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The article is situated within the conceptual lineage of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's groundbreaking Black Metropolis model. However, it provides a new way of considering this intellectual heritage. The analysis suggests that African American traditions of Pan-Africanism have not been expansively addressed in their magnitude on Black urban sociology. Drake and Cayton's theorization is reconfigured as it exists within a Pan-African value system for the contemporary Black (Diasporic) city. The research presents "unsung" Pan-African tropes that are central to the maintenance of the Black city's identity and psychological cohesion. If the mind is the "primary battlefield" as Garvey insists, then it is important to note the (beneficial) psychological impact that African American redemption and the Pan- African Metropolis can bestow on African Americans. The discussion locates Pan-Africanism as a tangible operating mechanism on African Americans' lifestyle, mental health, and (Africanized) identities within Detroit's Black community. Field observations of Detroit's African World Festival connect these festival spaces as they characterize and drive the city's identity, psychology, economic considerations, and ultimately, Pan-African groundings. The sustainability of an Afrocentric philosophy and psychology has enhanced the Black city in the manifestation of a distinctive cultural political economy. The Pan African Metropolis emerged during Detroit's Black Arts Movement (the 1970s of my youth). To this end, the article pushes back against "the lie" which overgeneralizes African Americans in a Black deficit homogeneity, whereas the "alleged Black American monolith" is not connected to any operating African continuum in their daily lives. Plain language summary: The Pan African Metropolis: Pan African Lives in a Pan African City All cities have a psychological effect on their inhabitants. How does a Pan-African value system shape the distinctive character and mindset of a city? This article attempts to answer this question. The current research on Detroit's African World Festival looks at how it connects to a larger Africanized World of Detroit (from the 1970s to the present). It locates and celebrates African Americans in Detroit who live devoted, daily Pan-African lives. It voices how the city has benefited from the norm of its Pan-African leadership. The discussion fills a needed gap as it looks at how contemporary customs of Pan-Africanism have made a positive impact on African Americans' lifestyle and mental health who live in Detroit, Michigan. The argument presents unique Pan-African values, which are referred to as Pan African tropes. These tropes have uniquely shaped Detroit's Black community's psychological makeup and distinctive personality. From this perspective, Pan-Africanism is discussed here from a holistic perspective for African Americans. It is considered deliberately as a mindset-shaping and Black progress philosophy in the foundation of the city. The cultural agency of Detroit has created an unsung tradition of Black placemaking through African heritage connections, celebrations, and preservation. Garvey insists what has made African Americans reject their African heritage is brainwashing from white/European inducement of continued mental slavery, as Bob Marley captures Garvey's most comprehensive message in Redemption Song, "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds". This is why Garvey tells us the primary battlefield is the mind. Ultimately, the mental health of African Americans is dependent upon the recovery of their historical dignity, and a tranformative Africana Studies education, and thus, more accurate knowledge as it applies to them. Thus, Pan-Africanism has a seriously unrecognized psychological benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about ruins and photography and especially so in the context of Detroit's declining urban landscape. Numerous books present us with beautiful ruined buildings and landscapes, and further explanations why we might be drawn to images of decay. While some claim that ruin imagery triggers a form of resistance to the forces of capitalism, others stand critical to the beautification of ruins by arguing that such imagery removes viewers from any reflection on what causes ruins. Detroit's new saviour Dan Gilbert is one of those ruin detractors who blames Detroit's image as the poster child of ruin photography for all failed investments. This paper focusses on these image battles in the construction of a city's place identity and argues for an understanding of ruin photographs as performance. Instead of offering a trace of an object once in front of the camera, I investigate how a collection of forgotten photo-installations curated by Detroit's Urban Center for Photography gesture performatively to the ongoing event demolished by neglect whereby buildings are intentionally left to rot for profitable real estate development. Strategies of advertisement campaigns, it will be shown, are appropriated to make such live gestures. Investigating the doing aspect or force of ruin photographs contributes to cultural geography's recent concerns around the potential 'force of representations: their capacities to affect and effect' and as such moves away from one of the central tasks of cultural geography, namely its focus on what representations mean. The spectre of Detroit's image battle ultimately should provide us with questions about the construction of a city's identity through visual documents and enable us to question the mechanism of neoliberal urban planning and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the acclaim, struggles, and ultimate closure of a Detroit public school for pregnant and parenting teens that was shuttered despite national commendation, community protests, for-profit charter conversion, and a civil rights lawsuit. Authors analyze discourse from educational, media, and legal data sources to offer a critical policy analysis of the school's closure trajectory. Authors suggest how the effects of state decision making, restricted student agency, and waning legal protection fueled public educational disenfranchisement rather than boosted educational access and equity. Implications regarding school closure policy reform, community coalition building, and renewed legal protections in urban education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the impacts of reductions in residential effective tax rates on homeownership in Detroit, Michigan. The decline in effective tax rates