Reconstructing Flint: The Value of Design in a Damaged City

Reconstructing Flint: The Value of Design in a Damaged City Wes Janz and Diana Short

WJ: We don’t matter.

I bring colleagues from architecture and urban planning. Graduate students in architecture, urban planning, and historic preservation from Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the U.S., and Uzbekistan. Undergraduate students from architecture, creative writing, philosophy, and visual communications. A prominent blogger from San Francisco. They’re designers and I’m asking questions about the value of design in a place none of them can imagine, that few of them will return to, where nothing is quite like what they were told or will tell others.

They won’t matter.

We roadtrip on I-69, take Exit 136 SAGINAW ST/DOWNTOWN, turn left onto Saginaw, and we’re main dragging. Flint, Michigan.

Everyone.

I’ve taken eleven trips to Flint in the past three years, fifty different people with me. Everyone says some version of: “This isn’t so bad.” It might be: “There’s some life here.” Or, maybe to catch my attention: “I like it.”

Everyone.

Of course, I prepare them (bias them?) with statements like this: The story of Flint’s decline is rather simple. General Motors was founded there early in the twentieth century. In time, the company’s ascent drove the worker-citizens to unparalleled personal, familial, and communal gains. At its peak in the 1960s, Flint was home to 190,000 persons and 80,000 General Motors’ jobs, and was believed to be on its way to a population of 250,000. Today, Flint’s population is at 120,000 and 17,000 GM jobs remain. No one is

sure if the bottom has been reached or if it even is in sight.

And: Many, if not most, of the houses being demolished and in need of demolition in Flint were constructed using low quality materials and techniques. Following WWI and WWII, small poorly constructed housing was quickly erected on narrow lots, close to the factories that provided employment. These were never high quality houses. It can be argued that these buildings, long ago, fulfilled their original mission.

And: The large quantity of abandoned and boarded houses in Flint is critical. This much is clear: thousands have been torn down and thousands await demolition. Hard, comprehensive numbers are difficult to establish. A mayoral aide in Flint stated in late 2006 that City crews tear down two to seven houses every working day. A City of Flint demolition crew chief told me that 4,000 houses need to be torn down “today” and another 10,000 will need to be torn down in the future.

It doesn’t matter.

On the city’s northside, any right or left turn off Saginaw takes you into neighborhoods where the norm is boarded houses or empty lots where a house once stood. “You pick the street,” I say. There’s abandoned houses on every block, collapsing houses always in sight, lives spiraling downward behind every front door.

Everpresent, everblock, everlife.

As the conference title asks, does design have value in a place such as Flint, where there is, essentially, no on-going construction, not development and planning, nor a real estate market. The contractors are primarily demolition contractors. Like much of the middle class, the architects have left or are leaving.

And there’s more (or less) on the way.

Retired GM workers depart. Hospitals consolidate. Businesses “early retire” employees. The current housing crisis expels overextended homeowners. The State’s recession grinds. As all this plays out, the death spiral tightens, pulling many others down with it.

Power--in a city where the police force is downsized, distracted, and

demoralized, the fire department is overworked with arson, and hard-working and well-intentioned citizens struggle to hang on—resides with and is distorted by locals.

At the “bottom,” houses are FOR SALE by people who don’t own them.

Scavengers and scrappers know better than bankers if a house is occupied, or not. Shadow residents trick utility companies into turning on natural gas or telephone, pirate electricity through use of concealed extension cords, occupy abandoned houses quietly by going in the back, broken door. Buildings take on a hybrid functionality. One example: dead (i.e., murdered) bodies are placed in houses set afire = house as crematorium.

On the flipside, from the “top,” Dave too works creatively and determinedly among the lost houses and buffeted lives. He manages many hundreds of abandoned buildings in Genesee County and Flint, listened in 2006 as a vague argument was made—“A building is a better place when a human being is inside it,” senses that a city with thousands of vacant buildings should think about “looking the other way” when a squatter moves in. Realizing he can provide a place for someone to live—to hide out, sleep, recover, rest, stay dry, regroup, whatever--and save $1500 per squat (what he pays to have a squatter evicted, full legal process). Money he can spend in other places, ways, and lives.

