Metabolic Wasting and Exceptional forms of Governance in the Decline of Detroit

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Environmental Justice

Abstract

In spite of calls by and to environmental sociologists to dismantle the binary between human and non-human environment, much theory fails to examine the development of human experience within particular environmental regimes. Environmental sociologists give glancing arguments about inequalities while environmental justice scholars advance arguments by showing how marginalized communities are targeted for degraded environments but neither group has developed a strong theory for how human experience is degraded within environmental economies. The contemporary political experience of low-income residents in Detroit, Michigan sheds an uncomfortable light on this void. Through examining the political consequences of environmental management efforts in Detroit, particularly around the Detroit water and sewer system, this paper calls for a new theoretical construct that engages human and non-human experience as metabolic, both constructive and destructive, in the redevelopment of the city. In this paper I argue that the economic structure in Detroit has become a ‘Wasting Economy,’ wherein dehumanization functions in the removal of citizenship experiences therein constructing the residents as less-politically empowered and more vulnerable to exceptional forms of governance.

Author

• Jennifer S. Carrera, Michigan State University