was driven by a citywide reassessment that significantly reduced effective tax rates. These estimates are used to infer the potential impacts of moving from a traditional property tax to a split-rate tax in which the tax rate applied to land is higher than the tax rate applied to structures. Using Detroit parcel-level data over the years 2012–2019, we find that tax reductions resulting from property reassessment generated a very small net decrease in homeownership. Our evaluation suggests that moving to a split rate tax would likely result in a minimal change in the homeownership rate in Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on three years of fieldwork, this article explains the emergence and persistence of two conflicting styles of street life in Brightmoor, a depopulated, majority Black, poor Detroit neighborhood facing early gentrification. As most longtimers were inured to historical neighborhood violence, they tended to act vigilantly in public, even after recent crime declines. By contrast, White newcomers, most of whom had moved from middle-class neighborhoods, often defied vigilance such as by organizing a farmers' market across from an open-air drug market. They mobilized aspirational public life as a means for changing the neighborhood and end in itself. To explain these conflicting styles, this article theorizes the cultural mechanism of " the hysteresis of street life. " Styles of street life, shaped by residents' unequal historical neighborhood experiences, tend to linger under conditions of gradual neighborhood change. It also shows how the hysteresis of street life may contribute to the reproduction of inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This content analysis of news stories about the Detroit water shutoffs sought to understand how the ongoing water crisis is framed in local Detroit newspapers—as a human rights issue, or in relation to the city's financial burden. Using a deductive framing approach, we paid special attention to the frames used within stories and whether articles contained context related to the water shutoffs, specifically about health implications. We paid particular attention to how the focus on health implications changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Results showed that stories about the water shutoffs often included an economic consequences and responsibility frame which put the blame for the water shutoffs on the city's government and simultaneously called for the city to step up and fix the problem. Very few news articles focused on the human element of the story, with only a small fraction of the stories including the voices of residents living with no water or focusing on the health implications for those without running water in their homes. These findings led us to make strategic recommendations for reporters covering the water shutoffs in Detroit and similar areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Detroit, Michigan, the urban poor fear they are being displaced and replaced by water. As part of the city's recent redevelopment efforts, planners have proposed creating green and blue infrastructure zones to manage urban flooding and mitigate the volume of overflow storm and sewer waters that pollute the Great Lakes each year. The areas slated for these water retention zones are the same marginal neighborhoods where Black residents face frequent foreclosures due to water debts and mass shutoffs from water and sewer services. This paper explores how water materializes and mediates uneven landscapes of livability, as well as new modes of living in common among those excluded from the urban commons. I introduce the concepts of "bluelining" and "blues infrastructures" in order to think through the contested assemblages of water, race, and space at the margins of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a corpus of contemporary French novels, this article proposes to explain the different approaches to the city. If it does not exhaust the fictional vein of the "course of a social territory" (Viart), our grouping around the works of Patrick Deville, Jean Rolin, Tanguy Viel, Thomas B-Reverdy and Laurent Gaudé shows however that the city is at the same time a motive and an engine, a crucible as much as a catalyst for the current major literary questions. The city will be French or not; at the centre of all violence, it becomes accursed; at the mercy of the elements, it is martyred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, a group of geographers led by William Bunge founded the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a methodology based on teaching neighborhood residents the skills of a folk geographer to help them improve their built environments. This article focuses on the necessity of revisiting the geographical expedition format today and its influence on participatory urban planning practices and advocacy mapping. After looking at DGEI's activities in the Detroit neighborhood of Fitzgerald, I then focus on two specific elements in direct relation to the field of urban planning: that of communal participation and that of the map-making process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes an impasse as "what it feels like to be in the middle of a shift." This paper mobilizes that notion of impasse to critically analyze the position of Detroit's "maker" community against the background of a rapidly changing city. Makers, who might crudely be described as small craft-manufacturers, have found themselves entangled in an emergent narrative of place transition captured by the juxtapositional monikers of "Old Detroit" and "New Detroit." The goal of this paper is to think through what gets taken up by these Old/New representations of Detroit – and what the shift between the two feels like – as described by makers. I interpret Old and New Detroit to be unique-but-inseparable place imaginaries; they are the representational bracketing around a transitional lifeworld in which the optimism makers brought to Old Detroit has largely come unraveled in New Detroit. This unraveling, I suggest, is not only a collective melancholy associated with feelings of eroding creativity and autonomy, but also a percolating confrontation with the privileged fantasies of Old Detroit. For makers, New Detroit meant professionalization and gentrification: on one hand, the exigencies of New Detroit have occluded the creative and egalitarian form of change they envisioned for the city; on the other, it opened new financial benefits for their small businesses. The resulting impasse tasked makers with adjusting to the economic and moral