Abstract
Public circulations of politicized visualizations and definitions of blight serve not only to define and police an idealized image of care, but also bolster the state’s valorization of creative interventions that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape. An image of care of single‐family homes presents an invented morality—one which sets itself as distinct from another manufactured idiom: blight. This duality allows for processes of domestication to be defined, defended, policed, and politicized. Creative interventions on Detroit’s built environment that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape become valorized by the state and its neoliberal partners (corporate business leaders, philanthropic foundations, and public‐private partnerships), despite artists’ intentions to subvert the power of such interests. So long as blight is conceived of and imagined as the absence of care, instead of being the end result of decisions made, laws passed, and policies enacted, the racial and economic segregation of the 20th century will continue to shape our urban spaces. So long as artistic and creative interventions are conscripted into this image of care as a domestication of blight, social and aesthetic innovators will be instrumentalized in market‐driven regimes of value.