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Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.
- GenresNonfiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published June 23, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 23, 2017
In: Southeastern Geographer, Vol. 56, No. 2, Summer 2016, doi: 10.1353/sgo.2016.0015
“Modernity in ruins. The disaster unfolds. …” Thus begins Dora Apel’s fascinating account of Detroit, specifically the ways in which the city’s visual representations have captivated the cultural imagination. Characterizing Detroit as “the crucial nodal point” (p. 6) in a dense network of imagery expressing contemporary disillusion with Western progress and power, this volume intriguingly engages with aesthetic, social—and more covertly, psychoanalytic—theories to form a singular critique of the ongoing cultural enthrallment with ruin imagery as a seductive diversion from the failures of the failures of capitalism. In so doing, Apel successfully deconstructs the continuing urban crisis as one mystified by ideological cipher fashioned from alternately fetishistic and exploitative representations; by empirically problematizing the notion of “ruin porn” she further demonstrates the insurgent power of re-contextualized art to focus attention on the human and political tragedy expressed in urban decline. However, by not fully engaging with the genitive power of racial ideology and its essential role in constructing the imaginative landscape of Detroit, the book critically under-explores the deep connections between the geographic subjectivity of the city and the West’s long association of the racialized Other with anti-civilization, pollution, and decay.
The book does several things well, particularly those achieved under the rubric of what Apel terms the “deindustrial sublime.” An analytic drawn from Kant’s notion of the sublime (an aesthetic category describing experience that agitates paradoxically to soothe), deindustrial sublimity is employed by Apel in order to reframe images of urban ruins as ultimately comforting stabilizations of otherwise disorderly and threatening places and events. Apel argues that within the context of real economic precarity, sublimatic depictions of urban abandonment assuage anxiety by exotifying and safely situating ruins elsewhere on the map. The aesthetic “containment” of decline, Apel contends, is evidenced well beyond the ubiquitous coffee-table photo books, and her analysis casts a wide net as it draws upon material from disparate genres like documentary and narrative film, product and ad-copy (for instance, Chrysler’s recent “Imported from Detroit” campaign), newspaper reportage, and the recently popular zombie figure to explore the city’s ability to domesticate disinvestment and inequality through its rendering as a tragic, yet beautiful object. This analysis, like Apel’s earlier work with torture and lynching imagery (2005) is embedded in a thorough review of the history and theory of Detroit and deindustrialization, in this case relying heavily on work by Thomas Sugrue and David Harvey. [End Page 254]
By considering Detroit in aesthetic terms, Apel produces a few distinctive insights. First, by making use of a representational rather than “real” framework, Apel is able to address the conventions of “documenting” decline as an implicit rhetoric functionally supportive of hegemonic neoliberal urbanism. This approach may be familiar to scholars acquainted with Megan Cope and Frank Latcham’s (2009) and Jeff Crump’s (1999) respective critiques of decline narratives in Buffalo, NY and Moline, IL. However, the visual methodology and empirics of Apel’s study uniquely emphasize both the power of ruins to evoke an apolitical response and the proficiency by which representations of urban decline circulate in a culture otherwise uninterested in its social realities.
Apel’s aesthetic approach also allows her to foreground the affectively contradictory nature of urban decline in a way under-appreciated by the existing literature on Detroit and decline both. Focused on “the ability of ruin images to move and arouse us (intellectually or emotionally)” (pp. 24), Apel unearths just how Detroit is able to touch us, inspiring both fear and desire and channeling both onto a place most have never been and many will never go. This argument effectively reinterprets Detroit more as a project than object, a geographic repository for society’s irreconcilable emotions about the present and future of capitalism. Though unacknowledged, Said’s Orientalism reverberates through the text, leaving the reader with the impression new methodological ground has been broken.
Finally, by interjecting aesthetics into what is essentially a social critique, Apel creates new room for considering the transformative potential of geographically-embedded art in the context of decline. A chapter examining such installments as the Heidelberg Project, Object Orange, and Ice House Detroit engages with Andrew Herscher’s (2012) earlier work celebrating the “productivity” of art in the city’s otherwise disin-vested landscape. Apel, however, goes further than Herscher by centralizing the ability of art to reject—and thereby contest—the “symbolic order” of decline (p. 112) stigmatizing landscapes like Detroit as redundant or deviant. The publisher’s decision to not print Apel’s images in color is especially regrettable for this section of the book.