uncertainties posed by still-unfolding circumstances in a changing Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an exploratory overview of different research literatures examining the relationship between urban nature or green space on the one hand, and marginalized, stigmatized, and illicit activities on the other. We situate this discussion within the geographic literature concerning assemblage theory and informality, and apply these concepts to urban green space. We offer some comparative examples from Detroit and Berlin, two cities known for their green space and illicit activity, but with very different histories and cultural contexts. For this purpose, we draw on our own primary research in both Detroit and Berlin, examining how the dynamics of these interactions produce diverse and distinctive urban places in some cases and associations of danger or insecurity in others, sometimes both simultaneously. We utilize diverse methodologies, including qualitative interviews and focus groups, mobile explorations, photography, and sketching to provide examples of spaces as complex assemblages of actors with diverse, emergent potentials. We conclude by contending that green spaces and urban nature belong on the same map as studies of informal and illicit activities, adopting a more fluid conception of the shifting relationship between people and green space in the evolving city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First, we examine Businessmen Daniel B. "Dan" Gilbert and Michael "Mike" Ilitch's multibillion-dollar investments in Detroit's office buildings and entertainment venues. Next, we set their entrepreneurial activities against the city and region's historical political economy extending back to the early 1900s. Third and finally, we determine that Gilbert and Ilitch's plans for entertainment and commercial development took precedence over planners and their grand plans for citywide and region-wide redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evictions have recently gained attention as a problem affecting millions of households worldwide. This study contributes to knowledge on the conditions leading to housing insecurity and evictions by examining the role of foreclosure markets in feeding portfolios of slum landlords and contract sellers in Detroit's single-family residential neighborhoods. Leveraging data from tax foreclosure auctions and eviction filings from 2005 to 2017, we link foreclosure sales to subsequent eviction cases and estimate the neighborhood-level impact of prior year tax sales on current year evictions. We separately examine the acquisition size and eviction rate of major individual auction buyers. These findings shed light on the contemporary construction of eviction economies in distressed cities through foreclosure markets and investors' methods for profiting from the constrained housing options of low-income and credit-impaired households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing post–World War I housing shortages and the prospect of social unrest, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic supported the construction of modern workers' dwellings. Their efforts produced an extraordinary volume of new units, transforming the working-class experience. Yet, architectural and planning historians have overlooked the comparative potential in this body of work, which includes landmarks of modernism and wood-framed bungalows. This article contributes a transatlantic comparison. It explores European and US policies and projects, shedding light on the particularity of the American case, epitomized by Detroit, where in the absence of planned developments workers sought houses as independent consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hipster scene in Detroit, Michigan, is explored via participant observation and in-depth interviews. Participants used hipster norms as a resource for masculinity dilemmas, including a lack of white- or blue-collar jobs and stable female partners. The analysis examines how these men successfully enacted their progressive values in some arenas (read: gender) but not in others (race relations). More specifically, their emphasis on the creative class, the bicycle as an attainable status symbol, and "bro-mances" served as masculinity balms. These strategies are examples of how homophobia and violence are not always the response to "threatened" masculinity. At the same time, participants enacted a definition of community and specific spatial practices that resulted in a subculture with a white majority within a city with a black majority. This work demonstrates how ethnography is a powerful tool for studying the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in subcultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical case study analyzes Michigan's implementation of Public Act 4 (PA4), also known as the emergency management (EM) takeover law. PA4 grants the state control of school districts with dire budgetary problems. As most U.S. school districts are citywide, PA4 gives the state direct control over all the (previously locally controlled) schools in Detroit. We use tenets from critical race theory (CRT) and components from critical policy analysis (CPA) and offer a critical race policy analysis (CRPA) to explore racial power and privilege enacted by PA4, imposed upon Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the early 1960s onward, battles over school desegregation took on an increasingly metropolitan orientation, one all but destroyed by the Supreme Court's 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley. In Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia, segregationist urbanites, when faced with a legal challenge either created or made possible by black civil rights advocates, reversed course and trumpeted the advantages of metropolitan desegregation. These tactical metropolitanists recognized that a larger desegregation area reaching into the predominantly white suburbs would mean that white children would continue attending majority-white schools and they understood that stoking suburban opposition to desegregation could defeat integrationist legislation. Despite their segregationist motives, tactical metropolitanists offered a potentially productive solution capable of mitigating white flight, providing lasting integration, and aligning with the efforts of integrationist civil rights advocates in court. Uncovering tactical metropolitanism complicates our understandings of urban segregation and the sources of metropolitan reform. It suggests the need for a metropolitan history of civil rights that centers