Why Compare Detroit and Dortmund?

By Kristin Dickinson

“What is it like to be ‘Germany’s Detroit’?” asks  Melissa Eddy in a 2013 New York Times article about Oberhausen, a city in Germany’s “Rust Belt,” or Ruhr Rhine Region. 

As the industrial capital of Germany, cities in this region experienced a boom in the steel and coal industries in the 1960s and 1970s, following which they have been faced with steady economic decline and high unemployment rates. Dotted with abandoned factories and housing units, the region’s postindustrial landscape has gained iconic status, with the select repurposing of former mines and factories for parks, museums, conference centers, and rotating exhibits.

In recent years, several of the major cities in the region—including Oberhausen, Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, and Duisburg—have been casually compared to Detroit in diverse media outlets. Focusing largely on poverty and economic decline due to each region’s historic dependency on single industry economies, these comparisons are almost always negative.[i]

Art projects have in turn taken up this comparison in a more concrete manner. The Detroit Project, which took place in Bochum between 2013-2014, employed Detroit as a negative example for the city. With the slogan “This is not Detroit!” the organizers pointed toward Detroit as a city in peril. In other words, the project utilized Detroit to showcase a future that Bochum should actively work to avoid for itself. 

This kind of comparison is unfortunately all too common. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, Dora Apel shows how Detroit has become a repository for urban nightmares. Photos of Detroit often depict buildings in ruin, such as the iconic Packard Plant: “These images serve as a warning to other cities, while also presenting Detroit as an isolated example of a racialized city that is responsible for its own decline.”[ii]

In his examination of ruin photography, John Patrick Leary shows how it “aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins [and] dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them.”[iii] These kinds of images present Detroit in a one-dimensional manner, detached from its complex realities.  

In contrast to superficial comparisons between Detroit and Germany’s Ruhr Rhine Region, the exhibit “Visualizing Translation: Homeland and Heimat in Detroit and Dortmund,” brings together the work of visual artists Theon Delgado Sr. and Peyman Azhari to create a more meaningful connection between these two cities. By translating the heterogeneity and multilinguality of their neighborhoods into visual form, Delgado and Azhari’s work forges a positive counterpoint to more prevalent images of architectural ruins or economic decline in Detroit and Dortmund. 

Focusing on Southwest Detroit and Northern Dortmund, Delgado and Azhari’s images provide glimpses into the everyday lives of these neighborhoods’ multilingual residents. 

Southwest Detroit is a diverse neighborhood with a primarily Hispanic population, but also Black, Native American, and Middle Eastern residents. While a vibrant and thriving neighborhood, Southwest Detroit’s location next to the Ambassador Bridge to Canada makes it part of a designated US “border zone.” Hispanic and Middle Eastern residents in particular are often subject to ICE raids and racial profiling. 

Northern Dortmund is a highly international neighborhood, with residents from over 130 different countries, including Turkey, Italy, Syria, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Libya. Approximately 37% of residents receive some form of social benefits, making it the poorest district in Dortmund. This is one reason the neighborhood is often described as a “sozialer Brennpunkt” (social hotspot), as a “ghetto,” or as a “no-go-area” by German media outlets.

Far from snapshots of economic decline or cultural erosion, Delgado and Azhari’s images invite us to view Detroit and Dortmund through the lens of cultural translation. Highlighting residents who speak multiple languages, have started their own businesses, and navigate their lives in Detroit and Dortmund in positive and productive ways, their images forge sites of transnational contact and connection. They encourage us to view ourselves, our cities, and our understandings of Americanness and Germanness through the lens of plurality.

[i] For one positive example of comparison, see the project Realize Ruhrgebiet, which issued the 2014 manifesto “Recht auf Stadt!” (Right to the City!). Pointing to Detroit as the “epitome of the postindustrial city,” the manifesto asks in turn what the Ruhr region could learn from this Midwestern city. With an open call to repurpose urban spaces in decline, the manifesto looked to recent non-commercial urban initiatives in Detroit for inspiration.

[ii] Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 78.  

[iii] John Patrick Leary. “Detroitism.” Guernica. 2011.