Stricken by an economic depression so severe that it bankrupted the city in 2013, Detroit provides an exceptional field of investigation for testing the social imaginaries of collapse. Whether a post-apocalyptic ghost town or a garden city liberated from the yoke of capitalism, the fallen capital of the fossil fuel industries becomes a blank page on which different versions of our future are written: all is lost, or all is possible again.
Raphaëlle Guidée's literary investigation incorporates the stories told by residents, activists and researchers, and asks: how can we tell the story of the complex, fragile and heterogeneous worlds that are being reconstituted in the hearts of ruins?