the importance of municipal boundaries in perpetuating inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force in Detroit in the 1924 and 1925 elections. In the 1910s, the Detroit Citizens League had risen in Detroit politics through its practice of the rhetoric of political Protestantism, designed to mobilize Protestant laymen through religious appeals. In the 1920s, this style of politics backfired on the Citizens League: after spending years focusing on Detroit's business elite, Protestants abandoned the Citizens League in droves when that organization backed a Catholic for mayor. By turning to the Ku Klux Klan, many Protestant voters found an organization making the appeals that they had backed a decade before and which was better at incorporating them than the Citizens League. Ultimately, the Citizens League's response to the Klan was complicated both by reluctance to further alienate past supporters and by an inability to unite politically with past foes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to scholarship on urban visual culture by advancing understandings of how visual imageries may become (online and off-line) sites of confrontation between dominant media perspectives and the lived experiences of urban citizens. Based on participatory photography amongst local residents in Detroit, this article provides transformative insights by contrasting sense makings of Detroiters with dominant media portrayals of a "decaying" city. Residents were asked what images they would use to "see" and represent the city. Photo elicitation interviews revealed interlaced lived experienced and narrated reminiscences of local life and the material urban fabric beyond the prevailing narratives of mere neglect and abandonment. This study develops further knowledge of how photography can simultaneously operate as a critical socio-spatial research subject and an empowering tool for research participants. Through shifting the hegemonic locus of media agents toward residents' positionalities, findings indicated potentials for redressing the misunderstood spaces of the everyday life of ordinary people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that a distinctive character of the Black city is revealed in its connections to African heritage preservation. The Africanized Black city is situated within the long foundations of Pan African thought. A main assertion is that Black dignity is (re)instilled through the reconstruction of Afrocentric identity and philosophy for the Black urbanite navigating the unresolved problem(s) of the color line. Pan African legacies in the African American encounter with the modern city erected the localization of "African Home," where the spiritual citizenship inhabited by Pan African architects generated an agency of self-determination in Black placemaking. In this way, Black placemaking "refers to the ways that Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population of Detroit has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the imaginaries that shape the city are in constant transformation, changing with each successive government or regeneration initiative. Since 2010, downtown Detroit has been targeted by blight removal projects, real-estate speculation and redevelopment plans. These growth-oriented imaginaries shape the ways in which place is perceived and encountered – materially and conceptually – often responding to ruin and decay with erasures and evictions that play out through cultural geographies of precarity, simultaneously disappearing and reproducing conditions of inequality. The changes in the city are reflected in my own experiences of Detroit in 2009 and 2015, using walking and driving methods to support grounded and emplaced encounters with the ‘unbecoming’ ruins in the city. The city of 2009 is being replaced – in imagination, and in reality – by a new way of thinking about Detroit, which asks us to imagine differently, to positively re-envision the future possibilities for growth and change. This article interrogates the different imaginaries of regeneration in the city and considers, through urban ruins, places that are absent from the new way of thinking Detroit. Through Berlant’s ‘precarity’ and Massey’s ‘emplacement’, this discussion reveals a complex process of unbecoming that is typified in the unstable material, cultural and historical geographies that structure the experience of place in Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tells of efforts to establish Detroit’s public housing, exploring questions about the origin of this programmatic effort and its manifestations in that city. Josephine Gomon, an engineering-trained white woman picked to direct Detroit’s first housing commission, helped shape low-income housing during the mid-1930s, and also helped establish planning in the city. We explore both race and gender barriers that she faced and also discuss her creative approaches to relocation and development. Gomon faltered in some ways but offered a glimpse into the missed potential of future redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1921 and 1939, the border separating Detroit, Michigan, from Windsor, Canada, represented a key site for undocumented immigration on America’s northern border, and the migrants in question were European. This essay examines industrial urban America in the wake of 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts to reveal the effects of restriction and policing on America’s emerging welfare state. It finds that in Detroit, after federal policies gave nativism the force of the law, local smuggling, policing, and enforcement practices branded foreign-born Europeans as illegal regardless of their legal status. During the New Deal Era, when the federal government built America’s welfare system, the stakes for belonging to the nation-state became higher than ever. In this moment of transition, local actors drew on rhetoric connecting foreigners to crime and dependence to urge federal policymakers to tie welfare benefits to citizenship. These local initiatives in Detroit and across the nation prompted the federal government to purge non-citizens from the Works Progress Administration, the new welfare program most associated with dependence and relief. Ultimately, this essay argues that a shift in national mood about foreignness in urban America took hold of the United States in the 1920s and shaped federal welfare policy by the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today’s Detroit has come to represent more than a single city in decline. Its abandoned landscape, from formerly majestic public buildings