Elena Sobrino (1:55)

Okay, so it's been out for a week or so. This is awesome. Congrats. It's so nice to talk to you today, Nick, because we have met before. We met quite a few years ago. So we were on a panel. We were at an STS conference in Boston and we were on the same panel and I think you were presenting some early findings, some work that I believe has ended up in this book we're talking about today. And we kind of met in this context. We were both interested in toxicity. So you were doing this work in Detroit and I'm doing fieldwork in Flint. And I also remember just starting out my fieldwork and I was looking at the Flint water crisis and yeah, we were both in Michigan. I remember getting coffee at Roos Roast and chatting about. Yeah, just what fieldwork is like. And this was all pre pandemic too, I believe. So it's kind of a distant memory. So it feels really good to meet up and talk about this book. Congrats.

Nick Caverly (3:03)

Thanks. Thanks for having me, Lynn. Yeah, I think it was back in like 2016, like nine years ago, and I think, you know, that would have. It would have been for us in Boston or maybe it was 2017.

Elena Sobrino (3:14)

Yeah, around then. Yeah.

Nick Caverly (3:15)

Yeah, around then. I think I was. I was in like the thick of fieldwork when we met. And a re. I. A really drafty idea that became Chapter five was the. The paper that I gave at. For us that year.

Elena Sobrino (3:30)

Yes. Yes. And we might talk, I think. Yeah, like, about asbestos.

Nick Caverly (3:34)

And it was about asbestos.

Elena Sobrino (3:35)

Yeah. Yes, totally. No, it's. Yeah. Well, that I. I feel like there's always been. We. We've had a lot of shared interests, I think, going our different paths, but certainly we've been kind of neighbors and doing research in pretty similar settings, cities. So my first question for you is actually I saw in 2017 where you were at, but maybe kind of rewinding a bit before that, what brought you to this particular project and what kind of led you to end up writing a book about demolition? Like, what. What were the origins of this, man?

Nick Caverly (4:16)

So this project, it's taken a lot of different forms, but it started. It kind of. It got its start and then it got kind of abandoned for a little while and I came back to it, but I am. I was. So I'm from Michigan or I grew up in Michigan. I grew up in the kind of western Detroit suburbs. And. And Detroit is a place that has always been kind of like, I don't know, part of my life, but also like, not. It's was never a place that I lived before I was in college and I. I went. Went to the University of Michigan and I won an undergraduate research, like, summer research award that sent. I. You know, I was like, I'm interested in understanding, you know, how are people conceiving of community in Detroit. And so I got to spend. I, you know, bless university research accounts, I guess, but got to spend the summer, like, learning to be an anthropologist, talking to people about, you know, how they were, you know, what community meant to them at a time. And this would have been in 2010. You know, Detroit was, you know, was not yet in kind of formal bankruptcy proceedings, but like this was a moment when, you know, people were making do in the, like, increasing absence of municipal services and kind of bootstrapping municipal services. And I wrote a little honors thesis about that project, and I kind of just set it to the side, thinking, okay, well, that was fun, but I don't think I'll ever get to do that again. And then I ended up around a whole bunch of architects and urban planners who were talking about how. How are the social conditions of city. You know, social and economic conditions, how do they shape the way cities grow and change? And it's like, well, you know, I guess I'm really familiar with a place that. That isn't. Like, maybe we could think about socioeconomic and political conditions shaping the ways that things are being unmade, actually. And I went to graduate school kind of with that question, and initially I thought I would focus on. On kind of basically what's called vacant space or empty space. And there's a really wonderful book by Sarah Safransky called the City After Property, in which Sarah really takes up that question. And so I was thinking, well, I could. You know, Sarah's a geographer. I could do a project that's relatively similar to Sarah's, and I'm an anthropologist, and it would be different. But then the only thing people wanted to talk to me about Detroit was like, can you help me get a building demolished? Or can you help us understand where buildings should be demolished? And so I was like, well, maybe I could focus on demolition. Like, actually, this is a thing that people are trying, you know, whether it's folks at home or folks in kind of municipal offices, like, are really trying to understand. And so that's how I came to do a project. I was like, I'll just organize a project that is around, like, how does demolition happen? Why is it happening, and what are its effects?

