General Motors’ Buick City complex in Flint, Michigan was once a symbol of the city’s industrial might, comprising a massive cluster of factory buildings staffed by some 28,000 workers. The shuttering and demolition of the factory in the early 2000s left behind one of the largest brownfields in the country. As difficulties with environmental remediation—particularly of soil and groundwater contaminated by recently-discovered PFAS—complicate plans for redevelopment of the site, Buick City has also come to represent the stubborn and toxic legacy of industrialism. Flint’s recent experience with contaminated water has served as a reminder that this toxic legacy is deeply present in the day to day experience of living in this community. When Flint switched its water supply in April 2014 to the much-maligned Flint River, which winds past the Buick City site to the east, it was, for many residents, tantamount to funneling the river’s noxious industrial history directly into their homes. The revelation that one of Buick City’s storm water outflows drains into the river upstream of the Flint Water Treatment Plant’s intake pipe further fueled popular speculation about all of the industrial chemicals residents may have been exposed to over 18 months of drinking and bathing in Flint River water. Buick City now joins Flint’s infamous lead pipes as a reminder that historically-accumulated, dormant toxicities can be re-mobilized under the right conditions. Breathing new life into industrialism’s dead spaces will, however, require more than just a fuller reckoning with its toxic inheritance: it will require fresh thinking about new industries that support a healthy economy, landscape and community.
Peering through a chain-link fence at the former location of General Motors’ Buick City, once a massive complex of factories that employed upwards of 28,000 people. All that remains now is a vast expanse of weedy concrete and the ghostly outline of the buildings that once stood here. A variety of hazardous chemicals including PFAS have been found in soil and groundwater at the site, which ranks among the largest brownfields in the United States. Visible in the background is the water tower at the Flint Water Treatment Plant, from which water from the nearby Flint River was dispensed to Flint residents from April 2014 to October 2015. Improper treatment procedures exacerbated the natural corrosivity of the water, resulting in severe damage to Flint’s infrastructure and a public health crisis. Many residents were wary of the river water from the beginning, conscious of the river’s history as a kind of toxic thoroughfare channeling the byproducts of 150 years’ worth of industrial activity along its banks. Just as that toxic history looms large within popular understandings of Flint’s water crisis, the experience of the crisis now colors popular perceptions of the Buick City site in turn. On one hand, the site has been implicated in the recovery effort, held up as a possible source of revival and opportunity, with major corporate suitors eyeing the site and promising jobs; on the other hand, it exemplifies the difficulty and expense of environmental remediation, as prospects of redevelopment have been complicated by new revelations about the extent of chemical contamination at the site as well as proposals for potentially additional extractive industries. For the most part, residents themselves have been on the outside looking in, as the land is owned and managed by the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response (RACER) Trust, created during GM’s bankruptcy to take charge of the corporation’s bad assets. Recently, RACER has begun offering tours of the site and holding informational meetings, but the extent of its commitment to engaging the community in its planning remains in question, to the frustration of neighbors and other concerned residents who feel a connection to the site.
Looking across the Flint River at a storm water outflow connected to the Buick City site. Under a dusting of snow one can discern the containment booms that have been placed at the mouth of the outflow to capture surface-level contaminants. The river has a rich and complex history for the residents of Flint. Historically, industrial activity has clustered around it, from saw mills and carriage-making shops in the 19th century to the automobile factories that earned Flint the nickname the “Vehicle City.” The consequences for the health of the river have been severe. Legend tells of the river catching on fire, of large-scale fish die-offs. Residents recall stories of illegal dumping commanded of them by their managers at General Motors. Large amounts of contaminated sediment have had to be dredged up from certain sections of the river. Over the years, the brokenness of the river—once Flint’s lifeblood—became symbolic of the brokenness of the community. Despite all of this, water quality has improved substantially since the introduction of federal environmental protections in the 1970s. Current residents kayak and fish on the river; others picnic nearby on the restored river’s edge that runs through downtown. But the river’s reputation has largely remained poor, and the picture is not all rosy. In recent years, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has detected PFAS in the water here—a class of chemicals also found at the nearby Buick City site. The northernmost outflow connected to that site drains into the river upstream of where the city of Flint drew its drinking water from April 2014 to October 2015. For those who use the river as a source of sustenance and recreation there are concerns that chemicals from Buick City may be finding their way into peoples’ bodies through these other routes, too.
Ben Pauli. 20 February 2020, "An Unstable Inheritance: Flint's Buick City and the Mobilization of Dormant Toxicities", Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 2 March 2020, accessed 24 April 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/unstable-inheritance-flints-buick-city-and-mobilization-dormant-toxicities