to entirely depopulated neighborhoods, symbolizes the devastation that has followed deindustrialization in former manufacturing centers globally. Detroit’s descent into emergency management and bankruptcy has attracted extensive commentary. This essay reviews three significant recent contributions to this growing literature, in order to evaluate Detroit’s prospects for future revitalization and to identify how analysis of the city’s experiences might contribute to further analysis and policy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the premise that pictures are not only culturally but also economically meaningful in the context of tourism, this article proposes a rearrangement of MacCannell’s model “semiotics of attraction” to discuss current negotiations of meaning of sight/site marking with urban photography. In Detroit, the city’s negative image has changed from ill-reputed urban wasteland to picturesque ruinscape of “America’s Great Comeback City.” Turning the post-industrial shrinking city into a tourist attraction has not resolved socio-economic problems but instead commodified them. Carving out the underlying neoliberal ideology in cultural meaning of urban decline at the example of Detroit’s changed image, this article puts forth to debate in how far tourism shifts from being a leisure activity to being a marketing strategy and what that means for negotiations of cultural values through tourism semiotics, the significance of photography, and the visual in urban tourism, and eventually for the significance of tourism in urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 3 December 2013, a federal judge approved the bankruptcy filing for Detroit, MI, the largest municipality to seek such protection in US history. The bankruptcy forced those overseeing the city to determine the economic value of Detroit's assets, including the art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. These efforts led to debates over the moral commitments to art, on the one hand, and paying the city's debts, including pensions owned to retired city workers, on the other. We analyze newspaper coverage of this situation from US newspapers as well as Detroit Free Press between 1 January 2013 and 31 January 2014 to investigate how these moral commitments became moral orders during an economic crisis that has been argued is symptomatic of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous U.S. cities suffered immense fiscal strain following the subprime mortgage crisis and financial crash of 2007–8. Diminished revenues, tightened credit, and speculative financing that went bad in the aftermath fueled widespread fiscal distress on the local scale. Although the current moment resembles fiscal crises that crested in cities in the 1970s–90s, two factors distinguish the current period. First, municipal affairs have become thoroughly financialized—dominated by speculative securities and volatile debt arrangements—such that local crisis can no longer be understood apart from financial market instability. Second, local fiscal politics have become increasingly removed from democratic oversight and control. This de-democratization hinders the capacity of political communities to reregulate markets and rebuild urban communities. An analytic model derived from the work of Hyman Minsky and Karl Polanyi emphasizes how cities become ensnared in a “financial instability” cycle and how communities seek to protect themselves by way of the “double movement.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As researchers working in Detroit, we have become sensitized to the rhetoric often deployed to describe the city, especially the vocabulary of monstrosity. While providing powerful images of Detroit’s problems, insidious monster narratives also obscure genuine understanding of the city. In this article, we first discuss the city of Detroit itself, describing its place in the American and global social imaginary as a product of its particular history. Second, we consider the concept of monstrosity, particularly as it applies to urban environments. Following this, we relate several prevalent or popular categories of monster to descriptions of Detroit, considering what each one reveals and implies about the state of the city, its landscape and its people. Finally, we discuss how narratives of monstrosity may be engaged and utilized to serve alternative ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Detroit’s City Beautiful Movement. The construction process was a place-making effort designed to implant order on the urban landscape that involved the displacement of a community who represented everything that city planners sought to erase from Detroit’s city center: overcrowding, poverty, immigrants, and transient populations. Current historical archaeological research reveals how the existing ornamental landscape of Roosevelt Park masks the history of a forgotten working-class neighborhood. This synthesis of archival and material evidence details the conditions of life within the neighborhood and of a contentious, decade-long displacement struggle rooted in the inequalities of early-20th-century industrial capitalism. Positioned at the start of a century of controversial urban planning initiatives, the Roosevelt Park case study encourages understandings of displacement as a process that has diachronic and comparative dimensions, both in Detroit and in other urban settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing orientation of urban governance toward managing territory as a collection of real estate markets is an internalization of neoliberal reason, particularly its entrepreneurial logics, which results in an emerging market city, a city restructured in the service of markets and governed as a series of micro-market geographies. This reconfiguration of urban governance in US cities is a transition to the management for markets rather than population. This paper offers a case in which the rendering of the city as a series of markets underpins a multi-million dollar foundation-led planning project in Detroit that reimagines and restructures the role of urban governance in seeking a spatial fix for investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax foreclosure offers an opportunity to investigate processes of disinvestment in the city. Prior research has not considered how tax foreclosure administration protects or further damages neighborhoods where foreclosure occurs. Detroit’s loss of households led to disinvestment in housing and demolition of structures. In addition, at each of the three stages of property foreclosure and