This is de Certeau, these are “everyday life practices,” writ large. And small. One can’t really see, but hears of “ways of operating,” people who “disguise and transform themselves,” men and women “poaching in countless ways on the property of others,” “clandestine” operations, and “the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong.” Or Scott’s “weapons of the weak”—“In place of a land invasion, they prefer piecemeal squatting; in place of open mutiny, they prefer desertion; in place of attacks on public or private grain stores, they prefer pilfering.”

You ask about: “The power dynamics of our built environment”? “The forms, processes, and manner in which buildings are used”? If I could, I’d like to crank these challenges as set out by the facilitator of this “‘Social’ Value of Design” panel.

The questions are basic. Do designers have a role in such charged economic, social, and political environments? Does anything we teach/learn in architecture school have traction in a place where so many difficult lives are being lived, where the main concerns about the built environment that many citizens have is: how fast can you tear down the house next to mine? It seems we have some responsibility, as professionals involved in materializing such places, to help them dematerialize, even as we should be concerned about the hardships endured both by those left behind and those who choose to stay in Flint.

And, finally, I wonder: can we learn about design from those who remain? In this

most unforgiving, unrelenting, and unarchitectural of places, might we be able to make a small contribution to its reconstruction by learning from the locals?

That is . . . might we matter?

So, yes, I take people to Flint. And in February 2007, I took DS. DS: Destroy the image. Cultivate shrinkage. Demolish Emptiness.

These words, found on a poster used as part of exhibitions organized by Philipp Oswalt at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2006, explore the phenomena of “Shrinking Cities.� Printed boldly, the phrases deviated greatly from the prior lessons of my architectural education.

Obsessed so much with creating and developing, little thought is paid in architecture school or the profession to the end of this cycle. The death of what we make.

In order to fully realize decline, I must see it with my own eyes. Feel the cold winter air, gather the facts, and take the photographs in preparation to walk through the house, which will be destroyed in my presence in just a few minutes.

We are spectators to what is happening in this place.

Thirteen students of varied interests and disciplines, including myself, participated in a seminar that concentrated on the relevance of leftover people, places, and materials. During our trip to Flint, Michigan we saw two houses demolished in an hour and a half. A home, a symbol that I project on this assemblage of materials, is reduced to rubble. Is this experience quantifiable? Is it necessary for an architecture student to witness such an event? I had studied growth for four years. I was taught to realize the necessity and importance of the built environment to humanity.

But I see the insignificance of my future profession in a place like Flint.

My eventual goal is to create relevant structures that I hope will benefit the people that inhabit them. The value of design to me is potential. A word that is full of latent possibility.

Does Flint have potential or has that left town along with the thousands of unemployed auto workers? As soon as the large machine destroys a home, we move along, continuing our tour through this alien landscape. Desolate, burnt, and scavenged. The community cannot react quickly enough to its own demise.

Can you prepare for shrinkage?

As a future architect, am I responsible?

WJ: For Marwa, a big day it was. September 20, 2006.

She met Marvin, her first private demolition contractor, in Flint. Don, her first backhoe driver. Glenn, her guide for a two-hour “distress tour.” She met Keith, who always will be the first squatter she spoke with in her life.

From a middle class background in Egypt, Marwa had never seen a city dismantled. Giza, Cheops, Sphinx, Alexandria, Imhotep . . . as they dominate our preconceptions of Architecture in Egypt, so too do they influence contemporary in-Egypt understandings. Deconstruction, unbuilding, the ephemerality of the built environment . . . as these were new concepts to Marwa, so too are they among our new Rust Belt realities.

She met Kevin, the City of Flint demo crew chief and eyed the backhoe he trailers, city-wide, five or so stops a day. Walking around and in Kevin’s next victim—the countdown started, Marwa not knowing the house would be an unhouse in mere minutes—she took in the backside tags, the charred stairway where a fire advanced, then retreated. She stood in the second floor toast.

Sometimes, homeless make a home with a mattress. So Kevin goes in yelling . . . he’s a house-killer uninterested in humanizing his hit list.

