'Demolishing Detroit' Book Cover

Demolishing Detroit

How Structural Racism Endures
Nicholas L. Caverly
December 2025
256 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781503640252

Innovative field work reveals how infrastructural systems—buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins—maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape

For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them.

As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

"Nick Caverly has written an intellectually provocative, original, and refreshing examination of Detroit. He skillfully foregrounds the stories and experiences of Detroit residents and demolition workers to provide an unexpected and nuanced view on how racism, labor, and urban redevelopment operate in contemporary American cities. Caverly's ethnographic sensitivity combined with his attentiveness to the relationship between structural racism and the built environment is not only innovative, but sorely needed in the present moment."
—Andrew Newman, co-editor of A People's Atlas of Detroit

"Nick Caverly has written a book for these mean times. Demolishing Detroit provides a history of the theory and practice of development by destruction. But, even more than that, it suggests and substantiates a notion of the ways that racism has been built so insistently into the material fabric of our everyday lives that it frames and determines the results of even the best-intentioned efforts of address it."
—Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

"Demolishing Detroit cracks the shiny facade of revitalization discourse in Detroit to reveal the messy detritus of cumulative racism and structural inequality. In addition to painting an intimate, ethnographic portrait of local residents and community activists, Nicholas Caverly convincingly demonstrates that Detroit is a cautionary tale about the stakes of tearing down without also building up."
—Melissa Checker, author of The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice

Nicholas L. Caverly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.