disposition, implementers took actions that promised to encourage disinvestment in property by facilitating the spread of blight and encouraging negative externalities. This occurred because (1) foreclosures took many owner-occupied properties; (2) the sale of properties to government entities was small and did not promote reuse; and (3) the foreclosure auctions disadvantaged purchasers who would become owner-occupants, channeled properties in strong neighborhoods to investors at low prices, and sold properties disproportionately to destructive buyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critiques the Detroit Future City (DFC) strategic framework concerning municipal service provision and land use over the next few decades. Relying on policy and media documents, we show that the DFC exhibits narrow, market-oriented logics characteristic of the pervasive hegemony of neoliberal urbanism in American city governance. We address the corporate orientation of the Detroit Works Project, the public–private partnership behind DFC, and argue that the plan may exacerbate the racialized spatial injustices produced in Detroit by 20th-century exclusionary metropolitan growth, ineffective governance, and decades-long flawed approaches to economic development. Furthermore, DFC not only advances previous planned-shrinkage attempts but also seeks to repurpose major areas of the city for global investment, reversing their zoning for agriculture and green space. Our analysis of census data shows that Detroit’s most disadvantaged residents disproportionately reside in areas designated as future “innovation landscapes.” Exploratory spatial data analysis indicates that these zones are not internally homogeneous and engulf resilient residential land usage. Moreover, greening serves the symbolic purpose of reconstituting problematically racialized “Black” areas as purified, investment-ready spaces. We urge neoliberal urban research to continue tracing its global embedding and relational evolution, but also to reorganize the pernicious sociospatial reality on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper dissects the ways in which Fordist and other corporate and state actors laid social and urban frameworks for Detroit in the early twentieth century and considers the urban practices of immigrant groups as these industries declined. I look at Arab and South Asian immigrants, many of whom arrived in the United States during periods of intense economic and national crises, and examine how they navigated through an “Americanized” and industrially fractured landscape. I argue that these immigrant groups drew into dense immigrant-oriented neighborhoods, where each community had their own means of propagating identity through national and religious forms, constructing and reusing buildings through a range of architectural references, and reinventing local and traditional building forms. Half a century later, these neighborhoods served as platforms that put forth the visions of immigrant communities, economically sustained a deteriorating industrial landscape, and became the vehicles by which immigrants claimed territoriality and belonging in Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Detroit’s long-range planning agenda—as articulated in the Detroit Future City (DFC) plan—is based on an innovative vision of a smaller, greener city. Implementing this vision rests on clearing the city’s most abandoned and deteriorated neighborhoods and transforming the area into vast green spaces. Eventually, therefore, the eighty-eight thousand people currently residing in this zone must (be) relocate(d). As services are phased out and infrastructure networks decommissioned, it is reasoned outmigration will accelerate; this strategy of “urban triage” geographically targets expenditures on the basis of viability, such that the flow of public resources to “nonviable” neighborhoods is constricted. This article explores one assumption that underlies triage-based policy and planning. Namely, it is believed that by removing infrastructures and services (“city systems”) from a given area, people will leave that area, a causal proposition that can be broken into two constituent parts. First, there is nothing unproblematic about removing, no matter how incrementally, the city systems that serve as the skeletal framework of the city. City systems are politically and institutionally embedded within a complex web of intersecting structures, processes, relationships, and interests—a “stickiness” that complicates efforts to dismantle them. The second half of the proposition is that removing city systems will provide the needed incentive for people to voluntarily move out of the targeted areas. This assumption, however, may not appreciate the degree of socio-spatial persistence that can be exhibited by groups occupying abandoned spaces. Thus, even if efforts to geographically shrink city systems are successful, there is reason to believe that social remnants of community may indefinitely persist in target areas even in the face of great hardship—including the cessation of basic services. The present analysis suggests that the burden of proof falls on those predicting that the withdrawal of city systems will succeed where decades of generalized deprivation have failed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Vacant land invites occupation, both by ruderal vegetation and spontaneous human intervention. This active engagement—taking the form of art installations, cultivated plots, or domestic appropriations—is often unplanned and temporary. Capable of existing outside of market forces, the projects are realized efficiently, but without long-term durability. Their short-term value is undeniable but so is their vulnerability. This is especially true of landscape projects on abandoned lands. The limitations of temporary projects are elaborated across diverse occupation types, including guerilla activities, pop-up projects, design collaborative work, and short-term land leases. The argument is structured around four main points. First, public space needs to be unregulated and diverse, not just on a temporary basis in leftover spaces. Second, landscape projects require time to develop to perform culturally and ecologically. Third, temporary projects can be placeholders that limit the need for long-term re-visioning. Finally, cities with large inventories of abandoned land require greater restructuring than the temporary can promote. The temporary functions well as programmatic overlay or an event landscape to activate an existing, clearly articulated, often vibrant, space rather than as a catalyst for systemic urban change in places of disinvestment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