The book’s greatest lacuna is its treatment of race. Besides the occasional knowing gesture toward race’s significance to the history of Detroit, the issue is ultimately bracketed as subordinate to the processes of capital abandonment. This can be seen, for instance, in the book’s reaffirmation of the now-standard narrative that African Americans moved to Detroit only to face virulent discrimination and violence, and then finally to bear the ultimate burdens of deindustrialization. On one hand, this account effectively rebuts the myopic trope that the mid-century was some kind of “Golden Age” for Detroit from which it has now fallen (p. 97). However, without recognition of racism’s dependence upon, and agential expression through geographically-articulated events, notions of racial difference emerge as static, separable from the histories through which they have emerged. One could argue that given the limited scope of a single Detroit study, it’s untenable to expect each one to substantively address race. But in light of work by scholars like David Roediger and Stuart Hall linking racialization directly to representation, it is [End Page 255] disconcerting to read a representationalist critique of the “Chocolate City” that apparently misses urban decline’s multi-faceted metonymy with racialized Blackness.
Relatedly, the book’s closing essay exploring Detroit through the metaphoric of the zombie stumbles on similar grounds. Here, Apel looks to convergences between zombie fiction’s escalating popularity (noting Mark Siwak’s now defunct effort to create a zombie themed attraction in an abandoned neighborhood of Detroit), and recent media portrayals of Detroit as “apocalyptic” city, parasitical and an “‘alien nation’ within” (p. 153). Apel’s evidence and process is compelling, yet turns almost entirely on a critique of growing proletarianization and mass immiseration of the global economy. Even the Otherness of the paradigmatic zombie figure itself is largely reduced by Apel to religious difference, its origins in Haitian Voodoo. If there was a place to make a sustained engagement with racialist ideology and its constitutive role in the abandonment and destruction of, and simultaneous fetishistic delight in the ruined landscape of Detroit, this would seem to be it. Instead, racism is noted yet ultimately excluded from consideration as a product of the deindustrial sublime itself.
Criticisms aside, Beautiful Terrible Ruins is an engaging study charting an innovative path through the policy-dominated discussion of urban decline and the otherwise saturated body of scholarship on Detroit. Human geographers—particularly those interested in cultural representation—will want to pick up Apel’s book for its ontological sensitivity to place and the role place plays in socially situating subjects both in and outside its confines. Apel’s aesthetic-oriented approach is one not often seen in our field, and its utility in critically assessing such issues makes its methodology worth considering.
“Modernity in ruins. The disaster unfolds. …” Thus begins Dora Apel’s fascinating account of Detroit, specifically the ways in which the city’s visual representations have captivated the cultural imagination. Characterizing Detroit as “the crucial nodal point” (p. 6) in a dense network of imagery expressing contemporary disillusion with Western progress and power, this volume intriguingly engages with aesthetic, social—and more covertly, psychoanalytic—theories to form a singular critique of the ongoing cultural enthrallment with ruin imagery as a seductive diversion from the failures of the failures of capitalism. In so doing, Apel successfully deconstructs the continuing urban crisis as one mystified by ideological cipher fashioned from alternately fetishistic and exploitative representations; by empirically problematizing the notion of “ruin porn” she further demonstrates the insurgent power of re-contextualized art to focus attention on the human and political tragedy expressed in urban decline. However, by not fully engaging with the genitive power of racial ideology and its essential role in constructing the imaginative landscape of Detroit, the book critically under-explores the deep connections between the geographic subjectivity of the city and the West’s long association of the racialized Other with anti-civilization, pollution, and decay.
