The visualization shows how intensities of toxic contamination are treated as exceptions, and as “sites” to be remediated, rather than as sources of contamination which can migrate into water systems, the atmosphere, and into many lifeforms. It raises important questions about the consequences of scales of attention paid to places of the highest concentrations of contamination, rather than other distributions of toxicity which impact the surrounding community. Contributing a visualization of an entire city that is toxic allows for the scale of corporate toxic manufacturing and supply chains, such as GM, to be further queried. It shows the emplacement and displacement of these corporate forms of contamination on the earth.
This image might be enriched by adding a comparison with the original Buick City, or some form of juxtaposition of the current site and what used to be on the site. An option might be to include images of remediation testing which is periodically undergone on brownfield sites, or to include aerial images of the site immediately after Buick City was removed, when the presence of particular contaminants might have been most obvious on the surface.
This created image has a powerful composition, where the blurred lines of a fence frame an image of a snowy field, with a water tower in the distance. The snow is provokative, as it hides the ground underneath, and belies the degree of contamination of the site. At the same time, the forest in the distance seems to abruptly stop, which gives the viewer a clue that something is impacting the land in the foreground.
The caption can be elaborated further to discuss how any of the contaminants found on the site are more closely connected to the nearby river, to the Flint water crisis, and to other forms of everyday toxicity encountered by residents in the community (ex. would groundwater from the site leach into the river?_ If, as the author mentions, the site has become a symbol for local revival efforts, what notions of “environment” and “clean-up” are projected onto it and what kind of politics are these concepts connected to? For example, a bit more could be included about the working class nature of the site, and who the audiences are who go on tours- what are the stakes and potential problematics of emergent forms of ‘toxic tourism’? Have any other community groups formed different forms of commitment to the site, or to other locations of previous GM impact in the area?
This visualization and caption advances ethnographic insight by being a sort of archive of both the afterlives of the Buick City brownfield site, and the Flint water crisis. The blank snow represents the dual challenges of picturing the movement of toxicants under and through the earth and water, and the fence of building the local relationships which facilitate processes of not just environmental remediation, but also the private barriers between corporations and community building and engagement in late industrial landscapes.