From images of major transport infrastructures and housing blocks, to drug rehabilitation centers, vacant lots, and abandoned industrial warehouses, the City of Detroit has been one of the most photographed of all cities since the 1940s. Although much has been written about the historical legacies of urban change in Detroit and beyond, far less is known about the photographic collections that participated in the redevelopment of Detroit since the postwar period. This article therefore seeks to chart and unravel photographic depictions of two cycles of decline and renaissance: urban renewal (1940s–1960s) and city-center renaissance (1970s–1990s). How photography participated in these two cycles of production, reproduction, consumption, and display of photographs will be analyzed by focusing on citywide groups such as the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Committee of Detroit (1940s), Mayor Coleman Young’s image-led campaigns produced by the Department of Public Information (1970–1994), and social documentary photographer Camilo José Vergara’s ruin park proposal (1995). In their search for a community of shared interest to manipulate how the Detroit citizen had to look at their city, the Citizens’ Council of Detroit, the author argues, embodies Vergara’s discourse of decline as well as Young’s renaissance vision. In sum, this article offers a history of an overlooked factor in the redevelopment of Detroit, namely the role played by and given to photographs, and as such contributes to the current debates on Detroit’s photographic image exemplified primarily by ruin porn. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stone’s retrospective article holds to the view of his earlier work that a city’s fundamental capacity to confront existential challenges is made possible only by the engagement of elite actors with the resources for sustained politics. In this article, we set out to illustrate ways in which actors marginal to regime politics—neighborhood organizations, nonprofits, labor movements, and immigrant groups—can offer examples of sustained politics that provide alternate agendas for city politics by looking at three different policy arenas in three different cities: housing in New York, labor rights in Los Angeles, and education in Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How carrying a concealed weapon reinforces and challenges gender norms and changes how women move through and experience public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, city halls and local business communities cooperated to forestall urban decline in the face of population, industry, and retail loss to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. Before the U.S. Congress passed laws that established national housing programs, pro-growth coalitions in threatened cities launched programs designed to revitalize central business districts and lobbied in state capitals for legislation authorizing redevelopment efforts. In some notable cases, path-breaking measures crafted at the local and state levels served as models for the national initiatives that followed. Believing in the centrality of improved automobile access to their downtown redevelopment efforts, city leaders and business interests followed the same path in transportation as they had in housing. The case of Detroit illustrates how the drive for downtown renewal began before the federal government assumed the primary role with the passage of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociologist Jonathan Jan Benjamin Mijs explores Detroit, the symbol of destructive global forces, and finds agency in a wealth of ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of the ‘mega’ or world city seems inseparable from the ambivalent and transient experience of modernity – the ideals of liberty, individuality, property, accelerating progress, and, for many, the realities of immobility, anonymity, poverty, and arresting regression. When more than half of the global population pursues an existence within an urban frame, the densities and boundaries of urban spaces swell to fantastical proportions. With the vast increase in size, so the experiences and expectations of the city become more pronounced and profound. This introduction to this special issue of Thesis Eleven, ‘Big City Blues’, discusses the themes and stories of the articles below, which present different aspects of life in the metropolis. The over-stimulation of the desensitized urbanite, the wandering flâneur who fortifies him/her self against fragmenting pressures, the explosion of everyday peace into riots, the battles for political and social recognition of identity and property rights, and the financial meltdown of an entire municipal institution, are just some of the things that take place in the modern city, and are explored here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent declaration of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history has propelled Detroit’s plight into the international spotlight. Though a victim of the general decline of US manufacturing, drawing on Thomas Sugrue’s pioneering work I argue that Detroit’s crisis is better understood as a specifically urban crisis. The city’s concentrated poverty and desolation and its fiscal straits are not reducible to broader economic trends, nor are they exclusively the product of political mismanagement. Rather, they are the outcome of a long history of economic decentralization and racial segregation, made worse by a politico-administrative arrangement that distributes wealth and services unequally across the metropolitan area. By imposing municipal austerity, Detroit’s bankruptcy is unlikely to do much to address these fundamental inequalities. Any plan to revitalize the city must move beyond boosterism and tackle head on the problems of racial and economic segregation that continue to affect Detroit’s 700,000 residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, Detroit’s historic building stock of automotive manufacturing facilities has mostly disappeared. Demolition, redevelopment, and abandonment have left little to mark the city’s twentieth-century history as the world capital of the automobile industry. Planning and policy making have been complicit by publicly subsidizing destructive redevelopment and by failing to advocate for retention or preservation of significant structures and complexes. Even today, Detroit’s leadership calls for the demolition of one of the city’s last remaining historic auto