Elena Sobrino (7:24)

Yeah, and it's things, people. It's almost presented to you. Like, you start with an idea, and it evolves. Yeah. And I actually have a question about this. I guess, this interest in demolition throughout the city. And, I mean, I think it comes across really clearly in the book how, like, you just described, people are doing a lot of, you know, advocating or waiting for demolition for the city. It's a very slow process. And it feels like there's. You get the sense of this urgency to it and this kind of impatience with the slowness of how this is happening. And, Yeah, I wonder if you could say maybe a. Just broadly speaking, what is helpful about getting demolitions in, you know, what is the imagination behind that. And then I also wondered, I think there was a little bit of this in the book and I was kind of curious if there were examples that came to mind. Maybe not. But I also wondered if there were ever feelings of attachment to places and almost like a pushing away of demolition. Does that make sense? Was there a kind of feeling, any feelings of loss or mourning? Kind of. Because it's just interesting to see how demolition becomes this very sought after thing. But yeah, I was also curious, did people ever get attached and not want things to be demolished?

Nick Caverly (9:01)

Yeah, so this is a really great question. I'm gonna start with the second one, which is like, you know, are people. Initially when I kind of started focusing on demolition, I thought what I would be seeing was like a lot of conflict over, like, should, should this, should a particular building be demolished or should we be demolishing buildings in general? And you know, as I had kind of, I was like, I pretty sure in those, in those conflicts I would see, you know, kind of different kinds of moral or claims to space, ethical commitments, et cetera. And I was really surprised that I didn't run into, you know, conflicts on the scale that I thought I would. You know, there are a lot of times when I was talking to people, they would talk about, you know, I, I would rather this building, this empty building have people in it, right? I would rather that it not be demolished so it could be used. But in the absence of like people using this building, I would like it to go away. In part, people would talk about how, you know, a building, you know, Detroit has, you know, a large number of buildings in Detroit are single family homes. So a lot of the things that are being or have been demolished and have, are being demolished still are, are single family houses. So people would say, like, I can remember when there were people living in this, in this house, I can remember that they were evicted. You know, there's kind of loss and a mourning there. And then they would say, and it's been five years or 10 years, etc. Since people have lived there or there was a business in that storefront. And at this point, like, I would like, you know, it's not just kind of an aesthetic thing of saying, like, I don't want to look at an empty building. It's saying like, well, you know, when you don't, when literally there's not a person caring for a building for, for five years or 10 years, it starts to go a little wonky. Sometimes it starts to smell a little bit. Sometimes you have fires that you Know, and not on purpose. Right. Like electrical fires or something like that. And so people were kind of, you know, these are things that people. They didn't want to see. Not just they didn't want to see empty buildings, but they didn't want to have them kind of have negative effects on their lives. And so demolition is something that people look for and ask for, not just because they don't want to look at an empty building, but because actually, you know, empty buildings can have kind of negative. Over time, can have negative consequences in people's lives. And they don't want. They. They don't want those. And so initially what I thought was there would be this kind of conflict over whether or not to demolish buildings. And I was surprised that actually there was a lot of. Even among kind of, kind of community organizing constituencies and, you know, city agencies that are usually kind of intention over things. They aligned around the, like, the basic idea that, like, demolitions were a thing that needed to happen. They disagreed fundamentally on what should happen after. Right. Who should control the process. But the idea of demolition itself is something that I was surprised for the most part, people were aligned around.

