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Urban decline is often understood as the opposite of urban growth, yet this conceptualization is oversimplified, obscuring a genuine understanding of the social and spatial realities of the city today. Through the study of Detroit and, in particular, through a close reading of two residential neighbourhoods, this dissertation investigates the complexities of decline. It examines the development of decline over time, as well as how it has differentially affected social and spatial patterns and practices within the city. This dissertation approaches the topic by engaging with theoretical work on decline, as well as combining historical analysis with empirical evidence through extensive on-site research. This work traces the historical development of Detroit from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the present day, focusing on the role of public policies, land-use patterns and infrastructural development in laying the foundations for urban decline. It challenges the accepted narrative of the cycle of ‘boom-bust-boom’, which views the city in terms of ‘growth-decline-recovery’, by illustrating how Detroit’s decline today is a resumption of various structural changes that were made during the city’s critical period of physical, economic and demographic growth. This dissertation then investigates two contrasting neighbourhoods to illustrate the dynamic ways in which different areas of the city have been affected by, and responded to, decline: Brightmoor, the epitome of widespread decay and abandonment, and Grandmont Rosedale, a community of five neighbourhoods that has maintained relative stability. This analysis demonstrates how urban decline transforms the city—dismantling and disassembling existing spatial and social networks and infrastructures—while simultaneously creating new ones. It deviates from much of the current research that romanticises Detroit’s ruination by focusing instead on everyday urban life. This dissertation argues that decline is not simply the opposite of growth, and therefore current scenarios speculating full recovery appear problematic.

Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have been in steady decline since the mid twentieth century, when the industry that built it began to downsize and relocate production away from the United States. Decades of disinvestment and racial division left a city with central neighbourhoods sparsely populated and crumbling, while resources and services were concentrated in wealthier suburbs. In recent years, the city's landscape has come to be emblematic of post-industrial decline, urban blight and civic abandonment. My research adopts a mixed-methods ethnographic approach to argue that this framing of the city is in fact a deeply ideological one, with constructions of Detroit as empty and chaotic serving to lay the groundwork for a large-scale project of re-colonisation, which draws simultaneously on discourses of greening and redemption. Narratives of abandonment and the re-emergence of urban 'nature' work together to reclaim the city in the interests of a mobile elite whose 'white flight', widely cited as the source of Detroit's problems, never flew much further than the suburbs. Drawing on news media, documentary film, television, photography, semi-structured interviews and extended periods of participant observation in Detroit between 2012 and 2014, I show how constructions of emptiness, a wilful fictionalisation of Detroit's recent history, narratives of greening and a pervasive investment in structures of white supremacy serve to create a Detroit in which wholesale gentrification may be put forward as a social good.

Dexter-Linwood is a neighborhood on the near west side of Detroit. In the heart of this neighborhood sits Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), a non profit organization pursuing a mission to “make a profound difference in the lives of the diverse populations it serves by providing for basic needs, including affordable housing, promoting self-reliance and encouraging community involvement.” CCSS works to serve residents both inside and outside its immediate campus, delivering meals, providing healthcare, and maintaining job programs. As CCSS continues to grow and plan for the future, they sought a partnership with the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability to help them explore opportunities to continue to sustainably redevelop the neighborhood they serve in proactive, rather than reactive ways. With the goal to expand CCSS’s reach and deliver more options and programming to help carry out their mission in service to the community, the team’s project entailed creating a vision plan and roadmap for future sustainable redevelopment opportunities on and around CCSS’s campus. The “Sustainability Roadmap” consists of projects under the interconnected themes of economic development, health, clean energy, ecological health, community vitality, and strong partnerships, largely inspired from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Each theme includes goals for specific strategies CCSS could pursue to promote and enhance the theme and the overall mission of CCSS. Embedded in each goal are opportunities and best practices, informed through site visits, case studies, research, information gathering and project management, and include funding strategies, partnership opportunities, implementation plans, and design renderings in order to provide CCSS with a portfolio of potential plans to pursue. Additionally, in order to ensure that development and programming are in sync with the needs of the community, the team presents recommendations to CSSS for how to best deliver services based on community feedback and strategies for further participatory engagement. This document is intended to be a resource for CCSS, helping them sustainably expand their footprint, and leverage their position in the community in order to deliver greater benefits to the neighborhood and the populations they serve.

This dissertation consists of three papers concerning the development of urban austerity in the U.S. state of Michigan from the 1970s to the 2010s. The first paper, “‘They Ran that City Down’: Urban Austerity and the Production of Jurisdictional Stigma in Michigan,” advances a theory of “jurisdictional stigmatization” to show how cities are blamed for their own crises and framed as undeserving of outside support. Bridging a gap between literatures on territorial stigma and fiscal federalism, I use the case of municipal receivership to identify key moments in the lawmaking process—across the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—where policy elites develop stigmatizing narratives of post-industrial cities. I show how cities like Detroit and Flint are especially vulnerable to urban austerity, given the country’s unique (among advanced capitalist economies) system of fiscal federalism and what political scientists have termed “segmented localism.” The second, “‘We’re Doing What Needs to Be Done’: Financial Emergency, Policy Abstraction, and the Politics of Inevitable Austerity,” proposes a concept of “policy abstraction” to describe how lawmakers deploy the abstract notion of “fiscal emergency” to facilitate the implementation of austerity policy despite popular opposition. This intervention addresses a question in the literature on democratic responsiveness—how public policy is made without support from the voting public. In Michigan, policy abstraction allowed lawmakers to frame austerity as the only solution to urban fiscal crisis, what I term “inevitable austerity.” I show how this rhetorical and technical strategy facilitated lawmakers’ ability to circumvent popular opposition by deflecting the critique that their actions were anti-democratic. The third, “Who Governs the Crisis City? Expertise, Race and Representation in Michigan’s Municipal Receivership Regime,” considers the twenty-one individuals who have been appointed as municipal receivers across ten cities and three school districts in Michigan from the 1980s to the present. I ask: what expertise did these individuals have to govern crisis cities? I identify four trends: a commitment to cost-cutting and privatization; management experience in the public sector (in early receiverships) and in the private sector (in later ones), and educational credentials in business; previous experience as an emergency manager; and special credentials. Then, considering the racially charged nature of debates over state takeover in Michigan’s high-segregation context, I trace a fifth trend: the development of a “racial credential” to promote the hiring of Black emergency managers. While the literature on racial representation suggests that Black officials are more likely to be responsive to the concerns of Black constituents, this paper shows how the racial credential was developed not to represent local populations resistant to takeover, but to implement austerity despite local opposition.

Cities like Detroit are increasingly turning to green infrastructure improvements such as greenways to provide multifunctional benefits including connectivity, improved social and environmental health, and community empowerment and healing. How does an infrastructure project accomplish environmental justice goals and how can we ensure that the local communities are receiving the benefits? Through our research project, we examine how the Joe Louis Greenway will impact Detroiters and what strategies can be used to promote positive social and environmental outcomes. To answer these questions, we took a multidisciplinary research approach. This included a literature review to understand the challenges and opportunities greenways offer communities and to identify key elements of equitable green development including what should be measured to ensure local benefits. Evaluating local news provided a non-intrusive understanding of the public perception of the Greenway, which is an important indicator of its long-term viability. We also conducted an analysis of the impact of design by examining existing and notable urban greenway projects from different cities and scales through the lens of landscape architecture, urban planning, and design. Our final piece is an extension of the City of Detroit’s Housing & Jobs Toolkits from the Joe Louis Greenway Framework Plan (Vol. 1), which explores a range of tools that can be implemented alongside the construction of the Joe Louis Greenway in order to achieve goals of wealth creation and affordable housing. We built on this to create a similar toolkit that looks at social and environmental aspects of the Greenway with recommendations for land use, design, and program strategies. We included suggested ways to measure progress toward social and environmental outcomes. Finally, we provided guiding questions based on the lessons learned from our research to help evaluate how the Joe Louis Greenway is meeting its goals.

In Loretta Lees's study of a new public library in Vancouver in the late 1990's, she began to explore the ideals of non-representational theories, or those everyday practices that provide evidence not just of what symbolic meaning one may assign to a space, but rather what that space does—how it is enacted through everyday practice. This exploration provided Lees with another way to think about the built environment, one that she believed could open up a new direction for architectural geographers. Lees, building on the work of Jon Goss and other contemporary scholars in the field, described this new direction as a move towards a critical geography of architecture. This dissertation explores the use of a non-representational framework to study everyday practices through a single case study in the Avenue of Fashion in Detroit, Michigan. This research considers the historical evolution of Detroit through bankruptcy to present day using two common narratives of the city, one of rise/rebirth and one of Two Detroits, to offer a critical lens through which to consider performances of everyday life in this recently redeveloped area of the city. Within a non-representational framework, this study pulls in direct observational methods such as counting, mapping/tracing, photo documentation, trace observation, and field notes derived primarily from public life studies to observe and consider how the built environment is shaped through these embodied practices. This study contributes both an example of alternative methods that may be used in non-representational research, as well as new way to think about spaces that complements findings from more representational research. The findings from this study inspire a curiosity about the unfolding of everyday life and contribute to the work of Lees and others in advancing a critical geography of architecture.

The Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, experienced catastrophic floods in the summer of 2021. Jefferson East Inc., a non-profit community development organization committed to improving the lives of Jefferson Chalmers residents, partnered with the SEAS Sustainability Clinic and engaged our team of SEAS Master’s students to study the issue and recommend actionable items on how JEI can improve community resilience. Flooding in Jefferson Chalmers has been a decades-long issue that is due to historical disinvestment from racist redlining practices, poor management, and topographical factors that make the neighborhood prone to flooding. Due to these risks, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has designated almost all the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood in the 100-year floodplain. This designation puts restrictions on government funds and requires residents to purchase costly flood insurance. Two sources are responsible for flooding in the neighborhood: sewage stormwater backups when the system is overloaded, and surface flooding from the adjacent Detroit River due to high lake levels. Although these issues require broad systemic solutions at the city and regional level, Jefferson East Inc (JEI). can take specific actions to contribute to Jefferson Chalmer’s flooding resiliency. Our vision for a resilient Jefferson Chalmers includes both mitigation and adaptation activities. To mitigate the effects of an overwhelmed sewer/stormwater systems, the region should adopt a watershed management approach for implementing grey and green infrastructure projects. To adapt to flooding in the neighborhood, residents and businesses should repair and renovate their buildings to withstand flooding, engage with FEMA to develop a floodplain management plan and consider voluntary buyback programs to move out of the floodplain. JEI can support these mitigation and adaptation measures through proactive planning, hiring dedicated resilience personnel, encouraging sustainable and resilient design, acting as a communication hub, continuing equitable community engagement, and engaging in political advocacy. By engaging in any of these actions, JEI will contribute to the resilience of the Jefferson Chalmers community and support JEI's mission of bringing greater resources, development, and investments to the East Jefferson Corridor.

This essay reports on learning about housing justice, inclusive and responsive design, and campus-civic collaborative relations over the course of a year working with the United Community Housing Coalition (UCHC), the housing nonprofit organization of Detroit, Michigan. It will begin with a presentation of home ownership and inequity in Detroit, followed by consideration of the deliverables we adapted and redesigned and responses to them. The voice above is Ms. W, a single Black mother of three children, after we (UCHC) helped fund and install a new central air unit in her home. UCHC’s repair program’s phone number isn’t shared publicly due to the limited eligibility requirements and fear of creating false hope in ineligible clients. I’m not sure how she got the number because she wasn’t eligible to receive repairs: she wasn’t a previous client of our agency and she had back taxes owing on her property. But such voices and experiences are at the very core of the efforts summarized in this work, telling us when it is successful and reminding us of its limitations. Before considering in more detail the dialogue with people seeking assistance from and providing input to housing justice organizations, let me set the stage so that the structural injustices they confront can be clear to the reader, and the organizational landscape can be surveyed.

Climate change poses a fundamental threat to plant, animal, and human life. As ever-increasing impacts are felt across the globe, communities face rising stressors such as hotter summers, colder winters, severe flooding, power outages, and decreased food and water supplies. Communities will need to adopt new resilience strategies to best withstand these challenges. A history of systemically racist, destructive policies of urban renewal and post-industrial disinvestment has left much of Detroit’s geography and population over-exposed to climate risk. Resilience Hubs are a relatively new concept that originated in Baltimore, Maryland and have since taken root in communities across the country, leveraging existing community resources and bringing them together into one centralized network (see the Baltimore Case Study on page 33). Resilience Hubs operate at a local level, providing accessibility to residents and facilitating more effective responses in times of crisis, in addition to reducing cost burdens to nonprofits and mutual aid groups.

Sports spectating is a site where supporters build their identities and navigate experiences of belonging within their communities. In this dissertation, I explore spectator experiences of Arab American Muslim women in Southeast Detroit and examine how women create social identities through their experiences of watching and following American football. Arab and Muslim women’s experiences, particularly with sport, have often been represented in Orientalist and Islamophobic ways that inaccurately portray them as meek and oppressed rather than as agents. This research project uses a feminist framework to highlight Arab and Muslim women’s diverse voices, histories, and experiences. I critically examine the different ways women engage in spectator culture to understand how it can be a joyful site of identity building as well as a site where women negotiate their inclusion and belonging. The data for this project was collected through participant observation at high school football games and other sport spaces and events in a large Arab American community in Southeast Detroit. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with Arab American Muslim women and members of their family and peer groups. All participants were local sports fans and supporters who were asked about their experiences within their spectator communities. Thematic analysis of interviews revealed that women consider sports to be a key aspect of the relationships they build within families, as well as a place to create community and identity among friends, neighbors, and other spectators in stadiums and online spaces. In the context of watching and following sports, Arab American Muslim women navigate gender expectations from their social groups and take different approaches to challenging and maintaining gender norms while establishing their belonging in sport spaces, from the high school football bleachers to Ford Field. Findings demonstrate that watching and supporting local sports is important to women’s constructions of selfhood and that Arab American Muslim women’s experiences in spectator spaces are diverse. While the majority of research about Muslim women and sport focuses on the ways in which Muslim women are outsiders in sport culture, my research demonstrates the many ways they engage with sport and use it as a site for creating connections and expanding perceptions of what it means to be an Arab American Muslim woman as well as a sports spectator. These findings also highlight the importance of using a critical feminist analysis to examine minority women’s experiences in sport spaces as their perspectives and histories offer new insights about what it means to experience and create community that are not represented in the White, Masculine, Heterosexual, Christian model often used to examine sport culture.

This report discusses the findings from the Detroit 2030 District Transportation Emissions Baseline Survey that was conducted in 2022. The goal of this survey was to collect data on people who commute into the Detroit 2030 District for work. Data on commute distance, mode(s) of travel, vehicle fuel type, and distance traveled were all collected and used to calculate a GHG emissions baseline in kg CO2e. This survey also considered the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and the implications this has had on work commuting patterns. Data were collected during both pre-COVID and post-COVID timeframes, and the results were compared. The survey also contained a policy questions section, in which commuter behavior was assessed based on potential policy implementation. Based on our calculation, the baseline emissions in the Detroit 2030 District were estimated to be 2,546 kg CO2e per commuter before the pandemic, and 1,368 kg CO2e per commuter after the pandemic. The baseline emissions for Bedrock were estimated to be 338 kg CO2e per commuter before the pandemic, and 619 kg CO2e per commuter after the pandemic. These values were calculated using emissions factors from the GREET 2021 model, in combination with the ASIF framework for emission calculation. Some conclusions can be drawn from this survey analysis. As the Detroit 2030 post-COVID emission baseline is lower than the pre-COVID baseline, we can determine that this is likely impacted by the increase in remote work. This is a potential tool to lower transportation emissions: 49% of respondents thought that formal or expanded work from home policies would likely change their commuting behavior. Other emission reduction policies that respondents selected as likely to change commuting behavior include a driving alone tax, and a subsidized company rideshare program. Detroit 2030 District building managers should consider these policies when aiming to reduce commuter emissions.

Gentrification, one of the most controversial topics in the United States over the last half a century, is often seen as a catalyst to increasing property value in the surrounding context. However, the resulting displacement it causes has resulted in negative housing repercussions across the nation. Located on a riverine border with Canada, Detroit, Michigan is a city that has been marred by crime, poverty, and urban blight since the 1970s and gentrification is something the citizens have fought against.1 Especially with their need for affordable housing being one of the most prevalent in the country, with over one-third of the population living below the poverty rate.2 By reviewing the existing and upcoming affordable housing and mixed-use projects that have been constructed and proposed in Detroit neighborhoods over the last few decades, I aim to propose an architectural intervention that attempts to address what a myriad of projects have failed to address and provide an alternative community to the city; moreover, a hub. Most notably, creating job opportunities, areas for indoor and outdoor recreation, and a model for surrounding neighborhoods to follow... this proposed intervention will aim to provide more than a temporary solution. A community model with tailored housing units to different family sizes and structures, various amenities, and commercial aspects integrated within will be designed and proposed for a real site within the metropolis. Weaving into a network of innovative nodes of happening spaces across the city that have begun sprouting up over the last 5-10 years of Detroit rebirth, this hub will tie into this infrastructure, while also providing something new for the city. Lastly, this mixed-use project will aim to provide a blueprint for not only for this particular borough of Detroit, but also for the other poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the city, and potentially across the United States.

In 2019, the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department began to formulate the Gratiot/7 Mile Neighborhood Framework Plan, which will be used to guide neighborhood planning and future development in four northeast Detroit neighborhoods. At the end of 2019, the world faced an unprecedented health crisis as COVID-19 began to spread across the globe. The pandemic changed people’s lives and had major implications for the use of public space. Through this project, we explore the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on Gratiot/7 Mile area residents by collecting oral histories on their personal experiences of the crisis. These personal narratives allow us to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affected residents’ daily lives, their use of neighborhood space, and their connection to their community. In an interactive ArcGIS Storymap, we document the stories of Gratiot/7 Mile residents and other members of the community as part of their community history. These narratives also prompt future research avenues as social scientists, urban planners, landscape architects, and Gratiot/7 Mile neighborhood residents seek to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has altered neighborhood planning and development, both in the Gratiot/7 Mile neighborhood and beyond. We found that the pandemic shifted how neighborhood residents used public space and interacted with each other. As the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department continues to develop the Gratiot/7 Mile Neighborhood Framework Plan, we would encourage consideration of how the pandemic has transformed residents’ lives to inform the City’s planning efforts.