factories. This article surveys the disappearance of Detroit’s auto factories and documents the histories of three of the largest complexes: the Chrysler-Chalmers Plant, cleared for a redeveloped factory; the Cadillac Plant, cleared for a failed economic development project; and the Packard Plant, slowly abandoned over sixty years. The article calls for a revised theory and practice of preservation that accommodates the weak markets, imperfect conditions, and informal uses that characterize abandoned industrial buildings in shrinking cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The policy actions of senior levels of government can often be important catalysts to collective action for metropolitan governance. This article compares the challenges that actors in metropolitan Detroit have faced in attempting to establish metropolitan transit governance in response to the promise of federal funding for regional transit in 1967 and the grants announced in the 2000s. How has the region responded differently to the challenge of regional transit in the most recent wave of funding? What accounts for governance failure even when, at various points in the historical debate, local actors have been in agreement on a metro transit agenda? What has changed since the 1960s and will these differences empower the metro region to finally establish metropolitan transit governance? Finally, what can the lessons of these two periods teach us about governing regional transit in fragmented political contexts? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the music education and enculturation of Motown musicians who grew up in greater Detroit. The early musical lives of Motown musicians are described—in the home environment, in schools and in black urban neighborhoods. Schools are shown to be spaces of musical nurturance, both in the context of the formal curriculum and in the school culture at large. The story provides a positive example of urban music education that can inform and inspire music education today. It helps identify factors that strengthen relationships between school and community; it highlights the ecological nature of school music located within a complex network of social and cultural institutions that contribute to music education; and it illustrates how schools and individual teachers can provide a space for students to perform music of popular idioms. It also provides evidence of the power of music in the lives of students as well as of the capacity of young people to generate and contribute to musical culture and to effect social change through their music-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the USA's urban north, most blacks and whites lived and worked in racially segregated spaces during World War II. Public transit vehicles provided sites of interracial contact between these segregated realms. The Detroit case shows that under crowded wartime conditions contact between blacks and whites on public transit exacerbated existing racial tensions. As black passengers and vehicle operators became a more visible presence during the war, many white Detroiters acted upon their fears of losing spatial control of public transit vehicles. Using police reports of daily incidents, newspapers, letters and rumours, the paper explores white riders' attempts to thwart blacks' claims to equal access on public transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the roles of manufacturing employment, neighborhood poverty, and family structure in determining wages among Detroit, MI workers, just prior to the current economic crisis. Employment in manufacturing has been crucial for blacks and whites: 39% of black and of white men in the Detroit metropolitan area worked in manufacturing in 2000. Regression analysis in this paper estimates employment in manufacturing raised wages 15.8% for all workers in the metropolitan area, 24.4% for blacks and 13.8% for whites. It finds a higher wage penalty (4.7%) for blacks in non-manufacturing industries than is found when manufacturing sector jobs are included (2.6%). Wage returns to education were greater in the non-manufacturing employment sector, especially for blacks. Residence in the poorest central city neighborhoods reduced wages significantly for white manufacturing and non-manufacturing workers. Its coefficient was insignificant for black workers. Gender and marital status effects on wages differed between blacks and whites in magnitude: White women suffered a larger penalty for their sex than black women (22.6 versus 9.6%) yet black men enjoyed a greater return to marriage than white men (27.5 versus 25.0%). Controlling for manufacturing reduced the gender wage gap and the returns to marriage for men. These findings suggest greater accessibility for women; and lower returns to marriage in non-manufacturing sectors. Among employed blacks access to manufacturing jobs has been their main source of decent wages. The adverse effects of the industry's job loss in the 1980s and 1990s impacted all Detroit residents. Other high wage industries have employed relatively few blacks, have not paid them well; and have suffered job loss and slow growth over the period. Education could have raised wages for non-manufacturing workers, but not as much as access to manufacturing jobs. Today as in 2000, Detroit's residents desperately need job creation or relocation to the central city; and job training and anti-discrimination policy enforcement throughout the metro-area. All of these would be necessary to offset job loss and reduce inequality and poverty in Detroit. The extent to which blacks will benefit from 2010-11 improvements in manufacturing employment in Detroit depends upon whether private companies and the state provide equal access to the jobs and the training new technologies require. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic geographic targeting (SGT) of community development resources has become increasingly common among cities attempting to enhance the impact of limited community development resources. Through an examination of a unique geographically targeted community development initiative undertaken by the City of Detroit, the author shows that despite environmental changes that made adoption of SGT politically viable, efforts to implement SGT, particularly efficiency-based SGT (EB-SGT), were hampered by political, institutional, and technical factors. The author discusses the likely impact that these factors have on the potential for adopting and successfully implementing EB-SGT as a community development strategy in other cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]