Elena Sobrino (12:09)

Yeah, I think. I think that is kind of. That's really illuminating. Yeah. And I think I just know from spending time in Flint and growing up near Flint as well. But in my field work, I did see a lot of empty, abandoned buildings that were really beautiful in some cases. But a lot of these were often like, kind of like schools or maybe churches or sort of commercial buildings that I think there is a different feeling to how those are seen. And maybe I can see how the memories are sort of different when it's, you know, your neighbor versus this really elaborate architecture that is kind of falling into disarray. And this was something I didn't have a ton of, like, direct conversations about. But it certainly there was, I think, a bit of a sense of it would be so nice if it was used again. But I think those were always sort of. It never felt like it was a realistic thing at the same time. Just the sort of few conversations I would have about that. So, yeah, no, that's a really interesting answer or thing to discover. And I think also in terms of demolition. So I was super curious. Maybe you can talk a bit about your field work and what it's like to. So you say you observed or attended about upwards of 400, over 400 demolitions from beginning to end, and then many, many more demolitions in kind of bits and pieces. And I think for me, and I imagine a Lot of people listening. It's not something we see every day. I personally haven't been up close to a demolition that I can recall very well. So I wonder, would you like to say a bit what actually goes down at a demolition? Like what does it sound like, what does it feel like, what does it look like, smell like? Do you want to say a bit about. Yeah, just what that was like?

Nick Caverly (14:18)

Absolutely. And so the couple hundred demolition or a few 500 or so demolitions that I, I watched in total, like the totality that was like from the moment that like a building, like I, I saw the person like stick a placard on the building saying this building is scheduled for demolition at some point in the future. And then I was able to go back and you know, sometimes that that sign goes up and then like a week later somebody comes and is like, yes, it's ready for demolition. We have a. Basically, if you think of a construct, the, the tool that is really used, at least people use in Detroit is basically a construction excavator fitted with, rather than having just a scoop on the end, it has a little, what's called a thumb over that scoop. So like the person operating the excavator can just kind of tear into, can tear into the building. And that means that demolition can go really, really quickly. Like the actual process of taking down the building, you can go from a standing, like if you take like a 2,000 square foot building, you can go from a standing building to nothing is there within like half an hour. And so then, but that, all that stuff has to go somewhere. It gets loaded into what are effectively giant dumpsters that are on the back of large semi trucks. And that excavator with the scoop, they scoop stuff into the excavator or from using the excavator into the dumpster. And then somebody drives that to a landfill and then they come back and it takes a couple trips of those trucks to kind of make the wood and guts of a building go away. And then stuff like concrete that goes into a materials reuse facility that crushes concrete into road fill. And so the concrete and the bits of the building get separated. And this usually, you know, there's. This is usually a crew of like three or four people. There's usually a person operating the excavator, a person who's driving the, the dumpster, and a person who is a, you know, a kind of general purpose laborer who spends a lot of their time trying to train fire hose on the, that on the, the bucket of the excavator. Because something that can happen is when you turn a building into dust, you turn stuff like lead painted walls into bits of lead everywhere. And there are not a ton of regulations around demolition in the United States. But like, one of the things that we know can reduce the spread of lead dust is just to keep things as wet as possible. And the that. So that person spends a lot of time either, like trying to make sure that the laborer spends a lot of time trying to make sure that dust doesn't happen. And so then afterward, maybe the next day, usually not usually a couple weeks later, once all like, if there was a basement, it's been removed. Somebody comes through and they spread the site with dirt and they plant it with either grass seed or they cover it with gravel. And so on a couple hundred occasions, I was able to see all steps of the process, but usually, like, these are things that were happening, like, by different firms, by different groups of people. And so I wasn't able to see like kind of soup to nuts the whole process for a demolition. So I saw like bits and pieces. And like, initially these were. I was re. I was like, I basically sat. Usually people in their neighborhoods are watching demolition. Like, you know, someone will come out to their front porch. And so I spent, like, I watched demolitions with people who lived around them. And that's how I got to, I. I got to talk to people about like, what used to happen in that building. Like, and people would say, oh yeah, I used to work in that factory. Or I used, you know, here's who lived in this house over a period of time. And you know, that was. I thought I was going to be, you know, or sometimes like a state environmental quality regulator would come and check in on a site. And so that's how I got to see, see a lot of like, I was like kind of mapping out, like, what are all of the people and things that come together to make this like one action possible. So good, so good, so good.

