Tourism aesthetics in ruinscapes : Bargaining cultural and monetary values of Detroit’s negative image

“Never look back!” ¹

In 2008, I was surprised by people laughing at my asking for guidebooks to Detroit in book stores from Berkeley to New York City. In 2010, I was proudly presenting my hypothesis of the surreal function and expectations of “tourism” in contemporary Detroit as a result of neoliberal canonization of cities around the globe along the lines of “failure” and “success”: Detroit was not a nationally recognized tourist destination, it was often ridiculed as such, but still, the city puts its little money to subsidize efforts to fuel urban tourism to the largely abandoned inner city (casinos, sports events, pub crawls, science, and defense museums). My hypothesis that tourism is used as symbol for a “successful city” is based on the premise that tourism has been used to mask urban crises and thereby create a counter-image that serves to envision a better future for a city (see Roche, 1992; Fainstein and Judd, 1999; Greenberg, 2008). The official tourist bureau Visit Detroit produced tourism imagery of a “successful” city to counter its negative brand (Herron, 2004) as a shrinking city (Oswalt, 2004) with a recent history of nothing but crime and decay: in postcards and websites, the city’s skyline was staged in a traditional tourism aesthetic to cover up the decaying ruins of the inner city. In 2011, I was taken by surprise once more: the city’s negative attributes, its state of decline, was being put to use as a motif by a car company in their latest advertising campaign. The city’s major industry that had contributed to Detroit’s shrinking and socio-economic failure in the decades before now created car commercials with resurrection narratives of “the city that has been to hell and back,” promoting cars with glossy depictions of a declining “Detroit” that echoes the earlier tourism aesthetic. “Detroit” had become a signifier for an urban crisis that can be commodified like any other life-style product.

What had long been visually avoided in US tourism contexts—decay as symbol for failure and crisis—was becoming a fashionable attribute that suddenly could signify urban “success.” Detroit’s negative image of a failing city was being put to new uses. Tourism’s image campaigns as political tools that impact decision-making processes, appears as powerful currency in the negotiations of meaning. All questionable development and criticism aside, tourism still holds a magic ideal as an apolitical, marvelous, sacred, positive phenomenon. Yet, when reading tourism sight/site marking “semiotically” as negotiations of meaning, a sight’s/site’s economic relevance appears in a different light: discourses and hierarchies of dominant ideologies of “success” and “failure” surface as negotiations of power in the name of profit, marketing, capital accumulation, not merely as apolitical, harmless cultural practices of leisure and recreation. This article challenges the existing discourse on tourism as progressive for cities and society by pointing toward inconsistencies in the magic of tourism when it is used primarily as profit-oriented strategy.

With the shift from manufacturing to post-industrial service and information economies, industries like tourism, creative and research sectors are re-defining urban spaces. Cities are not only the place for life-style production, but also have become life-style products that can be advertised like Campbell Tomato Soup or Brillo pads. As products, cities need to be promoted or at least, that seems a global consensus that is currently carried out on the local level by city officials who employ tourism as if it was a prescription for urban revitalization (see e.g. Fainstein and Judd; Roche, 1992; Brenner and Theodore, 2005; Mayer, 2013; Beauregard, 2005). In the city that functions as tourist city, reputation is directly linked to destination marketing. That is done visually: image campaigns promote the city as sight/site. The tourist city can be the site itself and/or contain a number of sights. The relevance of these sights/sites swerves away from cultural attractions toward attractions that can be monetized, or, speaking in tourism semiotics, from having a cultural value as place toward creating monetary value through its image.

For the 1990s in New York City, Greenberg (2008) observed that “[…] image has gained unprecedented prominence in economic and social life.” (p. 33) Since then, image campaigning has become a popular political strategy. The image of a city currently is of high value in Bourdieu’s sense of symbolic capital that is meaningful and has the power to define and impact social processes. The image of the tourist city is also of high monetary value, in Marx’s sense of economic capital. Monetary value continues to have the power to define and enforce social and political processes (lobbying, access to education, and subsequent employment in positions that define social structures, such as politicians, chief executive officers (CEOs), professors, managers, renown artists, etc.).

In the image of a city that is promoted as a “destination,” that is, the tourist city, monetary, and symbolic values become entangled through ideologies of success and failure that put profitability at the center of everything. In what follows, I argue that neoliberal ideologies are represented through aesthetic traditions that signify failure and success in tourism culture/context of sight/site marking. Dreier et al. (2001) analyzed how “place matters.” The question here concerns the aesthetics of the image of place and how that matters. My premise is that the reputation of a tourist city works mainly on the basis of visual representations, and that these representations have actual political, socio-economic, cultural, and ecological implications. In its dual function between service industry and cultural practice, tourism is granted a power of value definition by which tourism gains symbolic (assumed) monetary value as well as symbolic cultural value that has non-symbolic (“real”) impact.