We step out as the yellow John Deere 690 ELC backhoe stalks the front door. No welcome wagon “knock knock knock.” No PIZZA DELIVERY call-out. Instead, a front porch shove-aside in one arm-sweep, a roof cave-in done by mechanical thrusts, exterior wall push-overs from a few horizontal shivers, vertical crushes to overwhelm the second floor structure.

Then, more shoves, thrusts, pushes, and crushes. More sweeps. More.

Thirty minutes, tops.

Then, a cigarette break. Idle conversation.

I have a photo of Marwa, eyeing the basement of the former empty house now full-up with torn wood, shingle spears, sharded glass, plaster clouds, plumbing pipe screensavers, wiring spaghetti, knocked down furniture, clothes shreds.

In time, she asked: what is the value of design in such a setting, in a place where

we walk, unremarkably, among the contemporary ruins of a once lively society?

Those are my words, influenced by yours.

When she did her master’s thesis—“Imagining the Alchemy of Shrinkage between the Real and Ideal: A Resilient Design in Evolution in Flint, Michigan”-Marwa wrote: Firstly, Keith, who used to squat on a front porch of a vacant house, was being evacuated from that porch on the day of our visit. Keith’s way of talking wasn’t that way of poor miserable people who may try to motivate other’s sympathy at all. On the contrary, he seemed to appreciate himself. The common picture of these individuals in all societies is primarily focused on the pathetic lives, started to be untruthful. During our talk with Keith, he emphasized that he doesn’t want to live that plain life of the ordinary people; he wants to move frequently. But, on the contrary, when we went into his porch we noticed that the furniture and the picture he hanged on the wall reflect a man whose sole dream is to have a private house of his own.

[Secondly,] since there are many vacant houses, why the homeless are not given a chance to live freely without any hassles?

[Thirdly,] the evidence of scrapped materials in Flint, in old abandoned houses left for 1-3 years before foreclosures. Scrappers with no money in the pockets are ready to earn their living once they get a chance. . . These people, who may be called “survival workers,” are so active and organized that they start the role of taking off materials [immediately after] the house is abandoned. . .

Finally, the moment of killing a house and its observant funeral afterwards for thirty minutes was a completely shocking experience in my life as a human being as well as an architect. . . The official institutions throw [away] all the materials and nobody cares about it.

While there are poor people who so see this rubbish as treasures that they struggle to sneak and steal it.

Matta-Clarke’s “house cuts” influenced her, as did Bektas’s participatory workshops in Istanbul, Cirugeda’s “Insect House” in Seville, McCutheon’s posttsunami workshops in Tamil Nadu, Hamdi’s belief that designers should “induce” others to act for themselves, Gladwell’s claim that “little things can make a big difference,” and Portland’s own Dignity Village.

“I started to think about our role as architects,” Marwa wrote,

in motivating people to turn their individual potentials to collaborative community work. This is a call for cooperation and participation, which should be the cornerstone in any architectural design for the poor, namely, the resilient architectural design.

Her specific response on behalf of the “forgotten places and ignored people” in Flint, she titled “Scrap and Build: On Our Own Village.” Close to the Third Avenue and Grand Traverse intersection, on land near to a one-stall garage where a squatter lived, where we saw a stack of used mattresses, and next to an abandoned house.

Using no money.

Early on, a reused sink could be situated in a new partial wall built of recycled brick (maybe by a former-mason-now-homeless person) on a vacant lot and connected to an unused water line (left behind from when a house occupied the site). Next, partial constructions—relocating a solid corner of a demo-ed house, salvaging house interior components of a demo victim, leaving a concrete slab for others to build on. Maybe next door, the abandoned house is deconstructed, its parts advancing the initial partial constructions.

Marwa wrote: The hope is that such minimal interventions might entice both those with no houses and those with entrepreneurial spirit to complete the enclosures that, over time and by accumulation, will grow into buildings and a social network.

Eventually, maybe, the sink is enclosed and includes a shower and toilet, gardens are planted, an adventure playground. Who knows, a salvage yard (where squatter-entrepreneurs give materials to some and sell scavenged materials back into the formal economy), possibly an abandoned house is converted into a live/work facility for nearhomeless people, and why not small kitchen preparations from gardengrowings?

