Sensing others: Empty buildings and sensory worlds in Detroit

Abstract

In recent years, tens of thousands of empty buildings have been demolished in Detroit. Alongside visual appearances like collapsed roofs and broken windows, unoccupied structures gather noxious smells, sporadic fires, gunshots, accounts of disappeared neighbors, and fears that such buildings might consume children and entire neighborhoods. The looks, smells, sounds, and other emissions of vacant structures impinge on the lives of adjacent residents, as much as they do provisions of the municipality’s property maintenance code. In so doing, unused buildings become the shared grounds for neighbors, building inspectors, and others to grapple with the felt effects of racialized political economic change. This article focuses on how articulations between embodied experiences and statutory norms enable efforts to locate, historicize, and expel buildings from the city’s landscape. Specifically, I examine how the elaboration of sensory distress provokes the seizure of privately owned buildings from corporate owners. By tracing this elaboration through backyard conversations, municipal codebooks, and demolition hearings, I take note of how sensory experiences cohere a potent platform for spatial politics. At the same time, as corporate entities shake loose of disciplinary strictures mobilized by state actors and neighbors alike, they reveal how those who profit from others’ distress can do so by refusing implication in shared sensory worlds.