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Elena Sobrino (20:11)

Yeah, that's so interesting. That's such a great, like, place to kind of, like, just join in in this kind of very social way. Was there a kind of. I don't know if this is easy to generalize. Was there a certain mood to this feeling of, like, watching, like, coming out in your neighborhood on your porch? Like, was it sort of celebratory? Was it more neutral or. Yeah. What was, like, the. Was there a variety of.

Nick Caverly (20:40)

I mean, there was a variety, but for the most part, people. People were happy. Right. Like, I. I kind of open the. I think the introduction of the book with, like, a celebration that happens just before some excavator. You know, an excavator goes and knocks into a building. And so for the most part, I think people were really excited to see buildings come down. There was also, though, a little bit of, like, that loss in mourning that you asked about. Right. People would say, like, okay, you know, but, like, it's nice to see this building gone, but, like, what are all of the things that produced it? How. How is this a building that's been produced through kind of on, you know, decades, if not centuries of kind of white supremacy producing certain kinds of property, questions of who could live where and do what kinds of employment. Like, all of that is bound up in the landscape, and people sitting in their folding chairs would just kind of narrate things around that. And so it was both, you know, I think there was this excitement at, like, maybe this demolition process will make something different possible, but also a kind of, like, for the most part, doubt among folks that that would really happen.

Elena Sobrino (21:54)

Yeah. And what would be kind of, maybe you could say a bit. It's a big question. But, you know, after this demolition, like, there's this sort of excitement and energy to tearing it down. And then I think you said earlier, where people start to maybe disagree and not feel so unilaterally positive is around. So what is going to happen to these sort of grassed over, graveled over lawns, basically?

Nick Caverly (22:25)

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think it's an unsettled question. It was a question that I thought I would see the end of, but I haven't. And so some of these kinds of grassy sites have, you know, get incorporated into sort of large. What are called, like, large development projects. So, like, kind of it's called a. Not a public agency, but it's not exactly a private agency. It's a land bank. But it. The people who work in the Detroit land bank kind of try to identify a bunch of empty parcels in a place and say, like, could. Is there a developer who would want to do something with these parcels? I think the idea with that was like, oh, and we'll have all of this kind of space that we can collateralize and make into capital once again. But because of how plotlines work, it actually hasn't happened like that. Like, these are not necessarily contiguous pieces of or, you know, increments of property. And so a lot of what happens with it is people, whether they own a lot or not, like, they turn them into places to hang out. They turn them into places to kind of grow gardens. And so, like, in some parts of the city, there are kind of conflicts between, you know, over what is the future of places. But for the most part, it's. This is grassy land that people are finding things to do with on their own, kind of independent of state entities, even though state entities or even private owners may hold title to the land?

Elena Sobrino (24:08)

Yeah. Is there a feeling almost of, like, this is kind of an interim, like, at any point this land, we might be using it for a garden. And it's. Is there a sense of permanence to. To it, or does it feel like at any moment it could be sort of repurposed or old?

Nick Caverly (24:28)

So, I mean, yeah, this isn't a new kind of activity. People in Detroit and other places have been. And Sarah, I really love Sarah's book because she dives deep into this and I think into how people navigate this reality in which, like, the, you know, something that they may have done for a year or five years or a decade can suddenly go away due to, you know, the kind of underlying question of private property. And something that I think is interesting in all of that and I. It's not in the book, but it was in an article that I wrote a couple years ago, is that sometimes people manage to kind of work through private property systems to create kind of more stable forms, stable claims to property, using what are called adverse possession laws. Basically saying we have used this space for, you know, the requisite period of time under the state law that actually our claim to it supersedes the. You know, the claim that a developer might have because they've not actually used it. I mean, this kind of labor theory of property is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, it's an incredibly. Like, this is like the thing that made colonialism and empire, like, operationalized in lots of contexts, including the United States. But it is also something that people sometimes work to produce a different kind of. You know, to produce a different kind of future. But that was, you know, so. But that kind of tension isn't something that. It was something initially I thought it would have in this book, but also did not fit in this book.