The smallness (i.e., appropriateness, decency, realisms) of the proposed architectural work and workings, the bigness of Marwa’s heart, the shock to her being that Keith caused, the intelligence of her approach . . . here is the value of design done not on behalf of homeless persons in Flint, but on behalf of architects and designers lost in conventional practices, deadhead jobs, and the cold-hearted calculations of our lost profession.

There’s more good news: she is not alone.

DS:

Like Marwa, I saw the potential for reuse in the pile of scraps that remained after a home’s destruction was complete. Both her project and mine—intended for exhibition in a local art gallery--explored reuse, manipulation, and assemblage of these items to confront the strong preconceptions of what a home can mean.

However, our intents differed greatly. She explored how these pieces could be repurposed into temporary shelters and I used them as a communication tool. I wanted to reconstruct the leftover materials and, in doing so, find a new context in which to express the significance of a house and what is happening in Flint.

Refuse is what remained. The contents of a home leave an indication of life. A biography that I can only theorize using visual references left behind. A twin mattress strewn about a small bedroom, propped vertically against the wall. A hollow wood door splintered on the floor and a dirty stuffed toy atop a pile. These objects are everyday and ordinary. Their disarray gave a feeling of urgency and desperation to this broken home. Now I was the scavenger, hungry. Among the many scraps: house numbers on a burnt piece of vinyl siding. I placed my own importance on these scraps, imagining that for a squatter, address numbers might signify being accounted for and could be used as a point of reference for the authorities. I struggled to separate my idea of home from what I saw in Flint.

After returning, I held the pieces that were once part of a larger idea or symbol. I was faced with how issues of joinery, relevance, and interpretation could best serve the objects. The quilt has long been used as a tool of communication and functionality. I looked at the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. I was intrigued by the patterns infused with history and ingenuity from previous generations. Using scraps of work clothes, these women used the materials they had to make something truly beautiful.

I began to stitch these materials and experiences back together, once again creating a composition that documented the destruction of the physical structure.

Broken and tattered pieces of flooring, vinyl siding, chain-link fence, and clothing were integrated into a large quilt that hung just above the floor and rested atop a soiled mattress. As gallery patrons looked down at the quilt, many questioned my approach. Explaining it throughout the evening of our opening helped me realize that my perspective had shifted through the process. I reflected on the house in relation to my own life and the value I place on the architecture of home. I tried to relay how none of that matters in a place like Flint. The intricacies of quilt called for people to inspect closer and to look at each artifact that made that larger whole. Pieces they could relate to, that could be found within their own homes, explained a place and an experience that puzzles me to this day and puzzles most who get the chance to see it for themselves.

WJ:

I’m just back from Flint. Yesterday. September 12, 2008. I took a faculty colleague in planning, five of his graduate students, a visiting Fulbright professor.

At day’s end, we’re in Carriage Town Historic District, a neighborhood in deep decline and deterioration and distress and any other “d-word” you can find. Here, the past few years when I visited, hand-painted signs were hammered to a vacant house.

“Human Sacrifices Needed” one said.

“Inquire Within” the other.

The backyard’s adorned with plastic skulls wrapped in barbed wire set atop fence posts, plastic skeletons swing from tall posts, weeds, tall trees, doghouse, a bleating goat.

Others warn me off the owner. “He took after somebody with a chain saw,” I’m told.

On this day, he’s home. Adam.

The billboards are gone, as are the trees, goat, and doghouse. Still, the skulls and skeletons catch our eyes, so we stop. Adam comes over.

(Paring knife in hand, playing with it, he’s cutting at a scallion pulled from his garden growing nearby where a house once stood.)

We talk. He’s a Halloween Baby and gets all sorts of weird presents, plastic skulls included. (For sure, he’s a character, but the birth date provides a kind of legitimization for his “clandestine” intentions.) Evangelicals once performed an exorcism on him and the property, and videotaped it.

Searchlight on his house to drive away hookers, hustlers, meth users. Nearby, a public telephone he Gorilla-glues to stop dealings near his property. Lawsuits pending against the City, on the hospital nearby (owners of the gone houses, the hospital gets tax credit for ownership but invests zero money in the falling properties).