Scholars of planning and policy have long argued that metropolitan or regional institutions for planning and governance are needed to address such problems as urban sprawl, central city decline, and inter-jurisdictional segregation and inequality. Yet some form of regional planning and governance is already practiced in every major U.S. metro area under the auspices of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which the federal government has mandated for roughly half a century. Why have these institutions proved inadequate to remedy America’s “metropolitan dilemma” of sprawling, inequitable (sub)urbanization? Are they simply too weak? Have they lacked the political will to challenge this pattern? Or both? I examine the question through a historical case study, based in archival research, of the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), the MPO for the seven-county area that includes metropolitan Detroit. I argue that SEMCOG should be understood in the context of the political history of twentieth-century Detroit and the trajectory of twentieth-century American liberalism. The development of SEMCOG in the wake of the New Deal and World War Two reflected broader liberal efforts to harmonize private choice and public planning, and municipal autonomy with metropolitan interdependence, in an era of federally sponsored, whites-only suburbanization. SEMCOG’s arrested development from the 1970s onward mirrored the broader unraveling of postwar American liberalism as the inherent tensions in the project became increasingly evident. In the twenty years after World War Two, Detroit pioneered the development of regional institutions for planning and governance: a Regional Planning Commission (RPC) and a Supervisors Inter-County Committee (SICC). These institutions were initially intended not to challenge but to facilitate the prevailing patterns of outward development and the proliferation of independent suburban communities, both of which placed escalating burdens on the central city of Detroit and black Detroiters in particular. The RPC and SICC were merged to form SEMCOG just as the political transformations wrought by suburbanization, segregation and the African American freedom movement shook the foundations of the liberal political order in which regional planning and governance had evolved. As metropolitan politics grew increasingly racialized along city-suburb lines, and the federal government retreated from regional initiatives, SEMCOG survived the 1970s only by vowing to defend local control and eschewing a role in resolving issues of racial segregation and inequality, while accommodating the prevailing pattern of sprawl and disinvestment. When SEMCOG staff questioned this course, they were forced to back down in the face of opposition from the now-dominant suburban growth regime. For advocates of regional planning and governance, there are sobering lessons to be drawn from the history of SEMCOG. In Detroit, institutions for regional planning and governance have failed to resolve the problems of sprawl and inequality, and in some respects exacerbated them, since these institutions are embedded within a larger political system that has been dominated by suburban development interests and defenders of racial and economic segregation. Although MPOs can help to bring important metropolitan issues before policymakers, and structural reform of MPOs could increase their capacity and willingness to do so, solving the metropolitan dilemma will ultimately require the development of a new multi-racial metropolitan politics that builds grassroots power for “reparative regionalism” across city-suburb boundaries.

Detroit’s history of systemic racial inequity has significantly contributed to the uneven development patterns of the entire metropolitan region that persist to this day. The process of central city decline, deindustrialization, and suburban migration in the post-war period compounded existing discrimination in housing and employment for Black residents, effectively trapping them in the city and preventing them from accessing suburban amenities. This dissertation evaluates the role that public transportation planning played in reinforcing racial segregation by restricting transit options to suburban areas, effectually limiting physical mobility of residents. My research demonstrates that the City of Detroit Department of Street Railways (DSR) had knowledge of suburban growth trends, sufficient budget revenues, legal jurisdiction, and the physical resources to provide service to suburban areas, but voluntarily limited suburban transit options. The failure to provide suburban service meant that the DSR could not capitalize on regional growth trends and could not recover from lost ridership numbers as Detroit depopulated through white flight and decentralization. This study analyzes key transportation planning decisions made by City of Detroit officials between 1922 and 1973 using qualitative, primary-source, archival records such as letters, meeting minutes, reports, survey documents, and maps. These sources have not been comprehensively researched or peer-reviewed to date, and my research contributes to a literature gap in the history of public transportation planning in the City of Detroit. Findings are determined using interpretive analysis to understand the role that transportation planning has played in reinforcing racial segregation between city and suburb in post-war Detroit.

Scholarship has shown how community-based education (CBE) programs can offer unique institutional and organizational contexts for negotiating the meanings and operations of care and racial equity in education. Researchers have also documented that, despite their existence outside of school institutions, CBE spaces interact dominant power structures in education, including race, class, and gender. In this dissertation, I inform the debate about the possibilities and perils of pursuing racial equity and justice through CBE programs by examining the sociopolitics of care in one such program. Using critical qualitative methodology, I conducted an ethnographic case study of the sociopolitics of care, race, and education in the Kids Mathematics Coalition (KMC), a summer program attended by middle- and high school-aged youth of color in Detroit, Michigan. Educators and researchers across contexts—including CBE spaces and schools—have taken up critical care praxis as a framework for joining educational theories and practices that prioritize social justice across individual and systems-level interactions (Ginwright, 2010; Wilson, 2015, 2016). Similarly, education researchers have identified instructional interactions as sites for potentially disrupting dominant systems of privilege and oppression. KMC, as a mathematics program, is a meaningful site for investigating programmatic and instructional discourses and youths’ negotiations of care, race, and power in education. Care—as a matter of interpersonal relations, but also as a resource and a politics—is one dimension of interaction between macro-level systems of privilege and oppression and local education contexts and actors. In this study, I explore the sociopolitics of care by investigating how participants in KMC understand and enact care with regards to education and race. Included in this larger discussion, I explore how participants’ conceptions of care relate to instructional practices and dynamics in the program, including around mathematics teaching and learning. Lastly, I explore how youth in KMC negotiate and make meaning about the sociopolitics of care in their own educational experiences. Using a conceptual framework that brings together critical care theories, community-based education research, and theories of instruction, I analyze in-depth interviews with KMC participants and participant-observation data from my time researching the program. Data show that KMC advances an understanding of care that privileges white paternalistic and abstractly liberal perspectives of race and education. Moreover, data show that common instructional practices and dynamics in the program perpetuate deficit-based perspectives of youth of color. Most of the youth in the program positively evaluate the program as a caring space, even while demonstrating more nuanced understandings of the sociopolitical dimensions of care when sharing about their own educational experiences. I conclude that a study of KMC sheds light on how CBE spaces can advance white paternalistic domination in education under a discursive guise of caring. For multiply-marginalized youth participating in KMC, the sociopolitics of care and racial domination in the program serve to reinforce existing systemic educational injustices and to manipulate youths’ affective agencies in negotiating such injustices. However, I also conclude that youths’ participation in program instruction and sociopolitical meaning-making about care also suggests powerful possibilities for youth leadership in developing justice-based conceptions of care in CBEs. In all, this study’s findings demonstrate how CBEs can both build community buy-in and support and advance systemic racial inequities and harms. They also demonstrate the possibilities of seeing youths’ caring agencies as resources in broader educational and more specific instructional contexts.

This research documents and presents a history of Black women’s organizing against water shutoffs, and for access to clean and affordable water. Using the oral histories of Black women water organizers this research will historicize the Detroit water crisis, explore the reasons why Black women have been core leaders within this fight, and examine the types of intellectual traditions embodied in their water organizing. By documenting their organizing, this research situates Black women water warriors as critical actors in the Detroit water crisis struggle, and as shapers of the radical Black organizing tradition in Detroit. This research will use critical oral history and Black feminist epistemology to address the following questions: How has water’s role, as a necessary, life-sustaining household and communal resource, influenced Black women organizers’ response to the Detroit water crisis? What types of intellectual traditions are present in their organizing and what types of organizing traditions are they creating? What impact have their relationships to each other had on the fight for water rights in Detroit? How can a Black queer feminist approach to archiving support ongoing efforts to document and preserve Black women’s histories and intellectualism?

The digital divide is described by technology experts and scholars as the disparity between digitally literate individuals with access to broadband internet and internet communications technologies (ICTs) and those who do not have access to ICTs nor possess digital skills. Approximately 19 million Americans, 6 percent of the population, are without reliable internet service. In Detroit, Michigan, approximately 40 percent of city residents live without an at home internet connection making it the most digitally disconnected city in the United States. Economic, social, and political factors have contributed to this high number of disconnected residents. Any resident affected by digital inequities faces daily challenges in accessing and navigating simple services. These inequities impact a Detroit resident's ability to find employment to provide for their family, a student's ability to complete a homework assignment, and an older citizen's ability to access healthcare services and pay their bills. Affected residents also miss out on being part of the political conversation. The digital divide can impact a resident's ability to access news, research political candidates, and register to vote for the first time. The digital divide must be understood as a spectrum, it is not binary. It is complex, manifested by a history of inequalities between countries, nations, and communities. Solutions in this space require a great deal of organizational collaboration, data gathering, and local expertise. Scholarly research has highlighted that grassroots efforts usually catalyze the solutions in this space, and local community nonprofits know the impacts for those most affected intimately and accurately. However, there is a scarcity of published academic work on the digital divide in Detroit particularly assessing the needs and work of residents and community leaders. We still don't know how these local change makers working in nonprofits, public sectors, and academia are viewing the digital divide. There is not much data on how they interact with one another or if their needs and behaviors share patterns. Lastly, we don't know how these stakeholders measure their success. This research seeks to begin to answer these questions using a primarily qualitative approach. I focus this work on local leadership in the non-profit and public sectors in Detroit. Based on qualitative research and secondary data collection through 8 interviews with community leaders, my research provides insight into how these leaders of the digital inclusion and equity efforts in Detroit see the current state of the digital divide, what they are doing about it, and what they believe they need to successfully reach their goals. These findings provide insights to what future collaborative efforts and relationships might look like as well as highlights suggestions and next steps for this work to continue.

