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As America's most dysfunctional big city, Detroit faces urban decay, population losses, fractured neighborhoods with impoverished households, an uneducated, unskilled workforce, too few jobs, a shrinking tax base, budgetary shortfalls, and inadequate public schools. Looking to the city's future, Lewis D. Solomon focuses on pathways to revitalizing Detroit, while offering a cautiously optimistic viewpoint. Solomon urges an economic development strategy, one anchored in Detroit balancing its municipal and public school district's budgets, improving the academic performance of its public schools, rebuilding its tax base, and looking to the private sector to create jobs. He advocates an overlapping, tripartite political economy, one that builds on the foundation of an appropriately sized public sector and a for-profit private sector, with the latter fueling economic growth. Although he acknowledges that Detroit faces a long road to implementation, Solomon sketches a vision of a revitalized economic sector based on two key assets: vacant land and an unskilled labor force. The book is divided into four distinct parts. The first provides background and context, with a brief overview of the city's numerous challenges. The second examines Detroit's immediate efforts to overcome its fiscal crisis. It proposes ways Detroit can be put on the path to financial stability and sustainability. The third considers how Detroit can implement a new approach to job creation, one focused on the for-profit private sector, not the public sector. In the fourth and final part, Solomon argues that residents should pursue a strategy based on the actions of individuals and community groups rather than looking to large-scale projects.
Welcome to the Cass Corridor, an area geographically bound by freeways and major thoroughfares, yet boundless in its rich history and influence. Since the French established the sleepy ribbon farms in the 1700s, the Cass Corridor has experienced a fascinating evolution. Home to affluent gentry in the Victorian era, the area became the hub for automotive parts suppliers, film distribution, and pharmaceuticals at the turn of the 20th century. The interwar period saw the area transition to a working-class neighborhood that descended into a slum. The Cass Corridor, however, redefined itself, Detroit, and the nation as a home to the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The corridor has long been a cradle of creativity that many renowned personalities called home, including Charles Lindbergh, Gilda Radner, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Marcus Belgrave, and others.
The infamous images of Detroit's crumbling buildings, abandoned homes and weed-choked parks are known worldwide. Seldom shown are the city's thriving food ways, quietly rebuilding neighborhoods block by block with urban farms, locally made fare, new restaurants and an innovative, homegrown spirit that is attracting entrepreneurs and culinary enthusiasts from across the nation. Old neighborhoods are coming back to life with the smell of simmering soup, the crunch of new pickles and the aroma of all-day barbeque. Magnificent Art Deco clubs and speakeasies painstakingly restored to their former beauty are busy serving great local food. Author Bill Loomis goes behind the graffiti and ruins to explore how the passion for eating well is proving essential to Detroit's comeback..
Detroit: The Dream Is Now is a visual essay on the rebuilding and resurgence of the city of Detroit by photographer Michel Arnaud, co-author of Design Brooklyn. In recent years, much of the focus on Detroit has been on the negative stories and images of shuttered, empty buildings—the emblems of Detroit’s financial and physical decline. In contrast, Arnaud aims his lens at the emergent creative enterprises and new developments taking hold in the still-vibrant city. The book explores Detroit’s rich industrial and artistic past while giving voice to the dynamic communities that will make up its future. The first section provides a visual tour of the city’s architecture and neighborhoods, while the remaining chapters focus on the developing design, art, and food scenes through interviews and portraits of the city’s entrepreneurs, artists, and makers. Detroit is the story of an American city in flux, documented in Arnaud’s thought-provoking photographs.
