The making and unmaking of place: the extroversion of the Mapleridge neighborhood in post-bankruptcy Detroit

What the paper says

• Our work unpacks divergent trajectories of abandonment, vacancy, and reuse in the active production of decline in Detroit. • Post-bankruptcy Detroit is an uneven landscape where the afterlife of abandoned spaces acquires sui generis characteristics. • Our examination of Detroit’s Mapleridge neighborhood challenges singular narratives of generic recuperation. • Mapleridge experienced contradictory pressures: introversion (place-based inertia) and extroversion (extraterritorial flows). • Going beyond fragmentation as an outcome of abandonment, we focus on extroversion as a process reinforcing neighborhood decline. A strong current in recent scholarship on post-bankruptcy Detroit has endorsed an uplifting narrative of resilience leading to spatial stability and eventual city-wide recovery. Yet this constructed tale of rebirth has conveniently overlooked entrenched zones of deprivation that remain virtually untouched by the “Comeback fever.” Looking at what has happened in the neighborhood east of Gratiot Avenue and south of 7 Mile Road reveals a different story of enduring distress that unsettles singular narratives of anticipatory recuperation. Mapleridge (as the neighborhood is officially known) is part of a larger mosaic of stubborn precarity across the urban landscape. While housing vacancy and an aggressive demolition campaign have figured prominently in shaping the physical contours of leftover spaces in Mapleridge, three less visible currents have embedded themselves in the already depleted landscape, turning the neighborhood literally “inside out.” The suburban lifeline that sustains Assumption Grotto Church, an underground economy tied to regional drug trafficking, and commercial businesses operated by immigrant entrepreneurs all can trace their existence to social forces originating outside Mapleridge and Detroit. In seeking to understand how and why abandonment and vacancy have persisted in the neighborhood, it is necessary to recognize that Mapleridge cannot be treated as a cocooned island-like enclave insulated from outside pressures. Instead, the neighborhood must be seen as an outward-looking zone of engagement with porous boundaries shaped more by powerful external forces than by internal dynamics. As a result, Mapleridge has come to function as a conduit, or passageway, linking extractive practices to multiple “elsewheres.”