Stories. Copper scrappers in his house, them having no luck as he’s reinforced everything. They leave, defeated.

(Twirling the knife in his hands as he talks.)

911ing police re: scrappers pulling pipes out of a house across the street, big noise. Cops don’t go in, there’s “no sign of forced entry” (and no glass in

windows either, so scrappers just jumped in). Adam taunts scrappers and cops, tries to get cops to intervene. Cops leave. Scrappers exit with their bounty eventually, diss Adam.

He envisions a deli in an abandoned house on the Third Avenue corridor less than a block away. Asks us questions about shared driveways, and the rights of two property owners when a driveway is shared, specific to the deli site. He was at City Hall half this day trying to determine ownerships, rights, seeking advice, guidance. No help.

(More knifing.)

We leave. I’ll go back. He’s committed to a place most leave, staked a claim on a place no one wants, imagines a future in a place where one doesn’t seem to exist.

(Later I’m told that Adam’s title to the house and property is muddled . . . he does not have “clear” ownership of the house or land . . . in a sense, he too squats.)

So . . .

One reality is that the title of this article—“Reconstructing Flint”—is more question than fact. Can Flint, will Flint, be reconstructed out of or as part of this demolition and deconstruction spiral? Or, maybe, it is obvious that Flint is being rebuilt if we look in other places, at other lives, for relevant evidence.

After eleven visits, getting to know a range of locals, and bringing a diverse group of persons to Flint, I believe that our consideration of “the value of design” must be placed fully within the lives, aspirations, and actions of local people.

Dave, as he quietly “manages” hundreds of squatters in a way the “system” never imagined. Acting responsibly on behalf of his fellow human beings, maneuvering, lightly, through legalistic protocols.

Keith, the squatter, who said to Marwa: “You can get as much as you want out of life. I believe in being positive.” Packing up, mobile, knowing a city and its gaps, cracks, and sutures, in ways few know.

Adam of “Human Sacrifices Needed.” Seeking strategic legal advice even as he practices tactical excursions. Dueling with “City Hall,” his own survival instincts evidenced throughout his house and property, his awareness of the politics and economics driving the present state of affairs.

The squatters that Marwa hopes to engage and learn from.

The bodies that laid on the mattress that inspired Diana’s quilt.

They are our hope.

Design has value and purpose in these lives, in their everyday existences, in how they make their way in this difficult place. On their terms, with their creativity, a day is lived and negotiated. Tomorrow, more of the same will take place, next week, month, and year too, without and probably despite the misplaced efforts of trained designers, architects, land surveyors, politicians, building officials, and others.

Keith matters. Adam matters. Dave matters. Those who we don’t know, they matter.

And in the ways that they seek to build upon these common practices as a means to find value in design and their own design knowledge, Diana and Marwa matter as well.

DS: Nearly two years later, I am a young designer, preparing to get my master’s degree. I often think back to my last semester of college, back to the house in Flint, and I am no closer to discovering an answer to the question raised in the seminar.

I won’t matter to Flint.

But what I learned in Flint will matter to me.

Problems don’t always have clear solutions and I am starting to accept that fact.

Cities boom and cities shrink, people move in and out, houses are built and houses are torn down and in that process the value of design is present throughout.

REFERENCES

Beckley, Robert. “Flint Michigan and the Cowboy Economy: Deconstructing Flint,” Taubman College of Architecture + Planning, The University of Michigan, http://www.tcaup.umich.edu/urp/cowboyeconomy.html (accessed September 15, 2008).

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1988.

Janz, Wes. Deconstructing Flint. Flint, Michigan: Genesee Institute, 2007. http://www.geneseeinstitute.org/downloads/Deconstructing_Flint.pdf (accessed September 15, 2008).

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1985.

Oswalt, Philipp, ed. Shrinking Cities: Volume 1: International Research. Ostfi ldern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004.

Willingham, Brian. Soul of a Black Cop. Flint, Michigan: Urban Humanities Publishing, 2005.

PHOTOS

Flint: House Teardown 2006

Flint: Squatter Keith 2006

Flint: Phases 1, 2, 3: On Our Own Village 2007

Flint: Quilt 2007

Flint: Adam’s House 2006