartment complex) to house their staff, its 50,000 residents were evacuated after the disaster and it is today an abandoned city in the process of being reclaimed by nature.

Given the publication he writes in, Temple can't say it even if he recognizes it, but Pripyat and Detroit (at least as portrayed by Temple) appear as twin cities, victims of failed, malingering ideologies and their attendant worldviews.