Working Detroit

Working Detroit PDF Author: Steve Babson
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The book concludes with an examination of the present day crisis facing the labor movement.

Working Detroit

Working Detroit PDF Author: Steve Babson
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The book concludes with an examination of the present day crisis facing the labor movement.

A Fluid Frontier

A Fluid Frontier PDF Author: Karolyn Smardz Frost
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814339603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Scholars of the Underground Railroad as well as those in borderland studies will appreciate the interdisciplinary mix and unique contributions of this volume.

Mapping Detroit

Mapping Detroit PDF Author: June Manning Thomas
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 081434027X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Containing some of the leading voices on Detroit's history and future, Mapping Detroit will be informative reading for anyone interested in urban studies, geography, and recent American history.

A People's Atlas of Detroit

A People's Atlas of Detroit PDF Author: Andrew Newman
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814342981
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This innovative collection builds bridges between multiple areas of social activism as well as current scholarship in geography, anthropology, history, and urban studies to inspire communities in Detroit and other cities towards transformative change.

The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit PDF Author: Andrew Herscher
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472035215
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Intense attention has been paid to Detroit as a site of urban crisis. This crisis, however, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has so often been noted; it has also yielded an explosive production of seemingly valueless urban property that has facilitated the imagination and practice of alternative urbanisms. The first sustained study of Detroit’s alternative urban cultures, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility. The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as “unreal estate”: urban territory that has slipped through the free- market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.

DIY Detroit

DIY Detroit PDF Author: Kimberley Kinder
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452949859
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
For ten years James Robertson walked the twenty-one-mile round-trip from his Detroit home to his factory job; when his story went viral, it brought him an outpouring of attention and support. But what of Robertson’s Detroit neighbors, likewise stuck in a blighted city without services as basic as a bus line? What they’re left with, after decades of disinvestment and decline, is DIY urbanism—sweeping their own streets, maintaining public parks, planting community gardens, boarding up empty buildings, even acting as real estate agents and landlords for abandoned homes. DIY Detroit describes a phenomenon that, in our times of austerity measures and market-based governance, has become woefully routine as inhabitants of deteriorating cities “domesticate” public services in order to get by. The voices that animate this book humanize Detroit’s troubles—from a middle-class African American civic activist drawn back by a crisis of conscience; to a young Latina stay-at-home mom who has never left the city and whose husband works in construction; to a European woman with a mixed-race adopted family and a passion for social reform, who introduces a chicken coop, goat shed, and market garden into the neighborhood. These people show firsthand how living with disinvestment means getting organized to manage public works on a neighborhood scale, helping friends and family members solve logistical problems, and promoting creativity, compassion, and self-direction as an alternative to broken dreams and passive lifestyles. Kimberley Kinder reveals how the efforts of these Detroiters and others like them create new urban logics and transform the expectations residents have about their environments. At the same time she cautions against romanticizing such acts, which are, after all, short-term solutions to a deep and spreading social injustice that demands comprehensive change.

A People's History of Detroit

A People's History of Detroit PDF Author: Mark Jay
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478009357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Recent bouts of gentrification and investment in Detroit have led some to call it the greatest turnaround story in American history. Meanwhile, activists point to the city's cuts to public services, water shutoffs, mass foreclosures, and violent police raids. In A People's History of Detroit, Mark Jay and Philip Conklin use a class framework to tell a sweeping story of Detroit from 1913 to the present, embedding Motown's history in a global economic context. Attending to the struggle between corporate elites and radical working-class organizations, Jay and Conklin outline the complex sociopolitical dynamics underlying major events in Detroit's past, from the rise of Fordism and the formation of labor unions, to deindustrialization and the city's recent bankruptcy. They demonstrate that Detroit's history is not a tale of two cities—one of wealth and development and another racked by poverty and racial violence; rather it is the story of a single Detroit that operates according to capitalism's mandates.

Detroit's Hidden Channels

Detroit's Hidden Channels PDF Author: Karen L. Marrero
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628953969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit’s history. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit’s development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior. Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit’s location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating a multitude of gender norms of their nations, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor. These families would maintain that power as the British imperial presence splintered on the eve of the American Revolution.

All Our Yesterdays

All Our Yesterdays PDF Author: Frank Bury Woodford
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814313817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
All Our Yesterdays is the first history of the City of Detroit to be published in the last twenty-five years. It is an account based on extensive historical research, yet is written in such a style as to make interesting and enjoyable reading. The authors tell of the founding of the the town by the French, control by the British, and growth as an American city. These episodes are recounted in the words and deeds of the people who lived and worked here, men like Judge Woodward, Father Gabriel Richard, and Governor Lewis Cass. Here also are accounts of the expansion of the automobile industry, the days of the roaring twenties, prohibition, the great depression, World Wars I and II, and the city of the 1950s and 1960s. This is the story of a great city; a story of past deeds, present problems, and future hopes. But more important, this is a story by and about the people of Detroit, for it is the people that have made this city great.

Driving Detroit

Driving Detroit PDF Author: George Galster
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812222954
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly high murder rate. In Driving Detroit, author George Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half century. Galster invites the reader to travel with him along the streets and into the soul of this place to grasp fully what drives the Motor City. With a scholar's rigor and a local's perspective, Galster uncovers why metropolitan Detroit's cultural, commercial, and built landscape has been so radically transformed. He shows how geography, local government structure, and social forces created a housing development system that produced sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Galster argues that this system, in tandem with the region's automotive economic base, has chronically frustrated the population's quest for basic physical, social, and psychological resources. These frustrations, in turn, generated numerous adaptations—distrust, scapegoating, identity politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional fragmentation—that collectively leave Detroit in an uncompetitive and unsustainable position. Partly a self-portrait, in which Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories, Driving Detroit offers an intimate, insightful, and perhaps controversial explanation for the stunning contrasts—poverty and plenty, decay and splendor, despair and resilience—that characterize the once mighty city.