This dissertation examines the relationality of dispossession, racialization, and migration in Detroit, connecting the neoliberal rationality of (re)development to its foundations in Indigenous dispossession and racialized labor. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” understands Detroit as a bordertown, where “the border” is the organizing structure and condition for the operation of settler colonialism in Detroit. From the international boundary to the county line, the border is the on-the-ground, everyday method for controlling space, disciplining populations, and limiting mobility for racialized subjects. To examine possession and belonging in a Black city on an international border, this dissertation introduces a “(sīˈtĭng)” — a methodology for locating (siting), seeing (sighting), and discussing (citing) dispossession as a social process and discourse produced and reproduced in the built environment through news reports, maps, plans, statements, advertisements, murals, graffiti, landscape, and architecture. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” cites the sites and sights of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue to halt the dispossessive logics of renewal and redevelopment. Then, it goes “off-site” to unsettle them.

ReGen: Detroit will look to occupy a unique space between the delicate balance of old and new in the Motor City. American post-industrial cities, were once leveled and left vacant, act as the ideal design “tabula rasa” and architectural stage. The architect can project their own ideals to create a new city that is more efficient, vibrant and harmonious with its historical context. If correctly applied, the architecture will work with the nature that has grown from the urban decay. ReGen will encapsulate three aspects1. ModularityIn the US, the car has greatly shaped urban design and western civilization. Detroit has mass produced, lived and was eventually diminished by the automobile, one of the most prolific and successful modular spaces known to man. By embracing the modular ingenuity that embodied Detroit for many years during its prosperity the city can be made anew. Pre-constructed, architecturally designed pods or shipping container spaces are becoming increasingly popularized in contemporary but for their many benefits they are still being extremely under-utilized in the American architectural and urban design landscapes. Modern construction capabilities allow us to design spaces that can have the affect in lowering overall building costs and constructing in a more cost effective environmentally friendly and less invasive way. The existing Detroit infrastructure was originally created to be a large transportation hub for over 1.8 million people. Today, there is opportunity to effectively transport modular units via car or truck anywhere in the city. In the more near future, shipping containers throughout the world can be brought to Detroit by train or boat. These containers can be retrofitted for reuse and can be purchased cheaply by Detroiters (similarly to Henry Ford’s assembly line) to utilize in a number of ways. Because of their adaptability the units can as be plugged into several newly designed frameworks in the city. 2. Urban AgricultureSimilarly to many US cities within the last decade, Detroit has embraced different forms of urban agriculture with relative success. However, unlike many of its counterparts, Detroit has an enormous amount of vacant land due to the widespread destruction and abandonment. This land, that has been vacant since the late sixties, can still be utilized for the betterment of the people of the city. Detroit was incredibly urban during its peak but it has always been connected to the agriculture from its surrounding rural areas in Southeast Michigan. Local farmers could, and still can, come to the heart of Detroit to sell their produce every weekend in the Eastern Market. For the city, the Eastern Market has represented more than a few sheds in a parking lot. It is a space of community and solidarity for everyone in the city even during the worst of times; because when it comes down to it, everyone needs good produce. 3. Iconic PairingSadly, much of Detroit’s urban architectural history has been erased thanks to riots, subsequent urban destruction, and decay. Pairing new design with specific historically important urban areas can bring activity and life back to them. ReGen will focus on sites in close proximity to Michigan Central Terminal, Book Tower, and the Eastern Market. The goal of these sites is to both raise awareness for landmark architecture and create activity hubs. Over time the energy from these sites will generate life throughout the rest of the city.

Detroit’s oldest neighborhood is Corktown, founded in the early 1800s by Irish immigrants. It is also the site of the Michigan Central Station, a once-opulent train station that was often where new Detroiters first arrived in the city, many of whom went on to work in the automotive industry. Following declining usage, the station was abandoned in 1988 and left to fall into disrepair. The station became a symbol for Detroit’s spectacular fall from grace, and for three decades it fell victim to scrappers and became covered in graffiti. In 2018, the Ford Motor Company announced that they had purchased the station and intended to turn it into a new campus for the development of autonomous vehicles. This paper seeks to look at the history of the Corktown neighborhood up to the modern day, tracing its founding by the Irish and its current demographics and prominent culture, as well as the history of the train station itself. This paper also will investigate the concerns and hopes of Corktown stakeholders through a series of interviews conducted in the summer of 2019. These interviews sought to determine what aspects of the redevelopment locals were concerned about, as well as the perceived level of outreach and communication from the city of Detroit and the Ford Motor Company itself. Through these discussions, the aim is to find areas in which the process could be improved and learn about the current strengths of the neighborhood, and what things people do not want to see change as a result of the development.

United by a shared history of depopulation and disinvestment, deindustrialized cities across the United States and around the world are engaged in a shared effort to develop holistic solutions to the complex challenges of vacancy, poverty, and blight. As the largest U.S. city to lose more than half its population, people around the world are looking to Detroit as they seek to understand the causes, symptoms, and solutions to urban decline. This legacy of decline is writ large across Detroit’s sprawling landscape, where a surplus of vacant land contributes to declining property values, increased crime, decreased vitality of residential and commercial areas, and general decline of the physical environment, with negative implications for both mental and physical well-being. While Detroit residents have long been transforming vacant land to improve their neighborhoods, the scale of the prob - lem far surpasses the capacities of a dwindling population and tax base. Largely in response to these grassroots efforts, there is increasing interest in urban greening and productive landscapes as a means for addressing the complex social and economic challenges of depopulation and vacancy. As the city now begins to revitalize amid increasing public and private investment, Detroit has the opportunity to implement land-based solutions to improve public health and well-being, sustainability, and environmental justice. Within this context, the City of Detroit’s Gratiot and 7 Mile (G7) Neighborhood Framework Plan provides a platform for the testing and development of land-based strategies to transform vacant land into a community asset. Through the iterative processes of site analysis, community engagement, case studies, and literature review, this report identifies four primary goals for adapting vacant land in the G7 Planning Area: [1] Healthy, Thriving Neighborhoods (promoting physical and mental well-being); [2] Safe and Activated Open Space (designing for visibility, presence, and care); [3] Sustainable and Productive Landscapes (enhancing ecosystem services); and [4] Resilient and Empowered Communities (building social capital). Each of these goals is accompanied by a number of recommendations that highlight strategies for adapting vacant land into a community and environmental asset. The aim of this work is to illuminate pathways toward improved quality of life and sustainability, not only for G7 and Detroit, but for shrinking and legacy cities elsewhere.

This thesis reflects my process assimilating into the role of Chelle in the production of Detroit '67 at the University of Louisville. Although there have been instances of actors crossing lines of gender, nationality, race, and even sexuality, to perform roles in contemporary theatre, discussion about generational differences is almost non-existent. Through historical research, first-hand interviews, and conventional acting methods, I explore the world of my role, searching for spirituality, authenticity, and identity. Additionally, I explain my use of The WAY Method ®, a process I began creating in 2014 to help actors be clear with who they are before empathizing with their role. This thesis is also an exploration in managing the idiosyncrasies of a first-generation African-American woman while embodying the historical, psychological, and cultural traits of a multi-generational African-American character. The adaptation of a known approach to acting to create a new one proves that future actors in a similar circumstance of generational difference can successfully build a process for bridging any gaps between themselves and their roles.

This thesis examines how cleanliness affected the development of Detroit, Michigan during the antebellum era. I argue that Detroiters used nineteenth-century knowledge of cleanliness to shape their physical environments, both public and private. Within the public environment, Detroiters developed paved streets, implemented gutters, created parks, and gardens, and hired scavengers to preserve their city's health by changing the layout and look of their city. Within their homes, Detroiters turned to the creation of wash-closets, more frequent cleaning of both house and person, and the use of rugs and brooms to remove waste and filth and be clean. In addition, middle-and-upper class Detroiters connected their desire for cleanliness with an improved moral character. Detroiters’ cleanliness efforts in the private and public spheres demonstrated their want for modernization and urbanization in a period of increased filth due to industrialization. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that the territorial City of Detroit grew and developed in ways that were similar to cities on the east coast during the antebellum era.

This research develops a technical tool that attempts to predict neighborhood change – as measured by indicators of socioeconomic “wellbeing” – and investigates the ethical challenges inherent in such a process. The technical component utilizes publicly-available data to predict changes in socioeconomic status in Detroit neighborhoods from 2012 to 2017 utilizing machine learning techniques. The research investigates how these data can shed light on Detroit’s socioeconomic changes since its declaration of municipal bankruptcy, if there is any predictive power to this data, and what the ethical ramifications of such quantitative assessments might be. Can data analysis and algorithms predict neighborhood change – gentrification or decline? Should such processes be utilized in the policymaking realm? This paper also presents an argument against the use of such algorithm alone as a decision-making mechanism, especially without first working within the communities that might be most affected by its implementation in policy or investment decision-making.