Elena Sobrino (26:09)

Yeah, yeah. No. And, I mean, there's so much in this book about gardening and dealing with contaminated soil and. Yeah, it's just really rich and it gives a lot to think about, you know, the afterlives or. I think there's a whole section of this book about aftermaths of this kind of moment of destruction. But then, you know, the sort of materiality doesn't just go away. It kind of gets redistributed. And. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear about that. And also, I think I also wanted to ask, kind of going back to the question of labor maybe, and these demolition crews. So I think one interest I think we have in common is unions and the politics of that. And, of course, working in a place. I mean, we know how important unions have been in Detroit's history and in Flint's history and Flint being the birthplace of the uaw. And I think people often think about Michigan and unions and they think of the uaw. But if I'm understanding correctly, I mean, some of this excavation, demolition work, it can be unionized and. Yeah, I thought you had some really interesting observations. I wonder if you could talk a bit, because this is something I don't know, I didn't know much about, really, like the sort of how do different workers relate? You know, they seem to have different relationships to the union and how useful or not it is or how accessible or not it is to them. And. Yeah, I would just love to hear your thoughts, you know, on that.

Nick Caverly (27:46)

So, you know, part of the general pitch of demolition of, like, you Know, demolition as a kind of social good is both like it's removing buildings that are the products of white flight and disinvestment and the kind of the idea that it would contribute to economic uplift for not. Not just you know, speculatively for capital in the future, but like in the immediate present for city residents through employment in. On demolition teams. So specifically it would create this kind of like uplift for. Specifically for black men was part of the kind of argument for the social good of demolition. To say like we have groups of folks who we know are structurally kind of marginalized within the prevailing economic system and this will create employment on their blocks in their neighborhoods and will find ways to get them connected to that employment. And that kind of happened. But part of the difficulty in doing it is that like so to operate the excavator, you know, this is like an incredibly skilled job. Like you can't. I. I remember someone was like well you want to drive the excavator? I was like, I literally like it's got as like this doesn't have like a steering wheel. It has a set if you're really good, you know, it has a set of kind of joysticks that you use to use to control it. And so it takes time to learn how to use one. Especially then to learn how to use one that like if you've done this for a while, like they make the folks who do this make it look so easy, but like it is not. And so there are two ways that you can basically learn how to drive an excavator. One of them is to. There is a heavy machine operators local that work kind of across the southern part of Michigan. And their training facility is basically midway between Detroit and Flint, might even be closer to Flint. It's in Howell for anybody who wants to go look that up. But it, it's approximately 60 miles from, you know, from Detroit. And that's. It's been there for, you know, basically since the middle of the 20th century. And it was put there at the time the local put it there because they were able to get access to a lot of space. But it was also really close by to where most of their members lived in a kind of like northern suburbs. So most of their and almost all of their members at the time were like white men. And the kind of the way that organized labor made us like well compensated, like good life possible for people. Like these are folks who, you know it, you know, you would meet some. I meet somebody. It's like, it's like their Grandfather was a, like a union operator. Their, the, his son was a unit, one of, one of his sons was a union operator. That guy's son was a union operator. And they this kind of like access to not just like a middle class life but like a, an upper middle, like a wealthy middle class life made possible by deep knowledge of machinery. Like this is still a thing that happens. And the union really was, is wants to you know, address some of the kind of the barriers that are, you know, that you know, perhaps not even, perhaps well documented that like labor across the 20th century of the United States, organized labor was not just somewhat racist but sometimes explicitly racist. And the operators union has kind of put a lot of time into trying to figure out how do we actually make sure that like the opportunities for well compensated work are accessible to folks who have been excluded from them. Especially like folks in Detroit who wanted to learn how to use an excavator. And yet that 60 mile, you know, basically 100 and 120 mile, you know, round trip makes accessing that kind of unionized employment almost impossible for most folks who live in Detroit. Like to have, you know, in a place that doesn't have public transportation in most places where cars are uncertain, where cars are expensive, where you know, the salt will just destroy your car in the winter. So like the access to employment that most folks had in Detroit was actually through more private training models and they could get access to really relative what is like locally well compensated employment but was not actually employment on the same terms as a union operator. And so what I saw was like not because of a racist union, not because of racist employers, you know, but simply because of the ways that historical patterns of racism in unionized labor are already written into the landscape. They continue to be reproduced in the present. And that was something that it was one of my interlocutors who is a union operator, a white dude from the suburbs who point he was like don't you just. Isn't this what's happening? And it was one of those moments that I was like yeah, yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Thanks for that. But like the local, you know, while they out they're investing in things like transportation funds, et cetera, like it will take a lot of work actually to address the ways that these kinds of disparities and who's had access to kind of the benefits of organized labor to figure out, you know, how to address those things.

