Last April, Shell flew me to Detroit for the company’s annual Powering Progress Together conference. This edition of the event was held in the cavernous Cobo Center, Detroit’s newly renovated downtown convention hall, and the conversation was all technocratic optimism. The Houston-based oil company had convened executives, NGO leaders, techies, academics and Detroit pols to discuss the “urban nexus” – a vision of the future of cities. Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, was hip to the lingo. “The future belongs to the thinkers, doers and innovators,” he told the audience.
When the president of Shell, Marvin Odum, talked about Detroit and mobility, I presumed he was referring to the Motor City moniker and the auto industry. But Detroit is also the largest American city with no rail transit. Its bus system is among the worst in the nation. The most prominent kind of mobility in Detroit is the unprecedented, continued exodus of the citizenry: around 238,000 people left between 2000 and 2010; 34,000 since. Even as the outflow ebbs, no other large American city is losing people faster.
So why would a multinational corporation hold a conference on mobility and technology in Detroit which, in addition to all its other problems, was then five months out of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history?
The answer, in part, is that Detroit’s comeback story has resonated with corporate benefactors, for whom investment and involvement in the city is its own public relations campaign. “The events industry today is shifting in perspective so that the destination is really part of the event, not just the room that it’s in,” says Thom Connors, the general manager of the Cobo Center since 2010. “We pitched it from the beginning as a comeback.”
For several years, the resurgence of Detroit’s core has given a positive association to consumer products. The “to hell and back” narrative that debuted in Chrysler’s 2011 Super Bowl commercial brought viewers to tears. (Tagline: “Imported from Detroit.”) Shinola, which manufactures its elegant watches and bicycles in the city, has shrewdly traded on its Detroit roots. The city’s resilience has also been harnessed to sell energy drinks and vodka.
Corporate goodwill in Detroit, like manufacturing, has taken on an aspect of performance. In March last year, Citi Corp released an advertisement trumpeting its own efforts to underwrite the bonds to bring Detroit’s flagging streetlight system back online. The video is inspirational, in a Wall Street kind of way. “You can have the greatest dreams in the world,” an official says. “But unless you can finance those dreams, it doesn’t happen.”
In May, JP Morgan Chase committed $100m (£69m) to invest in Detroit – a “double bottom line” project expected to produce both profits and social good. The bank has celebrated the investment in a series of print media advertisements.
In 2010, Blackstone-owned Vanguard Health Systems bought the non-profit Detroit Medical Center, committing to invest $850m over five years in the hospital system. The Private Equity Growth Capital Council produced a video about the purchase to demonstrate the industry’s virtue and utility.
Public relations ploy, clever investment opportunity, or much-needed assistance? It’s a little of all three. “Everybody wants to be part of it because it’s a good story,” says Mike Bernacchi, a professor of marketing at the University of Detroit-Mercy. “You can hear that talk, ‘Where were you when we needed you?’ There is certainly cynicism.”
On the other hand, says John Mogk, a law professor at Wayne State University, the city will take what it can get. “Every little bit helps.” This is, after all, a place that Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley – the city-loving Brookings Institute scholars – called “a dystopian disaster” in 2009. “Detroit,” they wrote, “has become shorthand for failure.”
It seems corporate America doesn’t see it that way anymore. The $279m renovation of Cobo, the downtown convention centre, will bring in 15 major conventions and conferences this year, up from four in 2011.
Some of those groups choose Detroit for its international airport and cheap hotel rooms, but many see the city as a symbolic site, whether for its automotive identity, status as a border city, or ongoing downtown revival. The auto show, a cornerstone civic event that had threatened to desert Detroit unless improvements were made to Cobo, made a celebrated return that was taken as a metaphor for the city at large.
Capitalism loves a crisis and, in practical terms, downtimes have made Detroit more a company town than ever before. “In Detroit, the absence of federal support like that offered to New Orleans,” writes professor James Rhodes in an essay comparing the two cities, “means that it is private and quasi-private actors that will dominate the city’s restructuring in the wake of bankruptcy.” Failed public services open the door for charitable companies like Penske Automotive, which donated 100 new police cars. Real estate has been so cheap that a couple of local power brokers, Dan Gilbert and the Illitch family, have consolidated control over a vast swath of downtown and the vibrant Woodward Avenue corridor.
Shell’s conference was followed by the Eco-marathon, an engineering contest in which students from North and South America compete to build and race high-efficiency vehicles of their own design. A conference centre full of clever kids tinkering with vehicles is an inspiring sight. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine New York or Chicago turning over their downtown streets for a science fair.
The city’s biggest transportation project, the M-1 Rail, is being funded mostly by private dollars. The city’s urban planning blueprint, Detroit Future City, is also a non-governmental project. No surprise that media coverage of Detroit often invokes the entrepreneur as a kind of saviour.
But is Detroit, as the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau put it in 2013, “America’s greatest comeback city”? As many Detroiters have observed, the city is resurgent but also bifurcating: a small and mostly white city is thriving within a much larger, poorer black city. The former is the recipient of big-money largesse and fodder for branding. The latter is, in some ways, no better off than it was before.
That’s too long a story to tell in a car commercial. Also missing from the famous Super Bowl spot that started the trend: Chrysler decided to move its headquarters from Highland Park, a desperately poor enclave within Detroit, to suburban Auburn Hills, Michigan, 25 miles north, in 1992.