In the years following the Great Recession (2007-2009), Detroit has seen an increase in financial investments of which have varied effects for residents across the city; so much so, that many Detroiters are claiming there are two Detroits: “Detroit” and “New Detroit.” “New Detroit” is an small area that has experienced a huge influx of residential and commercial investment. They feature new and/or remodeled housing and commercial services like grocery stores, coffee shops, and new restaurants. These areas are populated with mostly white residents. In “Detroit,” there is a large concentration of divested areas in the city. There is very little remodeled or new housing. There are little to no services like grocery stores or shopping areas. These areas are populated by an overwhelming majority of Black residents.It would appear on the surface that many Black Detroiters who reside in “Detroit” would feel outraged. Yet, in my findings, the Black Detroiters that I spoke with understood that in order to have any chance of basic necessities like safe neighborhoods and financial investment in local infrastructure and public schools, Detroit needs white people. They see more than anyone the complicated entanglements of Black Detroit performativity within racial social spaces that tie them to divested physical places in the city. The field of performance studies offers researchers a myriad of ways to elucidate how Black identity is co-constituted in racial social and physical spaces with varied effects on how Black Detroiters see themselves. In the field of human and social geography, and environmental psychology, the connection among place attachment and racial social spaces offer additional opportunities to see the symbolic and material ways that racism is embedded in the spatiality of social life. In this study, I found that racial social space as materiality can help researchers epistemologically understand how racism permeates and affects the ways in which Black Detroiters co-constitute performances of self. In this dissertation, I took an ethnographic look at how Black Detroit residents are performatively co-constituting their identities within racial social and physical spaces that call attention to the race and economic socio-geographical shifts that displace them.

This study examines African American stereotypes in film. I studied six directors, Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Lee, the Russo Brothers, Ryan Coogler, Tate Taylor, and Dee Rees; and six films Detroit, BlacKkKlansman, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Help, and Mudbound. Using the framework of critical race theory and auteur theory, I compared the common themes between the films and directors. The main purpose of my study is to see if White or Black directors predominantly used African American stereotypes. I found that both races of directors rely on stereotypes for different purposes. With Black directors, the stereotype was explained further through character development, while the White directors used the stereotype at face value with no further explanation.

Reggae, though it originated on a small Caribbean island, has extended far beyond its origins in Jamaica. Not long after its inception, this music became disseminated through popular commercial channels, which facilitated reggae’s global presence and exposed it to a wide and diverse audience. In conjunction with its far-reaching appeal, reggae’s origins in the black, Jamaican, working-class community and its connections to the Afrocentric faith known as Rastafari have also allowed this music to serve as a tool for pan-African expression. In addition, reggae has been used by marginalized populations, both in Jamaica and abroad, as a critical voice against oppressive forces. With these factors in mind, I examine the people and places associated with reggae music and culture in Detroit, Michigan, how reggae is used as a social unifier there, and the ways in which these practices fit into the larger scheme of reggae as a globally circulated musical form. I use the theoretical orientation of Afropolitanism to discuss the aesthetics and politics of reggae in Detroit and as a global art form.Through ethnographic research, which focuses on certain key figures and locations associated with Detroit reggae, I determine how various groups participating in the reggae scene in Detroit use this music and its associated culture to orient themselves, both in Detroit and in relation to reggae as a global phenomenon. I ask, what does this music mean to its participants? How is it used to construct personal and group identity? How does what is happening in Detroit relate to reggae music’s larger global narrative?Through my work I conclude that Detroit is an important, globally connected site for the production of black culture, albeit a culture that often finds itself in a marginalized position—both in Detroit and in the world at large. I find that reggae, while not being a powerfully influential force in Detroit, plays a significant role in generating a sense of community within this context, particularly as concerns Detroit’s non-contiguous Afro-Caribbean community. Furthermore, reggae music works to connect places like Detroit to a larger African and Afro-diasporic world.

Inspired by the city of Detroit’s substantial redevelopment in recent years – particularly the State of Michigan’s capital investments in Belle Isle Park, the Detroit Zoo’s proposal for a new aquarium on the downtown riverfront, and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy’s plans to establish West Riverfront Park – this thesis examines the cyclical civic interest in the design of public parks and the construction of communal spaces within them through the case study of the Belle Isle Aquarium, completed in 1904. Each chapter functions as an arterial avenue within a theoretical and empirical framework which begins with a consideration of the nuanced circumstances surrounding the aquarium’s commissioning, including how design requirements set forth by the Detroit Parks and Boulevards Commission combined with the European study of architect Albert Kahn to produce an aesthetic which fuses grotesque, Auricular, and Mannerist elements. Also investigated is the way in which aquatic design and international exposition culture coalesced to imbue Detroit with connections to specific histories and influenced the aquarium’s embodiment of grandiosity, mystery, beauty, and spectacle. Later, the way in which the aquarium integrates museological and educatory practices to effectively train its visitors to become more civilized, worldly, and – most indeterminately – modern, is examined, thus returning the dialog to the backdrop of the contemporary.

The rapid rise of an automobile culture in the 1910s and 20s provided ordinary North Americans greater mobility, freedom, privacy, and economic opportunity. Simultaneously, the United States and Canada witnessed a surge in “dry” sentiments and laws, culminating in the passage of the 18th Amendment and various provincial acts that precluded the outright sale of alcohol to the public. In turn, enforcement of prohibition legislation became more problematic due to society’s quick embracing of the automobile and bootleggers’ willingness to utilize cars for their illegal endeavors. By closely examining the Toledo-Detroit-Windsor corridor—a region known both for its motorcar culture and rum-running reputation—during the time period of 1913-1933, it is evident why prohibition failed in this area. Dry enforcers and government officials, frequently engaging in controversial policing tactics when confronting suspected motorists, could not overcome the distinct advantages that automobiles afforded to entrepreneurial bootleggers and the organized networks of criminals who exploited the transnational nature of the region.

In response to an education-market demand to provide equitable solutions for underserved populations, the State of Michigan passed legislation that created public school academies (i.e., charter public schools) to leverage marketplace competition that addresses supply and demand among high-quality schools. Detroit, Michigan, has a large number of urban low-performing charter and traditional public schools (Joy & Arellano, 2016). Overall, this study seeks to compare charter and traditional public schools in an urban context by examining differences in resource allocation to determine which model is producing better outcomes for student growth and proficiency. This exploratory study will use financial reports and state-assessment data from charter and traditional public schools to compare resource-allocation practices, thereby measuring educational-service efficacy through multiple variables, contributing to marketplace solutions that aim to ensure quality education in economically disadvantaged areas.

In 1956, the City of Detroit began plans for the Detroit Medical Center [DMC]—the largest urban renewal project in the nation. This hospital campus, motivated by leadership at four inner-city hospitals, sought to use public funding to raze the surrounding “blighted” neighborhood to attract private patients, thus providing a new industry for a city in economic decline. This strategy was ultimately unsuccessful and instead further contributed to both the city’s economic decline and the continued poor health of Detroit’s residents. This dissertation argues that the development of the DMC, which largely used federal funding for its completion, was built for the city planners and officials hoped for rather than for the city that existed. In doing so, planners and officials ignored pleas from activists and demographic trends, pouring money into a project that did not serve the community that utilized this institution. This, in turn, further taxed the city’s municipal hospital, Detroit Receiving, as the city continued to experience economic decline and the population of poor and indigent patients grew. Even as the violence of the Detroit Riots in 1967 highlighted both the extreme unease of Detroit’s black community and the central importance of adequate medical provision for Detroit’s most vulnerable populations, the city was ultimately unable, or unwilling, to prioritize the needs of its residents. This stigma associated with medical provision for Detroit’s indigent population even resulted in the continued failure of the individual hospitals of the DMC to merge into one integrated medical center, which external marketing consultants had deemed essential for the success of the DMC. Ultimately, the development of the DMC contributed to Detroit's economic decline. Rather than investing in its immediate community, DMC planners continued to make choices and spend money in attempts to court suburbanites and private patients. This resulted in continued financial strain on the city when these investments were not recuperated because most of the center’s patients and clientele always remained near the hospitals of the DMC–an area of concentrated poverty. By not investing in its community through the largely publicly-funded DMC, the city of Detroit did not ensure adequate health provision for its neediest residents. This contribution to the creation of a perpetually unhealthy, and poor, populace. A community must be healthy to work, to become educated, to be engaged consumers; the city of Detroit was not interested in making its residents healthier, and this is demonstrated by its actions during the development of the DMC. Because of this, the DMC never fulfilled its potential, and caused the city even further financial stress. In the end, this development is a symbol of what could have been but never was. As a study of the ways in which a struggling city attempted to use medical care as an engine of economic recovery, this dissertation provides a case study for historians interested in health and medicine in American urban cities and encourages planners and contemporary urbanists to consider the consequences of not providing adequate health provision to a city’s most vulnerable residents.