The book does several things well, particularly those achieved under the rubric of what Apel terms the “deindustrial sublime.” An analytic drawn from Kant’s notion of the sublime (an aesthetic category describing experience that agitates paradoxically to soothe), deindustrial sublimity is employed by Apel in order to reframe images of urban ruins as ultimately comforting stabilizations of otherwise disorderly and threatening places and events. Apel argues that within the context of real economic precarity, sublimatic depictions of urban abandonment assuage anxiety by exotifying and safely situating ruins elsewhere on the map. The aesthetic “containment” of decline, Apel contends, is evidenced well beyond the ubiquitous coffee-table photo books, and her analysis casts a wide net as it draws upon material from disparate genres like documentary and narrative film, product and ad-copy (for instance, Chrysler’s recent “Imported from Detroit” campaign), newspaper reportage, and the recently popular zombie figure to explore the city’s ability to domesticate disinvestment and inequality through its rendering as a tragic, yet beautiful object. This analysis, like Apel’s earlier work with torture and lynching imagery (2005) is embedded in a thorough review of the history and theory of Detroit and deindustrialization, in this case relying heavily on work by Thomas Sugrue and David Harvey. [End Page 254]
By considering Detroit in aesthetic terms, Apel produces a few distinctive insights. First, by making use of a representational rather than “real” framework, Apel is able to address the conventions of “documenting” decline as an implicit rhetoric functionally supportive of hegemonic neoliberal urbanism. This approach may be familiar to scholars acquainted with Megan Cope and Frank Latcham’s (2009) and Jeff Crump’s (1999) respective critiques of decline narratives in Buffalo, NY and Moline, IL. However, the visual methodology and empirics of Apel’s study uniquely emphasize both the power of ruins to evoke an apolitical response and the proficiency by which representations of urban decline circulate in a culture otherwise uninterested in its social realities.
Apel’s aesthetic approach also allows her to foreground the affectively contradictory nature of urban decline in a way under-appreciated by the existing literature on Detroit and decline both. Focused on “the ability of ruin images to move and arouse us (intellectually or emotionally)” (pp. 24), Apel unearths just how Detroit is able to touch us, inspiring both fear and desire and channeling both onto a place most have never been and many will never go. This argument effectively reinterprets Detroit more as a project than object, a geographic repository for society’s irreconcilable emotions about the present and future of capitalism. Though unacknowledged, Said’s Orientalism reverberates through the text, leaving the reader with the impression new methodological ground has been broken.
Finally, by interjecting aesthetics into what is essentially a social critique, Apel creates new room for considering the transformative potential of geographically-embedded art in the context of decline. A chapter examining such installments as the Heidelberg Project, Object Orange, and Ice House Detroit engages with Andrew Herscher’s (2012) earlier work celebrating the “productivity” of art in the city’s otherwise disin-vested landscape. Apel, however, goes further than Herscher by centralizing the ability of art to reject—and thereby contest—the “symbolic order” of decline (p. 112) stigmatizing landscapes like Detroit as redundant or deviant. The publisher’s decision to not print Apel’s images in color is especially regrettable for this section of the book.
The book’s greatest lacuna is its treatment of race. Besides the occasional knowing gesture toward race’s significance to the history of Detroit, the issue is ultimately bracketed as subordinate to the processes of capital abandonment. This can be seen, for instance, in the book’s reaffirmation of the now-standard narrative that African Americans moved to Detroit only to face virulent discrimination and violence, and then finally to bear the ultimate burdens of deindustrialization. On one hand, this account effectively rebuts the myopic trope that the mid-century was some kind of “Golden Age” for Detroit from which it has now fallen (p. 97). However, without recognition of racism’s dependence upon, and agential expression through geographically-articulated events, notions of racial difference emerge as static, separable from the histories through which they have emerged. One could argue that given the limited scope of a single Detroit study, it’s untenable to expect each one to substantively address race. But in light of work by scholars like David Roediger and Stuart Hall linking racialization directly to representation, it is [End Page 255] disconcerting to read a representationalist critique of the “Chocolate City” that apparently misses urban decline’s multi-faceted metonymy with racialized Blackness.
Relatedly, the book’s closing essay exploring Detroit through the metaphoric of the zombie stumbles on similar grounds. Here, Apel looks to convergences between zombie fiction’s escalating popularity (noting Mark Siwak’s now defunct effort to create a zombie themed attraction in an abandoned neighborhood of Detroit), and recent media portrayals of Detroit as “apocalyptic” city, parasitical and an “‘alien nation’ within” (p. 153). Apel’s evidence and process is compelling, yet turns almost entirely on a critique of growing proletarianization and mass immiseration of the global economy. Even the Otherness of the paradigmatic zombie figure itself is largely reduced by Apel to religious difference, its origins in Haitian Voodoo. If there was a place to make a sustained engagement with racialist ideology and its constitutive role in the abandonment and destruction of, and simultaneous fetishistic delight in the ruined landscape of Detroit, this would seem to be it. Instead, racism is noted yet ultimately excluded from consideration as a product of the deindustrial sublime itself.