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Elena Sobrino (34:13)

Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah, yeah, totally. No, I mean, thank you for sharing. I think that details. It comes up again and again, I think in different ways. Like this book is sort of about how things are sort of written into the landscape and the space. Like in this case, kind of the distances and geography. And it's just, I guess that brings me to something. I guess this conclusion you come to and you write towards the end, there's this notion that cities can demolish their way to environmental and economic justice suggests there's a straightforward fix for racism. And kind of in the way you were just talking about, I wonder if you could expand on that. You know, like there's kind of skepticism of this idea of, you know, critique of the straightforward fix. And you know, you end the book on this note of talking about repair and kind of, I wonder if you see sort of the work of repair. How is that different from the kind of logic of demolition for you? And maybe just. Yeah. Spending so much time, you spent so much time looking at and kind of talking to people about these demolitions. I mean. Yeah. How did that change the way you think of repair in a broader social sense? How do we repair the seeming kind of like the way racism is written in and kind of seems to be quite fixed and structural. Yeah. Like how did demolition kind of change your way of thinking about that whole problem?

Nick Caverly (35:56)

Yeah, I mean, part of the, you know, I think very low hanging fruit argument that I think this book makes. Because I don't, I don't know, it's just that like if what we focus on is tearing down systems of injustice, whether those are statues or empty buildings produced by, you know, centuries of structural racism or even racist policies, if, if what we do is just tear something down and stop, which is basically what Detroit's demolition programs have done and say, like that's what we can do. That's what we need to do. That we've actually stopped incredibly short of what a more equitable world actually will take. And so tearing things down alone is not a path to a kind of clean slate. And something that really brought that to me was something that I really have sort of struggled with, is like, you know, that means that we need to do more than just identify unjust systems and make them stop. We have to ask what does an actually just distribution of things look like? And so for repair. When it comes to repair, you know, this is both a question of, like, what is owed to people and to places that have been historically, you know, dumped on, had toxins dumped in their backyards, had then denied opportunities, been, you know, targeted sites of surveillance, like, what do we. What is owed? But then also so. But also what needs to be removed from those places and kind of structured in different ways. And so when we think about things like environmental contamination are kind of. Well, I don't know what the kind of state of environmental enforcement is in the United States while we're talking, but like, you know, a year or so ago, right, the policy of the United States was that everybody should have equal access to the conditions of, like, a good and clean environment. And part. And that's great, but it leaves out how we already have toxins that are buried in the ground, that are in the atmosphere, and that we can't make go away. Lead is one of those. And so the question isn't like. Well, is both, like, what do we do with the lead that's already here and how do we distribute that in a fair way? And that's something that I saw Detroiters, especially gardeners, thinking about is like, what is a fair distribution of contamination? And so when we think about repair, thinking about it as like, both a question of how do we. And this is, I'm thinking alongside a lot of really wonderful folks, but especially Olofami Taiwo's kind of constructive model of repair. To think about repair not just as, like, a thing to look to the past and say, what is the injustice of the past and how do we stop it? But also, like, how do we create the conditions for the future in ways that we kind of rejigger the ways that current machineries work to make them work a little bit, you know, to actually produce equity going forward. And so, like, demolition there being something that, like, it is very important maybe to tear down empty buildings, but that alone is not something that's going to produce justice or equity or repair.

Elena Sobrino (39:15)

Yeah, yeah. And I really think that this book does such a great job of showing the life cycle of, you know, before, during, after, and the kind of. Yeah, it's sort of an extended event in many ways. You know, there's a way you can think of it as. Yeah, like, how are we going to move things around, you know, not just destroy them. Yeah. No, the stuff about gardening was so interesting. Some of your. I think there were some people quoted in the book talking about, like, moving soil back and forth and kind of like moving stuff to the suburbs or bringing soil from the suburbs in and. Yeah, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that story. It actually reminded me a bit. I don't know if you've seen this. It was an art project a few years ago that Pope El did about the Flint water crisis, where he took Flint tap water, put it in bottles that he kind of designed. And there was kind of this whole setup. You know, he's a performance artist, but the performance in this case was sort of selling Flint water to kind of raise money. And. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen this, but it brought to mind. Yeah, maybe if you want, you could tell a little bit of that story. Cause I think it captures a lot of interesting, you know, the themes you were just talking about in a really concrete way.

Nick Caverly (40:47)

Yeah, I have a big, like, memory of this someone selling flint water. But I can't. I don't know what the context of that was. So maybe it was this project, but I'm definitely going to look that up.

Elena Sobrino (40:59)

I can send you.

Nick Caverly (41:01)

Yeah, it seems like. Yeah, same. Same idea as, like. So one of my interlocutors, who, I quote, is very dear to me, said one time, you know, so they had. They wanted to build a garden on the lots around their house. And they. You know, one of the really wonderful things you can do if you want to have a garden in Detroit is you can get the soil tested. And your people are encouraged to get their soil tested to just understand what's in it. And they got back the list of the, you know, the. The soil test. Soil quality tests on some of these lots around their house. And they were like, laundry list of kind of toxins, everything from, like, lead to kind of. Which is things that might have happened from the demolition itself and other things that might have been. Might have been a case of kind of dumping of polluted soil in the. In the aftermath of a demolition. But one of the, you know, he. He said, you know, make. I want to take this dirt. And I'm paraphrasing, but, like, I want to take this dirt and give it to the people who made it. Like, can we go make it rain Barium in the suburbs. Make it rain. Barium in the suburbs is a direct quote that'll live with me forever. And the funny part of that is barium is actually not super duper toxic. Of all the things to pull out of that report, barium is maybe not the most toxic one, but the kind of spirit being how can. Or the kind of conversations we had over the years was not just with him, but with other people, was people saying the things that were. Are coming up in our soil testing reports. Like these. These aren't just, like, accidents, right? Like, this is of a piece with a broader. When we think about environmental injustice, when we think about environmental racism, these are the same kind of conditions that have been in places like Detroit for. And elsewhere for a very long time, in which, like, the people who get the short end of the stick when it comes to environmental toxicity. And you know, this right? When this water crisis is, like, the case in point, when things go awry, it's communities of color, it's especially impoverished communities of color who are. Have to bear the burden of, like, popping up society. And so folks, you know, kept asking, or wouldn't it be fun if we, like, just took. Wouldn't it be right to just take this dirt and go, like, dump it somewhere in the suburbs? And, like, this was a joke for a very, very long time. And I left Detroit at the start of the pandemic, and so. And I didn't get to go back for a long period of time. And so, but I kept in touch with people kind of WhatsApp and FaceTime and that kind of thing. And, like, this was a moment in the early pandemic that, like, if, like, almost nobody was working, right, people were, like, summarily laid off from their jobs, and people had a lot of time on their hands. And so this was a time that some people actually, like, they actually did a little soil exchange with some lot that somebody. Somebody was working construction, and they were like, hey, there's actually this, like, soil on our construction lot that is we're not using. And my boss said we could have it, like, let's just go and, like, trade out the soil from our garden with this lot out in some suburban construction site. So they actually did it. And that, to me, both is like, kind of an imaginative exercise of, like, what would it look like to, you know, to think, to read the kind of landscape as this like lumpy, unequal thing and say, what would it take to make this just even a little bit more equal? Is a material thing. People imagine ways of doing that all the time. But like to kind of talk to people were like, no. And we actually did it. We had a lot of time on our hands and we did it, I think really helped crystallize for me how like the. The matter at hand, when we think about like structural racism is not, you know, like it is important to change, you know, the kind of. When you think about ideology or we think about kind of narratives or rhetorics, like addressing racist ideologies and racist rhetorics. These are important. Right, right. I'm not saying those aren't important. And if all we do is change those things and we don't actually change the ways things like land can be racist, the distribution of toxicity is racist, we're stopping short of actually addressing the, you know, a fundamental part of the problem. And yet we can also see that it is possible to do that. Right. Like people do this in small scale ways, but we could think about how to address structural unequal conditions in bigger ways and to do things that kind of take that idea of returning toxic soil to the people who made it in a bigger way.