In February 2012, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts announced the closure ofSouthwestern High School in the City of Detroit. I argue in this dissertation that the rhetoricaldiscourses used by policymakers to justify the school closure represent a neoliberal restructuringof the urban environment and social relations in the city, particularly for Latina/o Detroit.Applying the critical methodologies of ideology rhetorical criticism and a dialectical approach toculture, I analyze the ideological mystification of three neoliberal logics—crisis, instrumentalrationality, and innovation—in education and urban policy texts in relation to the culturalsensibilities and experiences of the Latina/o community in Southwest Detroit. Critique of therhetorical features of these neoliberal logics reveals mystification of neoliberalism is not only amatter of inducing audience cooperation, but also enforcement that there is no alternative to thecurrent arrangement of education politics. Situated within an urban crisis situation, a neoliberalpublic vocabulary confines the school’s value to its financial output and in the entelechial pursuitof perfecting school closure criteria, technocrats and ordinary people are compelled by aterministic compulsion to carry out the implications of instrumental rationality. As peopleparticipate in market valuations of school spaces and colorblind market argumentative criteria,the neoliberalization of school and education meanings is mystified through a rhetorical processof enclosure that entails closing off, seizing, and repurposing ways of perceiving and acting inurban spaces that are irreducible to market terms. Consequently, the Latina/o community inSouthwest Detroit is dispossessed of a communal resource and their cultural sensibilities andexperiences negated as third persona in the school closure discourse. Blurring the line betweenpersuasion and coercion, I have concluded that these rhetorical features are systemically violentin that they normalize an inequitable status quo and silence victims of the structural violence ofschool closings. I also conclude that commoning represents a vernacular cultural practice forLatina/o students in Southwest Detroit to struggle against neoliberalism and toward locatingnon-commodified communal values in order to claim a right to the city not only for themselves,but for all Detroit Public School (DPS) students.

The city of Detroit suffered a significant decline since the 1950s. As the city continues to recover, development has spurred growth, particularly in the Villages of Detroit. The alleys in the city house essential utility systems such as: sewer, electric, phone systems. These areas have fallen into disrepair, erased through vacancy, or illicit activities. In addition, city infrastructure systems, some reaching capacity, are in need of repairs and attention by city officials. Through the course of this project, revelations about the city’s complex infrastructure systems and governmental structure became apparent, as limitations were imposed on access to information, design restrictions, and new knowledge on stormwater systems. The objective of this project is to understand and provide potential solutions to the use of the alley networks in the Villages of Detroit. By studying the role of alley infrastructure from case study cities, we gain an understanding of the alley potentials that use social and green interventions. At the site scale, we sought to understand the existing systems, opinions and uses by residents. Analysis and survey information from community members demonstrate a need to repair alleyways as residents continue to use alleys despite existing conditions. Developing sustainable interventions in a legacy city allowed the group to understand design barriers and the role of constant conversation among municipal partners and organizations. For instance, the placement of the storm sewer network within the depreciating alley network creates a barrier to the implementation of green infrastructure per the request of the Detroit Water and Sewer Department (DWSD). This constant identification of blockades reconfigured this project from one of design interventions to designing towards policy tolerance and acceptance by location officials. Our study focuses on developing potential solutions to answer these observations and provide a possible framework for the alleys of the Village in Detroit. This project sought to understand the Villages through a landscape design lens by analyzing the various dynamics that provide a sense of place. Explorations into case study cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and current projects in Detroit, this project gained an understanding of the diverse potential of alley uses in contemporary design. This project also examined social components by analyzing the feedback from the community through an on-line survey. Our approached embraced social media as an inclusive platform to deliver community feedback. The current state of the alley network in the Villages ranges from non-existent due to vegetation to centers of commercial activities. Through this study, this project will provide potential interventions and support for alley revitalization, noting the feedback from the community organization, residents and the constraints identified by DWSD.

This dissertation investigates how and why the provision of urban parkland has changed over time, with different levels of government and different organizations in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors taking on different responsibilities. Based on a case study of park provision in Detroit in six sequential periods spanning 1805 to 2018, I argue that governance influences more than just the “publicness” of any given park or plaza. It also matters for socioeconomic and racial equity at a metropolitan scale, influencing which kinds of spaces and facilities get funded, how many spaces and facilities are provided, where they are provided, for whom they are provided, and who sets these priorities. In the nineteenth century, park systems were developed according to an ideology of privatism. Before 1865, the city of Detroit built only a handful of squares and parks, either in or near the city center, in partnership with developers. After 1865, metropolitan-level commissions developed a separate system of scenic parks and boulevards on donated farmland. This public-private approach to provision produced iconic parks like Belle Isle, but it left working class neighborhoods without open space. Progressive Era social reformers partially addressed this deficiency by launching a recreation commission to open play facilities in working class neighborhoods. A city plan commission began buying land for parks and playfields in new subdivisions, and county, regional, state, and federal agencies opened scenic parks at their respective scales. Yet enduring racial disparities emerged. Few parks were added in the inner city, where most African Americans resided, and the recreation commission relied on private agencies to supplement its few racially integrated services. Not only were African Americans served by fewer, separate, and unequal facilities, the enduring lack of open space was later used to justify discriminatory plans for urban renewal. In the late 1960s, urban rioting and organizing led to the reordering of park governance. Public agencies at all scales invested funds in urban recreation for the first time and new forms of public-private partnership emerged. As Detroit became a majority black city, politicians embraced these options selectively, soliciting revenue sharing but retaining local control of public space and keeping a focus on recreation. However, the municipal recreation system steadily declined as the local government lost revenue. Since 2000, some parks have flourished again under new management. The state of Michigan began operating riverfront facilities, including Belle Isle. Nonprofit real estate development organizations have used public and private funds to renovate parks and greenways located on the riverfront and downtown in order to spur real estate investment. But neighborhood recreational facilities remain neglected because deep-pocketed partners have not prioritized the social agenda they represent. The selective revitalization of parkland contributes to the disparity between the quality of life in much of the majority black city and that in its gentrifying core and wealthier, whiter suburbs. In addition to shedding new light on Detroit’s history, these findings suggest that with respect to park equity, what matters is not private or public control of public space per se but instead whether the goals and capacities of park providers align with the needs of city residents. Public and private partners alike will exacerbate inequity rather than correct it if they invest only in parks with the potential to spur economic development.

In the United States, the reorganization of municipal services in postindustrial cities threatens to erode foundational infrastructures of public health and safety. This is exemplified by the rapid regression of access to safe and affordable water and sanitation in cities across the state of Michigan, most notably in Detroit and Flint. In a region considered to be one of the most water-secure in the world, longstanding issues with water contamination from industrial toxins are converging with currents of economic crisis, climate-related changes, and contemporary anxieties about the future of cities. This dissertation explores these emerging forms of water insecurity as a means of examining contemporary transformations in urban biopolitics. It is based on fieldwork conducted intermittently between March 2015 and July 2018, with full-time engagements from June to August 2016 and November 2016 to March 2017. In conjunction with ethnographic research, I participated in two community-led public health studies assessing the impacts of the Detroit water shutoffs. Drawing on grassroots critique and critical race theory, I show how the legacy of racial residential segregation and regional power are reworked into contemporary urban environment through water in new ways. I extend Michel Foucault’s generative theory of biopolitics to consider how contemporary security techniques seek to contain – but often proliferate – the kinds of threats to “life as usual” posed by emerging and endemic water contaminants. I also examine the fear that social security administrations work to ‘secure’ the separation of families from water, and each other, as protections of the welfare state are dismantled, making the privatization of water possible in theory and practice.Social movements and social theorists alike argue that urban water infrastructures have become increasingly important sites for rethinking the ethics and politics of collective living in the aftermath of industrial decline. This dissertation traces how those excluded from the city’s water – despite their claims to citizenship, property, and human rights – nevertheless engage in urban water politics, assembling water just as (and precisely where) water overflows the bounds of modern infrastructure ideals and neoliberal governance. These sites of excess and overflow point to spaces of possibility for new socialities and new types of politics, engaged under the oft-made claim that “Water is Life.” Attention to the physics and politics of hydrosocial assemblage opens up considerations for how life might be assembled otherwise.

Participatory planning policies suppress the voices of critical urban residents, and that suppression creates an oppressive status quo for low income people of color in cities. Despite asymmetric power dynamics, critical residents in Detroit, Michigan are collectivizing, mobilizing, and planning insurgently to change the status quo of their city to promote equity and justice. This dissertation ethnographically demonstrates why and how residents in Charlevoix Village Association (CVA) sharply resisted gentrification policies and how they promoted insurgency as a viable alternative to neoliberal planning.Over three main articles, the dissertation moves from participation to insurgency, contributing to urban planning theory and practice by filling gaps in insurgent planning’s critique of inclusive governance and by proposing two empirically grounded theoretical branches of insurgent planning that have relevance for planning in general: insurgent knowledge and insurgent formation. In Chapter 2, I affirm planning theorists’ understanding that the system of participation relies on asymmetric information and power that often coopts community development organizations and destroys local neighborhood fabrics. I find that critical residents are not passively engaged; when engagement fails them, critical residents create independent avenues to push back on CDCs and other arms of the planning establishment. Chapter 3 demonstrates that when the planning establishment delegitimates residents’ local knowledge, insurgents produce studied ideas and theories, which they use to critique the planning process and pose insurgent alternatives. Insurgent planners revalue long-term residents’ specific and sophisticated local knowledges and link their local knowledges with technical and academic planning knowledge to generalize their condition, strategize how to limit the planning establishment, and intervene in the direction of urban affairs. In Chapter 4, I outline specific mechanisms through which regular people become insurgent. CVA’s insurgency formed by repurposing associational infrastructure away from participation and toward independent analyses of power. These power analyses directed insurgents to strategically assert nonconsent to austerity and the reimposition of separate and unequal in their city. Overall, through these empirically driven analyses of insurgent processes, I demonstrate that insurgency led by black working class residents can to some degree limit capitalism’s neoliberal expansion and build urban landscapes toward justice and democracy.

