Drivine Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

摘要

George Galster's excellent and impassioned book on his home city utilises 'driving' to illuminate both what drives the metropolis of Detroit and what drives its inhabitants to attain, retain and expand basic physical, social and psychological resources (p. x), what he terms 'respect'. In the opening chapter Galster takes the reader for a drive around Detroit, revealing that, in its soul, it is a place that makes things. He recognises the power of this city as an icon of the best and worst of what a metropolis can be, of how the marketing juggernaut used cars and music to weld the youth culture of the USA to American myths of freedom and individualism (p. 4) and how these myths have been symbolically destroyed. He argues convincingly that Detroit has been at the epicentre of tectonic shifts in national policy and legal precedents (Fordism, the first traffic lights and concrete highways, the Nation of Islam, civil rights and many others), and that the unravelling of the post-World War Two social compact in Detroit will be repeated across urban America. Like Goetz (2013), Galster shows how the physical ruins of factories and houses within the Eight Mile boundary represent the ruins of the New Deal and the political economy that underpinned it. The achievement, and subsequent loss, of a (lower) middle class standard of living and security (including housing) for working people defines our contemporary age across much of the Western world.