Masking the Racialized Politics of Green Stormwater Infrastructure in Detroit

Keywords: urban nature, green stormwater infrastructure, racialized dispossession, Detroit
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 48

Abstract

Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) is often positioned as a cost-effective alternative to grey infrastructure to sequester urban runoff otherwise released into local waterways. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) began implementing GSI to offset a small portion of the costs associated with its court-ordered stormwater management program. To date, program costs have exceeded $1.5 billion – a price tag born overwhelmingly by Detroiters despite providing ecological benefits to the entire metropolitan region. Local constituents have felt the burden of increasing drainage rates used to fund the program which have contributed to the inflation of water and sewer bills by 400% since the mid-90s. In 2016, the DWSD began several GSI initiatives that made use of demolished residential lots, including a pilot program constructing bio-retention gardens in the former basements of foreclosed homes. These initiatives, and the greenwashing of practices like housing demolition, were undertaken as hundreds of thousands of low-income, majority-Black households were disconnected from water service, and as officials at the DWSD proposed to downsize the water and sewer system by relocating entire Black neighbourhoods into city-owned properties. Without discounting the potential value of GSI, I argue this stormwater management strategy in Detroit has produced urban natures that mask processes of Black dispossession and displacement. Drawing on critical scholarship at the intersection of race and nature, I question the politics and logics of environmental remediation via GSI initiatives which aim to facilitate potential cost-savings through urban natures that disguise the racialized effects of a wider water affordability crisis.