ABSTRACT
The crisis of Detroit is not just a dual crisis of the city and the US automobile industry, or of bankruptcy and abandonment. A social hyper-crisis is one in which the determinants of crisis are a complex conjuncture of causes, and the crisis itself is irreducible to a single region of social space. Few cities in the world seem more desperate than Detroit for solutions to its "social problems". John Patrick Leary notes that in viewing Detroit ruin photography, one is conscious of nothing so much as failure—of the city itself, of course, but also of the photographs to communicate anything more than that self-evident fact. More generally, the bankruptcy has narrowed the discourse on Detroit's crisis and risks recasting the city's troubles as a consequence of fiscal profligacy and political irresponsibility. Detroit's bankruptcy is less a product of its persistent social and economic crisis than of the city's inability to accommodate itself to it.
