Detroit: Techno City

After the British marketing of Detroit’s take on electronic dance music in 1988, with the compilation Techno! The New Sound of Detroit, techno music has been interwoven with a particular representation of this North American city. Resonating internationally with other electronic dance music scenes, a unique mythology of Detroit techno draws new audiences to what was the capital of the Fordist automobile industry. Opening the discussion with Movement, the electronic festival central to Detroit’s annual Techno Week, we argue that Detroit and its citizens activate techno music to promote the renaissance of this once powerful industrial metropolis. Techno, and its associated cultural capital, act as value producers in the context of macro-economic urban regeneration processes within the local history and African-American futurist music aesthetics. From Detroit in the current era we trace back key issues, such as the mythology of Detroit as the “Techno City” and its DJ-producers, contrasting politics in Detroit’s techno scenes, and the appropriation of abandoned industrial spaces. Finally, the chapter addresses a dialogue of emerging techno music producers with the aesthetics of house music in Midwestern American industrial metropolis, Chicago. It is argued that techno dance music has articulated the technoculture since the late 1980s: in other words, it signifies lived experience of culture dominated by information and communication technologies in a city that had partly morphed into a post-industrial ruin.