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This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a step in identifying a more accurate economic history of deindustrialization. Following the extension of the timeline of deindustrialization and its divorce from the 1970s, this article examines the reasons for production facility relocation our of Detroit, prior to the 1970s. Given that the process of deindustrialization occurred prior to 1970, the reasons must be reevaluated. To this end, this article examines one of the lesser investigated reasons that auto corporations moved their production facilities out of Detroit; organized labor. It shows that organized labor was one of the driving factors of production facility relocation. This article makes use of multiple collections housed in the Reuther Archives at Wayne State University in relation to organized labor, as well as union density data. This article details how and why production facilities were pushed out of Detroit in an effort to evade organized labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) used a process called redlining to section off districts in an attempt to signal the level of risk to lenders. Consequently, lenders felt justified in turning away non-white borrowers, effectively leading to segregated communities. This practice carried on through the mid-1960s, after which some communities underwent socio-demographic transformations due to gentrification, urban renewal, and deindustrialization, amongst other things. This paper analyzes the current demographic trends in Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles to determine to what extent the resulting segregation from redlining practices has persisted. Redlining and census data from 1930 and 2020 were obtained and analyzed in order to compare the racial demographics over time. White vs. non-white population in redline districts in 1930 versus 2020 were compared in each of these cities. Whereas percent change between white majority and non-white minority provides a demographic trend over time, a local spatial autocorrelation (LISA) analysis helped to identify dense areas of minority population. Lastly, the index dissimilarity, interaction, and isolation were used to better expose persistent levels of segregation. This research provides one example of how historical GIS analysis can be done using diverse datasets to show spatio-temporal patterns of importance to ongoing issues of social justice and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cities of the American rustbelt provide a broad canvas for insurgent and guerrilla practices. Copious plots of vacant land and vacant structures of cities that have experienced substantial deindustrialization, property abandonment and population loss offer opportunities to engage with formerly productive or inhabited landscapes, even if these engagements are unsanctioned or illegal. Former industrial complexes have been a particular target of guerrilla actors, yet little is known about how sustained occupation, engagement and creative actions at postindustrial sites impact official, longer-term design practices. Exploring two sites that have long histories of transgressive activity, the Carrie Blast Furnaces in metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Packard Automotive Factory in Detroit, Michigan, this paper examines whether unauthorized actors can be sustained agents of insurgent design that inform or break the trajectory of conventional urban development practices, which typically view vacant industrial sites as "brownfields"—to be cleared, remediated and prepared for eventual private sector development. Chronicling insurgent activities and examining their intersections with local development practices, this study considers the contributions that guerrilla actors have made in the evolving plans for these historic places and assesses the potential for broader change in planning and design practices at large-scale post-industrial sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article observe the industrial plant shutdown stories in Detroit, Michigan with the experience of deindustrialization that can lead to resignation and a belief in the inevitability of a dehumanizing capitalism. It highlights plant-shutdown stories from displaced autoworkers like Gabriel Solano of General Motors, and Diane Garner of Ford Motor Company; and ways in which deindustrialization infuses and structures the life stories of Detroit workers.

Despite the tangible and documented impact race plays in questions of housing, employment, education, and health, discourses of antiracialism perpetuate the idea race—and by extension, racism—is no longer a relevant marker of disparity. In this alleged “post race” context, how do news accounts cover stories on urban crisis and renewal? This article takes up scholarly calls to develop “conceptual tools” that may enable critical scholars to explore how racism continues undercover in the 21st century. I argue for the importance of exploring how strategic forgetting operates in conjunction with the familiar and formulaic frame of personalization to erase or evade the continued presence of structured, systemic racism in the (re)construction/renewal of city spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rise in support for urban agriculture in Detroit, Michigan by the development of zoning ordinances and other policy initiatives intended to regularize urban agricultural operations. Topics discussed include population decline in Detroit due to deindustrialization and white flight, decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. on zoning ordinances and law enforcement was sparse and underfunded in Detroit.

The history of Detroit's deindustrialization is intimately connected to the long dislocation in the auto industry. This article highlights how the spatial fixes endemic to capital determined the parameters of that deindustrialization through several key moments. In particular, the role of black autoworkers and Detroit residents contending with such spatial fixes will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the history of Touch and Go Records - an independent record label founded in 1981 - to show how the late twentieth-century environment of Detroit became fertile ground for the rise of hardcore punk. As the landscape of the post-industrial city was transformed by such developments as deindustrialization and white flight, a cadre of white, suburban youth transformed spaces of abandonment into places of innovation and alternative urban redevelopment, particularly in the city's troubled Cass Corridor neighborhood. Such urban spaces provided the room for musical experimentation in ways that were not possible in the postwar American suburb. Such a process was undoubtedly informed by the economic and political histories of post-industrial Detroit. Yet this essay argues that the rise of hardcore punk was more than an indicator of economic and political transformation; it was also a moment of cultural rupture. Viewed from such a perspective, one sees a group of musicians, writers, and others set on creating a new, viable art form, one that sought to critique and replace an older dominant musical culture that had come to be perceived as lacking vitality and originality. This moment of cultural realignment came to play a great role in the evolution of late twentieth century American culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detroit’s perceived social and industrial degeneration has been matched by an unfortunate aesthetic appreciation for the image of urban ruination. Detroit, and other cities experiencing economic disinvestment, have become the inanimate models for a documentary and artistic mode of photography that fetishizes scenes of urban decline and abandonment. Such cities and urban spaces have become real-life stand-ins for the apocalyptic imagination already nurtured in broader arts and media. The fascination with the ruins of contemporary culture and the proliferation of what is sometimes referred to as “ruin porn” photography, point toward Susan Sontag’s cautious warning about the photographer’s complicity in retaining the photographed object’s state of being. Drawing on Sontag’s suspicions of photography, I offer a critique of the function and meaning of ruin photography. I draw on both Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s cautions about the interpretive function of the photograph in terms of the act of photographing the object as well as the meaning that the photograph proposes. Using this framework, I consider the recent conceptualizations of ruin, particularly the industrial ruin, as ambivalent and multifaceted. I question whether this multidimensionality is evident in the ruin photography of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and others, the urban exploration photography of Detroiturbex, and the documentary film Deptropia. I suggest that the photographer’s fascination with places of ruin carries out the double act of fixing such places firmly in a particular melancholic moment and equally fixes any potential meaning potentially represented in such imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]