The “semiotics of attraction” and “site sacralization” revisited

The distinction here is important as my models locate the source of attraction in the socially constructed relationship between a tourist, the sight, and its marker(s), not in the sight/site itself or in some putative, underlying “essential” meaning of the site. (MacCannell, 2014: 286)

Following MacCannell’s model of the “semiotics of attraction,” the tourist attraction is not naturally occurring, but a negotiation of meaning within the cultural practices of tourism. His model sight/site marking is based on semiotic theory; therefore, it promises to help explain how tourism as context creates meaning in the process of sight/site marking.

While I understand approach as suggestion for how to better understand tourism as an ideological factor in society, earlier applications of MacCannell’s approach have emphasized its potential to re-shape tourist attractions in order to make them more economically profitable. For example, Forristal et al. (2011) apply the model to improve destination-marketing strategies:

While it [historic Prophetstown in Battle Ground, Indiana] appears to have all the necessary elements to become a successful tourism attraction, it consistently teeters on the verge of insolvency. Applying sociologist Dean MacCannell’s ([1976] 1999) five-stage site sacralization theory as an analytical lens to investigate the site revealed that it has never successfully moved beyond MacCannell’s first stage (i.e. naming), which may be a key factor contributing to low visitation and poor economic performance. (p. 570)

Forristal et al. make use of MacCannell’s model in order to enhance the sight for better profitability. The idea is also to enhance cultural value; however, they argue for profitability in order to reach that goal. Departing from the marketing approach to use the model for an image analysis, my interest is not to understand the decline of the site per se but to understand how the decline of an entire (inner) city has become an attraction. The purpose here is to understand how decline has been turned from being a socio-economic problem with real life, everyday effects, and consequences into an image, a commodity, a tourist attraction, even as the underlying social problems do not change. Based on the premise that in re-branding Detroit’s negative image, visual representations of urban decay as worthy sights appear as expression of an ideology of tourism that corresponds to neoliberal ideologies of success and failure defined by the scale of profit, I specifically do not propose this analysis to debate Detroit’s “success” as a destination like Forristal et al. have done for Prophetstown. My use of MacCannell’s model differs from Forristal et al. in the following way: I aim to employ a semiotic analysis of sight/site marking to discuss ideologies of success and failure visible in tourism aesthetics. I dissect neoliberal ideologies of profit improvement proposed by the marketing approach and offer the dialectic of critical semiotic analysis. Management and marketing research continues to appropriate critical theory for the purpose of profit, despite the fact that critical thinking does not serve the purpose of profit maximization: “However, this anthropological and sociological approach can potentially be complementary to the market-based assessment frameworks that other tourism researchers have proposed” (Forristal et al., 2011: 580). In this sense, this article attempts to further deconstruct the myth that critical theory should cater to market rules in the name of neoliberal ideology of market “improvement.” The purpose is to offer to continue to develop alternatives to an ideology preoccupied with economic profit maximization. There is no “purpose” that thinking must cater to. The “purpose” of critical thinking is critical thinking. To suggest a critical approach as counter-argument to “marketing theory” is an expression of my concern about the authors’ use and proposition of the concept of semiotics. They propose a rather confusing and vague definition of what semiotics is and what it can explain when they say:

In essence, the name of a site is intrinsically a branding issue. Branding is used to imprint a representational image of a product or service into the mind of the consumer. […] In fact, the concept of a brand is very close to Peirce’s “sign” that represents something to someone and MacCannell’s “marker.” Thus, societal parties and institutions interested in the future success of Prophetstown could investigate and employ destination branding principles and practices, including semiotics, which is a field of study that has evolved from Peirce. (Forristal et al., 2011: 579) (author’s emphasis)

To clarify, semiotics is not a branding principle or practice. Semiotics is a hermeneutical attempt to investigate how meaning is created in and with language and similar tools of communication in societies. It can be applied to investigate how socio-economic and cultural meaning interact, for example, in branding principles and practices. Forristal et al. (2011) focus on the stage of “framing” as a means to develop destination-marketing tools (p. 573). Here, I will approach the question of “framing” not to evaluate the actual frames in Detroit’s tourist settings, but to understand the cultural and economic significance of negotiating the choice and design of “frames.” It assists to elucidate the significance between tourism and the aesthetic. My understanding of the cultural functions of semiotics in and through the visual is based on Roland Barthes’ propositions of how signs function in a given culture (see Barthes 1983, [1956]2000).