Criticisms aside, Beautiful Terrible Ruins is an engaging study charting an innovative path through the policy-dominated discussion of urban decline and the otherwise saturated body of scholarship on Detroit. Human geographers—particularly those interested in cultural representation—will want to pick up Apel’s book for its ontological sensitivity to place and the role place plays in socially situating subjects both in and outside its confines. Apel’s aesthetic-oriented approach is one not often seen in our field, and its utility in critically assessing such issues makes its methodology worth considering.
April 14, 2025
“A romantic fetishization of the relationship between nature and culture lies at the heart of ruin imagery and is central to what makes it appealing. This suggests a ‘timeless’ struggle between nature and culture that either places nature in the ascendancy over ruined culture as part of a downward spiral or, conversely, asserts the redemption of social ruin through signs of new life in nature. Yet for the poor population, no matter how haunting or strangely beautiful ruins may be, they are not romantic artifacts but reminders of jobs and homes lost, neighborhoods destroyed, and lives derailed. Photography that focuses only on the aesthetics of decay in architecture offers a narrative that distances and obscures the ongoing crisis of poverty and unemployment.”
January 27, 2022
a great look at ruins, ruins photography, detroit, and an analysis of the function of 'ruinporn.' it makes clear to me, even though not directly in the text, that the processes and policies leading to ruin and abandonment need to be made explicit in any photographic project including the subject.
Want to Read
April 8, 2023to-read
August 26, 2015
I saw this book reviewed in a literary blog shortly after I returned from a work trip to Detroit, so I knew I had to read it. My ILL department was able to get it from the Central Michigan University Library for me. The book was an eye opener for me, having stayed in a beautifully renovated mansion turned boutique hotel, while in Detroit, and having walked many blocks surrounding Wayne State University in the heart of Midtown Detroit, which looked like it was undergoing some sort of renaissance. The Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) was being renovated on the outside, a far cry from the story told here about the city trying to sell off the art collection. Here are some of my takeaways from the book: Detroit hit its heyday as an industrial city in the 1960s before the auto industry started outsourcing jobs to cheaper labor in Mexico and elsewhere. Unionization brought about living wages for the auto workers, and life was good. As the auto industry went elsewhere, the city began to fall into decay, and a counterculture of urbanex developed, dedicated to exploring and romanticizing the ruins. Yet in all the artwork of trees growing out of decaying books, and buildings left to crumble, where are the people? The people are left to fend for themselves, and are often blamed for the poverty they live in. Pensions are taken away that people worked their whole lives for, and how scary is that? If it can happen in Detroit, what is to prevent it from happening to us? And yet, through it all, the banks still thrive, the sport teams get new stadiums, and life goes on. So, what is the truth? Is this a sign of things to come, that we want to hide our heads in the sand and not see, or a isolated truth? This book would have us believe the former, while most of us would rather believe the latter.
June 28, 2015
Last week I received my usual daily email from a digital magazine that is in the forefront of creating and reporting political news. In the center of the page was an advertisement called Nine Scenes from A Changing Detroit. It is full of optimistic and promising chatter about the new Detroit that is emerging due to business and government coalitions. Whole Foods, a charter school (and the privatization that comes with that), a central market and much more all powered by a $100 million investment from JP Morgan Chase and Co. I had just read Beautiful, Terrible, Ruins so I viewed this with a different lens then I might have otherwise. While I live in a city that has gone through its own machinations with gentrification and the suffering and anguish that comes with it, Beautiful Terrible Ruins makes it clear that the winners blames the losers and that this is just the way of crony capitalism. The concept of "ruins" is new for me and I appreciated how clearly Dora Apel defined it and her critiques of it. I felt challenged by the book and wholly immersed in it. The art demonstrated her theoretical perspective and give life to it. Now when I am walking in Boston, in an area that has been almost fully gentrified I see the new construction of multi-million dollar condos as the ruins too and it's pretty heartbreaking. I thank Edelweiss for giving me the opportunity to review this book for an honest opinion.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews