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Despite Detroit's reputation for social and financial crisis, developers and investors have successfully pursued growth and land‐use intensification in recent years. However, in Molotch's initial conception of the growth machine, environments of extreme decline go under analyzed. While scholars have investigated the role of growth in Detroit, they have narrowly focused on a single document: the Detroit Future City framework. This work looks more holistically at the development networks leveraged to pursue growth through a discourse analysis of a broader set of development documents and interviews with development professionals, uncovering ways the growth machine adapts to this unlikely environment for growth. Rather than proposing an alternative to growth for a shrinking city, growth elites (led by philanthropic foundations) propose development scenarios leveraging triage to channel diminished amounts of development resources. In doing this, Greater Downtown, with its investment potential, is polarized from other areas of the city seen as risky investments. In addition to focusing growth in investment‐friendly areas, growth coalitions pursue incentives and branding campaigns to attract talent and affluence. These dynamics are a divergence from the growth machine model that supports the narrative that growth benefits all residents in favor of a narrative of triage.

This article outlines the political economy critiques of the shrinking cities literature by answering the following: (1) how does the “shrinking cities” canon define a categorically distinct set of geographies with unique challenges and what solutions are proposed? and (2) how has the urban political economy literature engaged with and critiqued these ways of framing problems and solutions? This analysis finds that the “the shrinking city” is loosely defined and that debates exist around their exceptionalism. Urban political economy scholarship debates whether the solutions provided through shrinking cities literature are innovative alternatives to growth-oriented development or manifestations of austerity urbanism.

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