Taking MacCannell’s suggestion to be a post-structuralist model for describing the performative, lose, arbitrary constructed character of tourism—through sights/sites in this case—the model enables to talk about the cultural constructed-ness of tourism because we can “unearth” ² the constructed-ness of sights/site that are main pillars of tourism rhetoric. Here, I make use of the model of semiotics of attraction not for destination-marketing interest. I use it to help clarify current relations between tourism and society, between the visual and urban and, ultimately, propose further to investigate the intersections between the four variables: tourism, visual, urban, and culture. My interest lies not in the experience of tourists but in ideologies linked to “tourism” as a form to shape ordinary, non-sacred culture. Fainstein and Judd (1999) work with a notion of culture in the context of tourism that reduces culture to opposable to “products and services” (p. 2). I work with the two terms of monetary and cultural value to mark the corresponding different functions of tourism, that is, profit-oriented destination and souvenir marketing, the service industry versus the leisure activity, the cultural practice. I run the risk thereby, as I will now accuse Fainstein and Judd of, to work with a reduced definition of “culture” which limits understandings of how tourism works in this possibly not dialectic combination of “culture” and “profit.” My working definition of tourism broadly follows Nelson Graburn (1977) and his notions of the sacred and the profane which he roots in Durkheim and Mauss (p. 19): “sacralization that elevates participants to the nonordinary state wherein marvelous things happen” (p. 20). “However, the most minimal kind of tourism, such as a picnic in the garden, contains elements of the magic in tourism” (p. 19). In the following, however, I inquire what the meaning of tourism is, not as marketing tool, not as human experience, not as practice of Modernity, but as ideology.

My hypothesis is that “tourism” elevates abandoned toxic factories and other decaying buildings into cultural recognition through site/sight marking: when the magic potion “tourism” is added, urban decay is turned into a product of high cultural value: ruins. In the tourist context, recognition of tourist sight/site produces elevated cultural value. Increasingly, that value is of both cultural and economic significance. In considering diverse contemporary visual representations of Detroit, I found it necessary to rearrange the terms of MacCannell’s model somewhat to help explain how the image of place—as visual representation, not as place—becomes culturally and economically meaningful once the visual representation serves as tourism imagery ³ and the place has a function as tourist destination. Following scholars from urban studies (Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Zukin et al. 1998; Greenberg, 2008), tourism then can be evaluated in its speculative function for urban politics in the United States: despite its destructive force, tourism remains a powerful tool in urban politics and restructuring plans that is sought to overcome the financial and proper socio-economic crisis of many urban settings today.

Reading the “semiotics of attraction” for “Detroit”

Modern international sightseeing possesses its own moral structure, a collective sense that certain sights must be seen. (MacCannell,[1976] 1999: 42)

MacCannell suggests five stages of what he calls “sight sacralization.” That is, the process of classification of something as a sight worth seeing. This ideal of “worth seeing” often applies to the tourist. The suggestion here is, however, that the ideal of “worth seeing” creates cultural and economic values that go beyond the consumer target group “tourists.” In this sense, tourism is not the initiating motivation for the analysis, but the cultural and political context that is considered as frame for how meaning is negotiated when tourism is the context. In the case of recent gentrification tourism ⁴ to Detroit, a new order of processes of the model of sight/site marking suggested by MacCannell in 1976 occurs. It is necessary to note that for the time of this research, Detroit has not been a tourist destination that appears in tourism imagery of the United States like “New York City” or “Hollywood.” In the case of Detroit, institutional and “informal” policies differ substantially from what MacCannell suggests in his model, yet at the end, the outcome—sight/site marking—is the same. In analyzing the visual functions in sight/site marking processes, current tourism ideology, or tourism semiotics, become crucial when applying the model for reading the semiotics of attraction in “Detroit,” therefore, MacCannell’s model remains highly useful.

The initial stage that MacCannell ([1976] 1999) identifies, “takes place when the sight is marked off from similar objects as worthy of preservation” (p. 40). That can be done through “reports filed testifying to the objects’ aesthetic, historical, monetary, recreational and social values” (“naming phase of sight sacralization,” p. 44). Although reports had been filed by local initiatives that called for the preservation of buildings due to architecture that contains historical and cultural values, neither the city of Detroit nor its official tourism board ⁵ has named Detroit’s decaying architecture or abandoned lots as sight/site. That means, step one of the “site-sacralization” process was not carried out by any institution or other official policy. Instead, “naming” decay as sight/site was done through visual representations and in non-tourism contexts. In Detroit, current processes of official sight/site marking interlace with earlier local non-governmental ambitions to preserve architecture and neighborhoods. Earlier attempts had failed due to the city’s enforced demolition plans. Local and national photographers, artists and writers had started to document decay, abandonment, and demolition. Buildings had been demolished despite voices that spoke for their preservation. In 1997, the website yesdetroit was created by a local resident to present Detroit’s decaying structures as worthy of cultural recognition:

Put aside their negative image, so sensationalized by a self flagellating media, and view them, for a moment, as you might one of the celebrated ruins of the world. Then you may come to understand why I call them The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. (Lowell Boileau, project creator)

While cultural elevation is suggested here (comparing Detroit to other “celebrated ruins of the world”), the quote also reflects that the essential part of the naming phase for tourism purposes is missing, at least from those who are officially tasked with speaking for Detroit. According to MacCannell, the naming phase is successful (i.e. recognition as sight/site) when “reports file[d] testifying to the objects’ aesthetic, historical, monetary, recreational and social values” (p. 44). In the case of yesdetroit for a long time, there was no official recognition of the ruins as a sight/site, no naming. Their unofficial “naming” as worthy of recognition was unsuccessful. Monetary and recreational values were not a primary interest for that website. While “aesthetical, historical, and social values” were identified, they had little impact on negotiating the cultural value of the buildings or any preservation efforts. In the context of tourism, however, the building’s cultural value was elevated through “monetary and recreational values” that tourism industry is expected to bring. This framing of decay and demolition through pictures is not necessarily a process of sight/site marking. These visual representations created meaning through documentation, ⁶ but they were of little touristic value.

Earlier, this kind of documentation signaled the existence of architectural treasures in urban decay and thus functioned as indirect initiative to “protect” the city’s buildings from demolition and complete deterioration. Today, the website has become part of MacCannell’s ([1976] 1999) penultimate stage: “mechanical reproduction of the sacred object—the creation of prints, photographs, models or effigies of the object which are themselves valued and displayed” (p. 45). In the beginning, the documentation worked like the stage of “framing and elevation” which MacCannell identifies as second stage (p. 44): simply to depict the state of desolation meant to frame it. The aesthetic re-semantification through other visual representations, I argue, changes the meaning of the website as well: it now works as sight marker, even on the official level. Later, the website re-frames the derelict structures: the copywriter/author of the website introduces tourism as an additional value in their list of reasons, why Detroit decay should be saved and celebrated (and re-used):

Now, as for centuries, tourists behold those ruins with awe and wonder. Yet today, a vast and history-laden ruin site passes unnoticed, even despised, into oblivion. Come, travel with me, as I guide you on a tour through the fabulous and vanishing ruins of my beloved Detroit. (Lowell Boileau, project creator, detroityes.com)

Around 2008 when I started my research, this website clearly aimed at virtual tourists, offering them “virtual tours” by providing visual information about decay, demolition, and ruins. Now, the website is linked to the official tourist office (METRO DETROIT) and offers an extended set of tours that actually move through the analogue place, the city:

Detroit Urban Adventures also offers a tour titled Detroit’s Rise, Fall & Renewal ($20) that covers the old and the new. A tour of the buildings that sprouted up during the city’s heyday will inevitably reveal a few heartbreaking examples of grand structures forgotten. For those with a fascination for urban decay, you can take a web-based tour of some of Detroit’s “fabulous ruins” at www.detroityes.com. (http://www.visitdetroit.com/features/81-tour-d-troit)

When decaying urban structures are marked as worth the “analogue visit” through visual representations, the currency rate of cultural value of the decay has changed. While in earlier years, the city’s official tourism website carefully avoided any reference and visual representations of its state of decay and abandonment, now this “negative image” has been embraced for touristic purposes. After over 10 years, the city’s state of decay has been included as a link to unofficial tours to the official website. It is important to note that the official “naming” of “decay” as sight/site came around the corner from behind informal sight/site marking processes and not through direct official policies.

Tourism semiotics in photographs of Detroit’s ruins

In 2010, two photographers from France published a photo book in which they call for the acknowledgment of Detroit’s decaying architecture as tourist attraction. Their book differs greatly in composition, book design, and textual content from an earlier famous photo book by social documentarist Camilo Vergara entitled American Ruins from 1999. Vergara documents cities of the Rust Belt and other places in decline and poverty. His interest lays in the city as residential place for citizens. Marchand and Meffre (2010) explain their motivation in interviews that came as tourists to a Detroit that they had discovered virtually in the Internet:

[…]they happened [sic] upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. “It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,” says Meffre, […]. (O’Heagan, 2011)

In nearly 200 pages, they present interior and exterior views of abandoned and derelict buildings of Detroit. Similar to city officials, they seem to believe in the (promise of) monetary value of tourism as post-industrial service industry when they promote the recognition of Detroit’s derelict architecture as touristically precious. Their claims follow the ideology of tourism as cultural practice of Modernity, defining what is worth seeing along the lines of high cultural value and low cultural value in terms of sight and not-sight. The authors suggest that Detroit’s urban blight—and eventually Detroit—would magically be transformed into something of elevated cultural value once the “ruins of Detroit” are granted the same cultural value—being an internationally renowned sight/site—like ruins of other places, namely “Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens.” (Marchand and Meffre, 2010). In Marchand and Meffre’s argumentation, tourism appears as what Graburn has denoted as the sacred, as what stands opposite to the profane, everyday life. They present their photographs as visual proof for a magic of the past that can be viewed, preserved, and commemorated: there is something to be discovered in Detroit’s decaying state. In their glossy aesthetic, the photos communicate the basic message of a tourist guidebook: come and see for yourself! This is certainly worth a trip! The magic here lies not on the decaying buildings per se, but the form that Marchand and Meffre chose to re-present them in: the glossy aesthetic of product advertisement and tourism destination marketing. In the process of site/sight marking through visual representations, the significance of the visual in defining “reality” appears as negotiation between defining relations between tourism and its respective contemporary functions in society.

Such recent photographic depictions of Detroit determine (and show ⁷ ) a shift in the meaning of urban decay that moves “Detroit” from urban wasteland (iconographic motif for the city’s negative image, similar to the Bronx in the 1970s) to a new staging of urban decay as post-industrial archaeological treasure: the aesthetic re-definition of the urban wasteland as picturesque ruinscape. ⁸ Following the visual rhetoric of the picturesque landscape for tourism in earlier times (Urry, 1990; Crawshaw and Urry, 1997; Hales, 1984) as ruinscape, decay is no longer rated as sore spot of the city, but as pleasurable to the eye. I would not categorize current phenomena as compatible with earlier or current definitions of slumming (see Dowling, 2007)—unless the tourist practice of pub crawling qualifies for “uncivilized” behavior. Detroit’s ruin tourism does not motivate the gaze upon the urban poor or social misery by upper classes. The social-inequality component (immanent to slumming), I argue, has been removed. That means, in the case of “the ruins of Detroit,” reframed now as an object of touristic veneration, what MacCannell ([1976] 1999) describes as second stage of site sacralization—“the framing and elevation phase”—has been transposed into an aesthetic style in the medium of visual representation that is void of any democratic concern like social bifurcation in a city. “Framing is the placement of an official boundary around the object” (p. 44), MacCannell writes. A photograph also places a boundary, but tourism adds another frame to how the photographs can be read: the shiny, organized, cleaned pictorial space in tourism imagery changed the meaning of visual representations of urban decay and hence of “Detroit” (‘s image).

The visual rhetoric of organized, clean pictorial space is transposed into the shiny, glossy, sterile aesthetic of advertisement in recent visual re-definitions of urban decay. The glossy aesthetic of clean pictorial space corresponds visually to the profit-oriented ideology of neoliberal urban political (and design) strategies to “clean” urban space in order to present it as successful vital city (see e.g. Sorkin 1992; Brenner and Theodore, 2005; Mayer, 2013). When comparing social documentary photos by photographers like Camilo Vergara—who already in the mid-1990s suggested the creation of a “ruin park” in downtown Detroit, an “American Acropolis”—with those of Marchand and Meffre, tourism semiotics in their work surface more clearly.

Vergara in his work focused on staging a picture of actuality (Grierson) through an aesthetic of failure that transposes the dirt and chaos of urban decay into the pictorial space (Vergara 1995; Vergara 1999). That is often achieved with the gritty, grainy at times blurry black, and white photography that looks to frame but not to alter. Camera angles do not play with special effects. Photos are usually shot in straight on angles in natural light to present a “democratic” perspective of the eye level encounter or from a high angle to provide an overview. ⁹ Marchand and Meffre (2010) on the other hand, make use of low angles to create a dramatic effect: the abandoned building appears more impressive, rather monumental. Playing with depth of field of the large format camera, they present interiors in a panoramic style. Making use of dramatic lighting and digital photographic after effecting (post-production), they stage a different “Detroit” than Vergara. They use color film and staged their motifs in additional light, enhancing color, and adding drama/turgy. Although their choice of motifs reminds of what Crawshaw and Urry (1997) have listed as what is best excluded visually from postcards of the countryside in Britain, their photo documentation of Detroit differs substantially from Vergara’s photo documentations of Detroit and decay. Their photos’ aesthetic reminds one of destination marketing. Tourism aesthetics, similar to other forms of product advertisement, function to promote places and sites to the consumer/tourist.

In Marchand and Meffre’s “Detroit,” decaying structures are presented like a shiny, new, fresh, undamaged fruit or gadgets. They transpose their call for recognition of Detroit’s decomposing architecture into the aesthetic of their pictures, by suggesting broken structures be understood as touristic ruins, urban decay appears as sight/site. Their motifs include theaters with the derelict stage in the center, as if someone watching from the audience would take a photograph of the scenery. But because the theater is long abandoned, falling apart in all its glory, the frame focus on material traces of rotting gigantic curtains, dust, and dirt, the photographers stage a past that is present in Detroit’s “ruins.” The semiotic referent appears as “nostalgia” (as celebrated culture), however, not as urban crisis with socio-economic consequences (as avoided reality). Their photos frame what they consider to be precious and worthy of preservation; their aesthetic of depicting the urban crisis is as clear and clean as a skyline postcard of the Renaissance Center in Detroit’s official tourism discourse.

In their photography, Marchand and Meffre argue with tourism’s symbolic capital based on tourism’s current high exchange rate of expected monetary value. Their visual rhetoric displays an aesthetic interpretation of decay in Detroit that reflects their ideology of tourism as promising revenue within the logics of sight/site marketing. In their photo book, sight/site marking and sight/site marketing correlate through the aesthetic. This way, the aesthetic in their photographs corresponds to the negotiations of meaning that increase the cultural value of Detroit’s broken buildings, by marking them as sights through photographic choices that result in a glossy, clean, sterile aesthetic. Sight/site marking in their photography takes places on the aesthetic level: elevation occurs not through framing the motif decay but through the choice of aesthetic style: decay is polished into a shiny product that can be gazed upon. The social agreement of site marking—to recognize decay as sight/site—hence takes place on the visual level: tourism’s aesthetic is the agreement here that turns the “ruin” (urban decay) into a symbol for success: having become a tourist sight/site. The glossy representation of urban decay as ruinscape reflects the socio-cultural agreement of the tourist site/sight as elevated cultural value. Clearly, to change the cultural significance of the condition of urban decay in principle does not change its condition, only the perception of it.

Two factors that MacCannell lists for the first stage of sight sacralization— establishing the “monetary, recreational […] value” of the potential sight— did not necessarily apply to the earlier efforts at documentation of Detroit’s desolate state of abandonment on all levels (politically, culturally, economically, and socially). However, when urban decay is aestheticized as sight/site, visual representations become sight markers that contain monetary and recreational value—through the aesthetic. Deducing from image campaigns, these values are currently crucial for urban tourism marking and marketing. Attempts for preservation—or cultural recognition of the value of historical architecture (heritage?)—failed. As city officials justify the demolition of buildings as necessary to save money, these preservation attempts failed, because they failed to offer a “monetary value.” The architecture “only” held possible cultural value—with a questionable exchange rate: the preservation attempts remained unrealized. That can be interpreted as considering the architecture as worthless. The photos by Marchand and Meffre contain such promised “monetary value” in their aesthetics: the clean, glossy, dramatic effects they employ stage decay and rubble as spectacle that promises recreational value of a potential tourism destination. In the context of tourism at this moment, recreational value is dealt as promising monetary value. The “framing and elevation phase”—second stage—has occurred through “protection and enhancing.” “Protection and enhancing” is done by depictions, visual representations, not through putting a plaque in front of the abandoned train station. By “putting on display” urban decay through making it the main motif in depictions, cultural elevation is achieved. Pictures that framed the Central Train Station Detroit in an aesthetic linked to tourism ideology, the cultural value of that train station was unexpectedly elevated. As the quote from the 2011 guidebook shows, urban renewal (“to revive downtown”) has become part of—or at least relevant for—tourism practices:

Corktown. Slows B-B-Q […] This is more than a restaurant; it has become the poster child for the revitalization of downtown Detroit, attracting attention from the New York Times in its restaurant section. It has defied its location, which is near the hulking shell of the old Michigan Central Train Depot, an abandoned station and office building that’s a favorite subject of the news media looking to portray Detroit as a decaying city. The building has received a sleek-looking renovation, and Slows has become a destination restaurant for suburban residents, rather than just a place to eat before or after a sporting event, like many other downtown places. One of its owners, Phillip Cooley, has become a community activist, advising others looking to revive downtown. As for the food, […]. (Counts, 2011: 148f. Authors’ emphases)

