"Wild Bill" Bunge's Radical Geographies of Detroit Explain Everything

I grew up in a lot of places. Most of those places were at one address in a suburb of Detroit called Harper Woods in a small house one block from I-94 and 15 or so blocks in either direction from Lake St. Claire and Eastland Mall. It was like living in the light halo of a black hole, always but never falling in, always but never being torn apart by the forces of a collapsing city. It was lakefront living with four lanes of concrete and a breakwall instead of a beach, one of the best high schools in the country boasting a tendency for full-on racism, and old Grosse Pointe fortunes rotting away at their foundations. If you followed that concrete-lined lakefront long enough, you would arrive at a tepid canal delineating the Detroit border.

As a writer with, like, ideas and a long history with Detroit I should probably have something to say about the current Detroit Situation. Yet I've had little to say. I guess that partially has to do with simply not liking Detroit much. I mean, I have mountains of empathy for the city and the people stranded within it, but Detroit also made me miserable for most of that long history, largely due to the disgusting sorts of class clashes that the city is amazing at constructing. Circa 1994, I remember being in study hall at Grosse Pointe North High School, a rich kid public school with a district edging into abject poorness (and African-Americanness), when I was met for the first time with what I recognized as full-on race hate.

I do like the buildings in Detroit, in large part because of their ugliness. Not their in-fashion urban decay ugliness, but the actual ugliness that resulted from building a giant city with a couple broad strokes of money in a time when buildings were most often giant concrete projections of industrial, technological power built by hideous men. I feel about Detroit like it's a neglected, forgotten parent in a shitty retirement home. Detroit is a parent of America and of technology; it gave us everything. But it also fucked us up really good.

I was, dunno, 13 or 14 when I caught on to the canal seperating the (historically) rich, white neighborhoods of the Grosse Pointes from the full-on, entirely African-American poverty on the Detroit side. Where I lived further inland, the split was not any more subtle: you literally went from rich white enclave to 8 Mile in a bridge over the interstate. On one side of the interstate you had walkable suburban Main Streets filled with high-end shops, and on the other, a giant falling apart mall that didn't actually have any stores in it. Detroit is or was an amazing city in its abilities to keep people from knowing each other, better than anywhere else I've visited or lived or studied. Detroit wasn't a city, it was a Middle Ages manor. Now, it's a manor after being swept with the Black Death.

Cartographer William Bunge published his An Atlas of Love and Hate: Detroit Geographies in 1969. As the name suggests, it was more than maps of streets and railways and water: it was a work of geo-activism. "To put it simply, [Bunge] believed that cartography was more than the number of feet between point A and B," Katherine Wisniewski writes at Architizer. "Instead, he focused on the minute patterns of human movement and behavior, revealing the machinery that orchestrates our activities. His maps are based on statistics, truth, and 'damn good graphic design.'" The blog indiemaps has an excellent and much deeper appreciation of "Wild Bill" Bunge here.

The Grosse Pointes are a tight collection of inner-ring suburbs. Together they were a giant vacuum for automaker money or really any other money that might be gettable in the city. Nowadays there's no commuting along these routes because there's nothing to commute to and, besides, the money vacuum has mostly moved to the distant outer-ring the map above by now.

Really not much to say about this one, just sadness.

Instead of toys, kids in the inner-city just get death.

It's too bad Detroit isn't actually a thing we can lock away to rot. It was abusive to its children, clearly. But a city is also its people and that's the horrible contradiction from which to base any accurate feelings about Detroit. My loathing of the city is exactly proportional to my empathy for it, and it's hard to know what to do with that information. Mostly, I'm just back where I started.

@everydayelk