Elena Sobrino (45:50)

Yeah, no, it's very. Yeah. You can see how something kind of spiral and grow from just. Yeah. Very simple, attainable. Yeah. Like action and rhetoric. Right. I think it's a really important thing to really constantly dance between. For sure. Yeah. Well, we have taken a lot of your time. So just before we do close this and. Yeah, there's so much more we could have talked about. I wish we could, but. Yeah, people can grab the book and read in detail about the things we talked about, things we didn't talk about. There's a lot in there. It's really great. But before we go, can I ask you, do you have any new projects related to this or different? What are you up to these days?

Nick Caverly (46:47)

I am working on a project about energy infrastructure. If we're thinking about where my research in Detroit kind of stopped off, it was with kind of small scale ways that people kind of move longstanding systems to try. They try to work them to do something slightly different. Right. Moving a couple lots full of soil somewhere else is a small scale kind of move. And so what I'm trying to trace is how people embed that kind of politics at an infrastructural scale. So looking and working with some colleagues who are engineers and community organizers and public artists to understand how the electrical grid is a place that people are kind of holding that kind of politics, that thinking about how do we redistribute benefits and burdens and embed that into infrastructure. And so we have, and this is something that is important in the context of sort of moves from fossil fuels to renewable energy to think about, like, how do you not just reproduce the kind of economic and racist logics of fossil capitalism in a renewable system? And also how do we make sure that places and people and communities that have borne the burdens of fossil systems. So living next to a coal power plant, living next to a gas power plant, how do we, what does it look? What do those people and places want to be made whole as we kind of, you know, despite a bunch of headwinds, continue to move toward a more renewable system. And so that's what I'm working on now is kind of collaborating with engineers and community organizers and public artists to figure out how do people want, what is the future that people want and what does it look like to actually build that in an infrastructural system?

Elena Sobrino (48:42)

Very cool. Yeah, that's what a cool group of collaborators too. Is this going to be, is this in Michigan, Detroit area? Or is this.

Nick Caverly (48:50)

So it's actually, it's I, so I'm, I live, I've lived in western Massachusetts for the past six years. And I was like, I moved here, I had an idea of a, I moved here at the pandemic and I had an idea of a project that was going to be based kind of across the Midwest. And that project for the pandemic basically became really impossible. And yet the demand to keep moving your research forward didn't stop. And so I am hoping to get back to that project that would be more based in Detroit, but this project is based basically on the eastern coast of the United States, which has an integrated electric grid.

Elena Sobrino (49:28)

Yeah, very cool. Well, I'm excited to hear more about this and follow along. This is, this has been a really great conversation. Thank you so much for.

Nick Caverly (49:38)

Oh, thanks so much, Elena. This was a lot of fun.

Elena Sobrino (49:40)

This was fun. Well, again, check out the book, it's out now, Demolishing How Structural Racism Endures. And that's from Stanford University Press. Thank you so much, Nick. See you later.

Nick Caverly (50:00)

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Elena Sobrino (50:25)

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