This quote illustrates that not the sight “train station” is a listed destination in the guidebook, but depicting it is the listed cultural practice in this guidebook. The moment people come to see it, and to photograph and document its existence (or theirs close to the station), can be classified as tourist experience. When this occurs, a different value and meaning is given to that station. Once these unofficial sights/sites become part of official tourism imagery, like guidebook entries or links in official websites, the exchange rate of the symbolic currency cultural value has increased in negotiations of meaning: the visual representations that turned decay into culturally elevated ruins changed the meaning of the city’s negative image into a touristically relevant “destination” and thereby (assumedly) the negative image into a brand with a change in agreement of what a urban wasteland, urban decay, broken factories signify for the contemporary urban ideal. I will argue below that this change of meaning is tied to the neoliberal ideology of profit maximization expected from tourism as post-Fordist service industry.

Visual representations—like the above-mentioned photo books—have strongly impacted the process of sight sacralization in the case of Detroit’s officially unloved remnants of abandonment and urban failure. The national imaginary of the place has started to change. In his latest film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Jim Jarmusch presents his protagonists as traditional car tourists, gazing upon Detroit’s ruins. MacCannell’s last stage now works as the initial one: the visual documentation of decay and demolition appear as higher rated sight markers than other officially declared sights of what to elevate into the culturally meaningful, like sports stadiums, defense museums, pub crawls, art museums, automobile heritage, and so on (see Visitdetroit, 2009). The visual representations exhibit tourism-typical nostalgia that have increased the exchange value of Detroit’s post-industrial landscape into a sight of elevated tourism value through the aesthetic semantic field as site marking processes.

Conclusion

The entanglement of cultural and monetary values in tourism contexts is changing the meaning of visual representations of urban decay. The process went from the traditional avoidance of urban decay (typically through visual exclusion: “Don’t look back!”) in a tourism context has evolved into an embrace and re-definition of urban decay as symbol for resurrection and nostalgia for the “good old times” when the United States was still a hegemonic power among industrialized nations. The change in meaning went from urban decay as sign (semiotic and symbolic) for failure and urban crises to urban decay as sign for renewal and success (resurrection narratives, the “come back-city”). Reading this process of change of meaning in the context of urban tourism means: when urban decay became an officially recognized sight/site, the cultural value of decaying structures (and the city as destination) changed. The promise of monetary value of the ruins as sights/sites and the city as tourist destination changed the currency of the cultural value of decay: visually framed as potential sight/site, urban decay is elevated in its cultural value. The state of decay and abandonment has been turned into Detroit’s new brand that can be used to promote it as destination. Detroit’s negative image has been dissected from its social reality and as image it commodifies the urban crisis as sight/site. Detroit is now promoted in a resurrection narrative as “America’s Great Come Back City” on the city’s official tourism website. When the image of “Detroit” can change from urban failure to urban success while the city declares bankruptcy, one might be alarmed by the political power that image campaigns and thereby visual representations are given, as Greenberg already pointed out for New York (see Greenberg, 2008). That means that in neoliberal urban politics on a global as well as local level, cultural practices like tourism can get increasingly linked to profit making through site/sight marking. Applying MacCannell is helpful here to understand that when “recreational” value is addable to the aesthetic, historical and social value, and monetary value (be it speculative/symbolic or real) magically comes into play. This (symbolic) addition of monetary value through tourism practice to cultural value of a site/sight increases the sight’s/site’s cultural value. What I understand as neoliberal in this tourism ideology is the idea/l that through adding cultural value anything can be turned into profit when it becomes a sight/site/destination. As my examples show, the visual plays a key role in the negotiations of what is a sight/site in the case of Detroit. The “value” of the city is directly linked to the city’s image. And, as I stated in the introduction, the image of a city currently is of immense relevance in political processes.

The meaning of urban decay has been altered in the case of “Detroit’s” visual representations through the process of sight/site marking. When comparing photographs of Detroit’s skyline by Vergara with those of Marchand and Meffre and with official tourism imagery of visitdetroit, there is a difference in framing and composition, but most explicit is the choice of the aesthetic. The aesthetic of “mechanical reproduction” (pictures) might set tourists in motion just as MacCannell (p. 45) said, but the interest here is to point out that “mechanical reproduction” and its specific tourism aesthetics currently define and impact the negotiations of meaning of tourism sights/sites in terms of broader cultural values and political instrumentalization of a neoliberal ideology of “success” and “failure.” In the representation of the glossy wasteland, the neoliberal ideal of cleaning up urban space (Brenner and Theodore, 2005; Mayer, 2013; Sorkin; Greenberg, 2008) is transposed into the visual aesthetic of a tidy pictorial space. This pictorial space has been transposed into the clean and shiny aesthetic that presents the (visual) chaos of decay as glossy product. In such glossy aesthetic, urban decay appears as sight/site, as tourism commodity. As tourism product, the urban crisis has a different value and meaning. As tourism destination, urban decay now seems to signify “cultural heritage” rather than “desperate need for a solution to overcome alarming socio-economic conditions.”