Urban planning is a progressive endeavor. Planners strive to improve cities, to make them more equitable, beautiful, sustainable, and resilient. This aspirational quality reveals a particular orientation towards time—a culture of ‘progressive futurity’ at the core of the profession, animated by visions of desirable urban futures and strategic claims about how these might be reached. Although planners in the United States rarely talk openly about ‘progress,’ an intrinsic progressivism remains in American planning. Without it, planning’s identity and legitimacy would disappear. This dissertation examines how this progressive futurity confronts a slow crisis of urban decline. It follows the City of Detroit’s urban planners as they grapple with the consequences of population loss, economic collapse, and infrastructural decay. I suggest that the magnitude and duration of Detroit’s decline—stretched across the planners’ careers—has steadily eroded their capacity for, and their faith in, effective planning interventions. As a result, their working relationship to the future bears little resemblance to the progressive futurity of the wider profession. Instead, Detroit’s planners routinely engage with the future in deeply personal, human ways, through a ‘phenomenological futurity’ of uncertainty, fate, despair, and hope.

The Power's Out: Social Negligence in Detroit, 1973-2003 examines the ways in which the city of Detroit has deteriorated in the late twentieth due to the incompetent functionality of the power structure within the city and how they have overlooked the needs of Black inner-city residents. This thesis utilizes a combination of primary sources and secondary sources such as newspaper articles, community organizational records, autobiographies, blog posts, and interviews to contribute a narrative of Detroit that discusses the conditions of Detroit post-1967 into the twenty-first century. Although industrial decline and white flight were major contributors to Detroit’s decline, the negligence of the city administration to provide an inner-city efficient infrastructure, adequate public housing, and proper civic service response and police-community relations. Research about Detroit revealed the city corruption within Coleman A. Young's city administration was vital to the overall decline of Detroit during his twenty-year tenure.

Water insecurity, broadly understood to be a lack of access to safe, reliable, and affordable drinking water and wastewater services, is a pressing, but frequently hidden issue in Southeast Michigan. From rising water bills that force families to prioritize water over food and medicine, to water shutoffs that completely disrupt service to people’s homes, many Detroit-area residents lack support or assistance to maintain uninterrupted access and affordable bills. This research employs quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the impacts of water insecurity on households in Southeast Michigan. We find that low-income residents in Detroit and the Detroit Metro area pay water bills that exceed an affordable rate, as defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Many households must adopt coping behaviors to mitigate the financial burden of expensive bills, potentially jeopardizing personal health and well-being. While existing assistance programs provide some support in the short-term, support is not adequate to address all facets of water security. From these insights, water security is defined as reliable access to water without fear of disconnection, regular bills that households can afford without making trade-offs, assistance in times of economic shock or prolonged distress, and increased public participation and administrative transparency at the system level.

This dissertation examines the history of censorship and anti-porn politics in Detroit, beginning with the city’s literary censorship campaign in the immediate postwar era and moving up through efforts to curtail the rapid growth of adult entertainment in the early 1970s. I chart the city’s evolving methods of censoring “indecent” media, along with the activism spurring it, through the lens of the city’s rapidly changing demographics. Rather than treating anti-porn politics as static and unchanging, I explore the shifts that occurred over time as both activists and city officials increasingly drew on the rhetoric and tactics used in contemporaneous fights over race. Thus, the literary censorship based in overt religious-tinged moralizing of the 1950s fell out of fashion by the end of the 1960s, a shift that coincided with the narrowing of obscenity law, the preferred legal means of censorship. By the early 1970s, pornography had become a visible part of the urban landscape as never before, which forced Detroit to develop new methods of regulating businesses offering adult entertainment. What city officials settled on was the use of zoning law, which seemingly was unconcerned with issues of morality or decency. Not coincidentally, this morality-neutral discourse developed concurrently with color-blind racial politics of the day, with shared rhetorical strategies confirming the overlap between the two. I thereby make the case that anti-porn politics in Detroit was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the broader history of racial politics in the city. Through an examination of this history, I argue that Detroit has long played an outsized role in the history of media censorship, with the city’s methods of regulating pornography exported as the “Detroit Model” to numerous cities across the country.

Contemporary Detroit is a space of material and symbolic unevenness. As concentrated pockets of the city start to see the effects of revitalization efforts, the majority of the city continues to lose population and resources. This dissertation questions how different types of stakeholders in the city make sense of these changes between the years 2010 and 2017, analyzing competing cultural frames about the meaning of the neighborhood and city across multiple stakeholder groups: long-term residents, large and small-scale real estate developers, city officials who work in redevelopment, and newcomers to the city. I use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival data to understand the ways that these narratives about the neighborhood and city are constructed across time. I argue that the meanings of neighborhoods are reflected through mnemonic remembrances of Detroit’s Urban Renewal period, as well as different spatial scales of how the concept of gentrification is interpreted. Furthermore, the meaning of the neighborhood becomes more expansive in spaces and times of decline and conversely, more restrictive in spaces and times of growth. This dissertation makes contributions to sociological work on the study of narrative frames, symbolic and spatial boundary work, the social construction of authenticity, and the urban studies literature on spaces of decline and shrinking cities. It is also meant to serve as a translation tool between these different stakeholder groups in contemporary debates over redevelopment practices.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the decision-making process of teachers, Kindergarten through twelfth grade, who left the urban setting in metropolitan Detroit. The theories that guided this study were Rotter’s locus of control and Condorcet’s decision theory as they investigated the experiences leading to teachers’ decisions to leave the urban setting within metropolitan Detroit. Four research questions were included (a) How do select teachers, Kindergarten through twelfth grade, describe the decision-making process they underwent before leaving urban education in metropolitan Detroit? (b) How do participants describe their experiences prior to their decision to leave urban education in metropolitan Detroit? (c) What factors do participants identify as contributing to their decisions to leave the urban education setting in metropolitan Detroit? (d) What do participants think about their decision since leaving urban education in metropolitan Detroit? Purposeful sampling was used to gain 10 teachers for this study. The participants taught in predominantly urban schools in metropolitan Detroit and left the field since 2009, the year three major car companies restructured and Detroit’s economy took a turn for the worse. A triangulation method of (a) a focus group, (b) interviews and (c) member-checks were used. Data was coded and analyzed for themes. Results indicated three primary reasons for teachers’ decisions to leave the urban setting within metropolitan Detroit (a) professional, (b) cultural and (c) political.

In Detroit, green infrastructure (GI) projects are seen as an opportunity to increase both the livability and sustainability of the city. From a livability perspective, GI could help alleviate flooding. Over the last few years there was an increasing intensity of storms in Detroit due to climate change (Li & Davis, 2009). In addition to stormwater management, GI is a component of broader revitalization efforts in the city to improve the environment, quality of life, enhance safety and beautification of the city. Current study draws on data gathered as part of a larger transdisciplinary investigation of GI in Detroit (Nassauer et al. 2015). This investigation considers the effects of distance from project pilot GI sites on the perception of safety. To understand the effectiveness of the GI projects, Professor Nassauer et al surveyed nearby residents about their perceptions of four pilot bioretention flower gardens and their potential effects on the surrounding neighborhood. The survey included visualizations of six vacant lots within two clusters approximately 1.5 miles apart in Detroit’s Warrendale neighborhood. The current study investigates how safe the pilots of design look after installation of the four bioretention flower gardens, and also, how these pilots of design will affect the perception of safety in the whole neighborhood. Results of the study showed that residents found bioretention flower garden design appeared safer than mowed lots and control sites which were an image of a typical vacant lot in Detroit. Furthermore, compared to the control sites, results of the survey showed that, residents believed that the perception of safety would improve after installation of the bioretention flower gardens in the neighborhood. However I did not find a difference in perception of safety between 100 meters and 100 to 200 meters radii from each garden . I considered other factors such as social support in the neighborhood, observation of crime and demographic variables, that may have affect the perception of safety in a neighborhood as well.

School district superintendents play several roles including teacher-scholar, instructional leader, organizational manager, business manager, democratic leader, stateswoman, and social scientist. In each unique role, superintendents are district leaders who use various leadership styles including authentic leadership, team leadership, system leadership, situational leadership theory, distributed leadership, leader-member exchange theory, and transformational leadership. This case study provides an analysis of interviews with four former Detroit Public Schools (DPS) superintendents and one chief executive officer. As a historical case study focused on former district leadership from 1975 to 2015, the research retells the leadership stories in a manner that provides insider information and shares institutional knowledge about leading Michigan’s largest school district. The five district leaders interviewed for this study are Arthur Jefferson, Deborah McGriff, David Snead, David Adamany, and Karen Ridgeway. Implications for key findings are embedded across time-related themes: duration, momentum, futuring, transformation, and quality. Each leader interviewed discussed challenges relative to complex school systems including but not limited to mission, vision, values, goals, operations, finance, academics, student attendance, general accountability, policy, and politics. The dialogue and circumstances for school systems serving predominantly high poverty students and families warrants comparable discussions about public education in urban areas across the nation.

Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most significant contribution to American housing and poverty scholarship is the socio-legal data it provides to demonstrate the high economic and social costs America pays for its failure to consider housing a basic human right. Indeed, Desmond ultimately calls for an American right to housing and presents law and policy solutions in Evicted to advance such a right. This Essay argues that Desmond's mostly federal legal prescriptions are insufficient to help all Americans realize the full promise of the human right to housing . American cities should also enact local ordinances that legitimate new housing arrangements in order to fully realize the human right to housing. Part I argues that Evicted's stories show that the law operates differently in poor housing markets than in traditional markets, and that poor residents are differently situated in low-income housing markets based upon their age, sex, gender, race, and ethnicity. In this context, traditional housing laws are often a cause of, rather than a solution to, housing inequality and insecurity. Evicted also reveals that poor tenants and their landlords make informal bargains that often undermine the goals of numerous housing-related laws and sacrifice poor residents' dignity. Part II builds on Desmond's legal and policy prescriptions by providing examples of how cities can codify the right to housing at the local level through resolutions and ordinances that legitimate more equitable housing arrangements. Part II further asserts that the right to housing is a legal tool that can help localities manage and effectively internalize the mounting economic and social costs of increasing inequality in American housing markets. If, in the face of retracting federal government support for housing the poor and working-class, localities enact laws that reflect the human right to housing, they may be able to encourage the private sector and civil society to work with them to create housing markets that reduce evictions and better respond to people's housing needs.

Faced with the interconnected challenges of population loss, vacant lands, and economic disinvestment, citizens of legacy cities like Detroit increasingly seek opportunities to manufacture their own social, economic, and ecolog - ical revitalization. This master’s project offers a case study exploration of the potential for arts-based revitalization through a campus landscape design for Pewabic Pottery, one of the last surviving pottery studios of the early 20th cen - tury Arts and Crafts era and a widely-appreciated Detroit arts institution. The medium for this exploration is Pewabic’s current 1.5-acre campus, which in - cludes a half-acre of vacant land once occupied by neighboring businesses. The project also considers multiple future scenarios considering purchase of adjacent parcels both vacant and occupied. We adopted a process-orient - ed approach to advance revitalization efforts by drawing connections be - tween arts-based revitalization literature and the slate of participatory design practices used across multiple design disciplines. Methods used to engage Pewabic’s community of stakeholders included a series of design workshops, event tabling, and surveys. With the information gathered from these activi - ties, we developed three concepts for the site: 1) Hospitality, 2) Fusion, and 3) Minimalism. Each concept considers alternative design variables regarding location of a new education studio, relationship with the historic Water Works Park, expansion of Pewabic’s campus to include additional adjacent parcels, and, finally, garden design styles. We developed these design concepts in the hope that the redevelopment of the campus landscape will contribute towards revitalization of other nearby neighborhood spaces by serving as an aesthetic catalyst for ecological design principles, and by enhancing Pewabic’s capacity to attract and engage visitors along the East Jefferson Avenue corridor.

Maintaining habitats is important for plants and animals. However, habitats in urban environments are fragmented due to urbanization. The fragmentation is a barrier for wildlife movement because landscape connectivity is decreased in urban environments. Previous studies in conservation ecology paid more attention to natural landscapes than urban environments. Other studies aimed at improving urban landscape connectivity were not practical because of restrictions in fully developed urban environments. This study provides practical conservation methods by taking advantage of existing vacant land to develop green infrastructure and increase landscape connectivity. The city of Detroit is chosen as a case study because of its large potential to redevelop existing vacant land. The paper includes examining structural and functional connectivity by FRAGSTATS and Conefor, selecting core patches in ArcGIS, identifying potential corridors by the least-cost-path and evaluating corridors by gravity model. By comparing data before and after corridor built-up, results show that census tract-level connectivity metrics would be improved by developing proposed corridors. To further link research results with the city of Detroit, multi-functional green infrastructure typologies for vacant land re-development are provided. This paper provides a systematic and scientific method for developing vacant lands and other available lands by green infrastructure network, which benefits both humans and wildlife. By developing green infrastructure network, both social connection and ecology connection will be achieved. Furthermore, this paper connects research with real world situations, providing a founded and practical strategy for other cities having similar vacant lands situation to Detroit to redevelop.

Often regarded as exceptional in its degree of economic decline, conditions of abandonment and population loss, the city of Detroit has garnered the attention of media, academics and planning professionals. Significant to this draw is the role of development ‘expertise’ and its hopes of mitigating the challenges of the city through largely economically motivated development strategies. A number of scholars contributing to the literature on political economy have related expertise to neoliberal agendas, contending that the status of experts relies on the economic rationalization of policy decisions. In the context of Detroit, I will explore the role of development experts (practitioners formally trained in development professions) at a time of economic restructuring, and the discursive practices employed to reproduce their status as experts; I will also explore the communities that resist such expertise. I used discourse analysis to compare the values and rationale for redevelopment strategies as presented in four discourses: 1) urban planning academia; 2) media; 3) development professionals and 4) community groups. More specifically, I aim to understand how the narratives within differently situated development discourses frame problems and prescribe solutions and how such narratives relate to worsening disparity across race and class groups. In addition to exploring the narratives that give leverage to the economically motivated and state sanctioned development strategies that dominate planning discourse, this work focuses on the resistance to these strategies through political mobilization of community groups. These explorations focus primarily on two disparate development landscapes: Downtown-Midtown, an area of burgeoning, state-subsidized private investment, and the 48217 zip code, an area with some of the worst air quality in the state, undergoing state supported expansion of noxious industries. From these explorations, I conclude that discourse on the development of Downtown-Midtown is largely framed by a handful of private investors deemed development experts, and the philanthropic foundation community that bolsters their interests. These individuals and institutions utilize their expertise in branding campaigns that simultaneously attract a wealthier class of young professionals to the city’s core, while at the same time pathologize outer neighborhoods of the city not seen as fit for investment. Building from the racialized historic context of the 48217 zip code, community groups were found to mirror the strategies of neoliberal expertise in their efforts to stop the expansion of industry, to no avail. This points to a more complex power dynamic between experts and supposed non-experts than the literature currently offers. Finally, this dissertation considers the ways that both the media and academic planning discourse potentially denigrate lower income and communities of color in the city, treating them as outside of the goals of dominant development discourse.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, welcoming initiatives aimed specifically at attracting first generation immigrant entrepreneurs for their economic benefits are launching in shrinking cities of the Rust Belt in the Midwestern United States. However, with their narrow focus on economic benefits, these initiatives may be overlooking the spatial or community development impacts of immigrant entrepreneurship which have a strong effect on the reinvention and indeed resilience that cities are seeking to achieve by attracting immigrant entrepreneurs. The main objective of this research is to examine first generation immigrant entrepreneurship within the context of immigrant welcoming policies and plans. The five initiatives under investigation - Agenda 360 (Cincinnati), Welcome Dayton, Global Detroit, Immigrant Welcome Center of Indianapolis, and St. Louis Mosaic Project - are the longest standing consistent members of the Welcoming Economies Global Network and its predecessor organization known as the Global Great Lakes Initiative. These initiatives have the most established programming and longest track records of all member initiatives.This dissertation begins with a review of the academic literature related to the non-spatial and spatial impacts of immigrant entrepreneurship. It then presents Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analyses of each of the initiatives, a social justice framework analysis of the Welcome Dayton Plan, and an examination of eight existing indices of urban resilience. Findings include common strengths and opportunities such as peer-to-peer programs, ethnic chambers of commerce, and existing immigrant communities, as well as common weaknesses and threats such as small staff sizes, limited sources of funding, and a lack of evaluation metrics. The success of welcoming initiatives will be mitigated by external threats such as federal immigration policy, negative sentiment toward immigrants, and competing welcoming initiatives in nearby cities. Furthermore, the three tenets of social justice - equity, inclusion, and empowerment - can impact the degree of immigrant entrepreneurship and influence its spatial impacts on economic and community development. The Resilience Capacity Index (RCI) emerges as the most likely index for incorporating immigrant-related variables. The documented spatial impacts of immigrant entrepreneurship demonstrate a clear role for immigrant entrepreneurs as contributors to economic and community development processes that lead to greater urban resilience at the city and neighborhood levels. Nonetheless, some measures of urban resilience like metropolitan stability, voter participation, health insurance, and home ownership may produce skewed or inaccurate conclusions about cities or neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.This dissertation brings two bodies of research - immigrant integration and economic development - together within the context of urban planning as part of a broader discussion about the role of immigrant entrepreneurship in reinventing America's shrinking cities. The analyses presented herein advance the understanding of immigrant entrepreneurship within the context of the Welcoming Economies movement. Immigrants are important assets for the vitality and resilience of cities and neighborhoods, and this dissertation points toward the development of evaluative models that allow for greater understanding of the outcomes of immigrant welcoming initiatives. Future research also could include an examination of the relationship between welcoming initiatives and secondary migration within the United States.