The re-definition of the significance and meaning of urban decay does not automatically alter the implementation of change of the actual condition of the urban crisis that the city still faces for people who are not just passing through, for those who still live there, who struggle to make a living, raise their families, and so on. ¹⁰ If the dominant agreement now is that urban decay signifies a fashionable attribute for urban renewal success myths—enabled by the context of tourism—I think there is a risk of forgetting about the divided back of the image: social inequalities in the crisis of capitalism. This also poses the question, what is tourism today and what purposes does tourism have? Following MacCannell’s model, tourism markers are a cultural agreement that adds value by “recognizing” a sight/site as such. In the case of visual representations of Detroit, this is not a question of authenticity but rather a question of authority: the agreement is that “yes, the sight/site is worth a trip.” If the relation between depiction (image) and depicted (the actual shrinking city) is understood as (1) arbitrary and hence negotiable, and (2) as relation between city and image, and if it is understood that meaning of tourism and urban development is also defined through pictures by what a dominant discourse agrees upon, it also means that it is possible to change the use of tourism for more democratic ideals once again. Negotiation of meaning in tourism contexts involves familiar processes of power, of hierarchies, of authority that follow traditional discourses and dominant hegemonic forms. As my analysis shows, when considered as part of culture, tourism can alter the currency of values. By entangling sight/site marking and sight/site marketing, and monetary and social values, tourism has become a powerful political tool. What is problematic about that? Current visual representations of Detroit negotiate meaning and cultural recognition of architecture, not people. The city appears as mass of buildings to preserve, not as place to live. This is being negotiated within the old framework of high versus low culture: the high culture of the glossy image; the low culture of the actual social conditions. In Detroit, tourism is used as argument for re-negotiating the cultural value of urban spaces/renewal. The argumentation is closely linked to the neoliberal ideology of success which is meant in marketing terms, as elevated monetary value (profit) and not as means to provide a right to the city for everyone. ¹¹ To the contrary, the crisis has been commodified, the negative image of Detroit is now its positive characteristic. Tourism’s idealized monetary value to help cities overcome a financial crisis proves to be connected strongly to the symbolic: urban decay meant as social problem remains an avoided feature in urban politics, urban design, society, and tourism (and increasingly city politics?). Detroit’s ruin tourism is not about slumming, about people looking at people in questionable living conditions. It is about preserving architecture and interior design, about life-style tourists catching and leaving the “aesthetic footprint” (Guerra, 2011), it is about attracting visitors, not to build sustainable infrastructure in cities (for all people to live in). Tourism in Detroit is concerned with building an image of Detroit that includes ruins in a very specific form: not as urban problem of de-industrialization as a direct result of de-centralization and outsourcing that led to possibly undesired massive unemployment, and “White flight” to suburbia (Sugrue, 1996; Galster, 2012, Darden and Thomas, 2013). Tourism becomes an active force in defining what urban decay means: following a culture of good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, of cultural value and without cultural recognition, urban decay is re-defined as visual motif of the picturesque, for pleasure rather than documentation, for commodification of a financial crisis as potential tourism sight/site, not its solution (as promised). In this sense, this type of tourism is more concerned with mythology than with actuality: slumming aims at encounters of “authenticity” tied to meeting people in their living conditions (whether staged or not); post-industrial nostalgia is tied to a look, to ruins and decay, to loss of capitalism and a great “American” past. I have not heard of anyone who goes to visit Detroit to look into people’s (traditionally inhabited) houses, kitchens, backyards, and living rooms. To meet the socio-economic challenges of a municipality by turning decline into a tourist site, the problems are not dealt with but commodified. Although such developments are hardly exclusive to Detroit, there are endless examples for such entanglement of tourism, governmental corruption, and democracy in crisis (see e.g. Fischer, 2014 or Tanaka, 2010). What happens to socio-economic problems like poverty, underemployment, lack of paid labor, unemployment, and unsustainable job markets when they are turned into commodities? If turned into tourism sights/sites through image campaigns, will the problems go away? Can (and should) site marketing address—or resolve—socio-economic problems in a nation state when tourism is employed and subsidized by governments to overcome a city’s image crises?