Tensions in South African universities have traditionally centred around equity (particularly access and affordability), historical legacies (such as apartheid and colonialism), and the shape and structure of the higher education system. What has not received sufficient attention, is the contribution of the university to place-based development. This volume is the first in South Africa to engage seriously with the place-based developmental role of universities. In the international literature and policy there has been an increasing integration of the university with place-based development, especially in cities. This volume weighs in on the debate by drawing attention to the place-based roles and agency of South African universities in their local towns and cities. It acknowledges that universities were given specific development roles in regions, homelands and towns under apartheid, and comments on why sub-national, place-based development has not been a key theme in post-apartheid, higher education planning. Given the developmental crisis in the country, universities could be expected to play a more constructive and meaningful role in the development of their own precincts, cities and regions. But what should that role be? Is there evidence that this is already occurring in South Africa, despite the lack of a national policy framework? What plans and programmes are in place, and what is needed to expand the development agency of universities at the local level? Who and what might be involved? Where should the focus lie, and who might benefit most, and why? Is there a need perhaps to approach the challenges of college towns, secondary cities and metropolitan centers differently? This book poses some of these questions as it considers the experiences of a number of South African universities, including Wits, Pretoria, Nelson Mandela University and especially Fort Hare as one of its post-centenary challenges.
Readers interested in urban studies and recent Detroit history will appreciate this thoughtful assessment of the best practices and obvious errors when it comes to reinventing our cities.
This book addresses the questions of what went wrong with Detroit and what can be done to reinvent the Motor City. Various answers to the former-deindustrialization, white flight, and a disappearing tax base-are now well understood. Less discussed are potential paths forward, stemming from alternative explanations of Detroit's long-term decline and reconsideration of the challenges the city currently faces. Urban crisis-socioeconomic, fiscal, and political-has seemingly narrowed the range of possible interventions. Growth-oriented redevelopment strategies have not reversed Detroit's decline, but in the wake of crisis, officials have increasingly funnelled limited public resources into the city's commercial core via an implicit policy of "urban triage." The crisis has also led to the emergency management of the city by extra-democratic entities. As a disruptive historical event, Detroit's crisis is a moment teeming with political possibilities. The critical rethinking of Detroit's past, present, and future is essential reading for both urban studies scholars and the general public.
Detroit was established as a French settlement three-quarters of a century before the founding of this nation. A remote outpost built to protect trapping interests, it grew as agriculture expanded on the new frontier. Its industry leapt forward with the completion of the Erie Canal, which opened up the Great Lakes to the East Coast. Surrounded by untapped natural resources, Detroit turned iron into stoves and railcars, and eventually cars by the millions. This vibrant commercial hub attracted businessmen and labor organizers, European immigrants and African Americans from the rural South. At its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, one in six American jobs were connected to the auto industry and Detroit. And then the bottom fell out. Detroit: A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America’s great cities, and one of the nation’s greatest urban failures. It seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse resulted from a confluence of public policies, private industry decisions, and deep, thick seams of racism. This updated paperback edition includes recent developments under Michigan’s Emergency Manager law. And it raises the question: when we look at modern-day Detroit, are we looking at the ghost of America’s industrial past or its future? Scott Martelle is the author of The Fear Within and Blood Passion and is a professional journalist who has written for the Detroit News, the Los Angeles Times, the Rochester Times-Union, and more.
The book provides a behind-the-scenes look into the unlikely partnerships, unique collaborations, variety of financial tools and bold bets led by The Kresge Foundation during a 13-year period in Detroit to foster a sustainable and equitable recovery for the city and all of its residents. The authors originally imagined the book contents as four individual case studies. In preparation, they performed an exhaustive review of Kresge Foundation historical documents and a comprehensive scan of media coverage and journalistic commentary about Detroit’s recovery. They also conducted more than four dozen interviews with the individuals who participated in, witnessed or otherwise impacted the changing tide in the city of Detroit during this period. Once assembled, the authors agreed that—assembling together in context with one another – the content could serve as an important snapshot of some of the positive forces and extreme undercurrents at play in Detroit during this extraordinary time in the city.
According to popular media and scholarship, Detroit, the once-vibrant city that crumbled with the departure of the auto industry, is where dreams can be reborn. It is a place that, like America itself, is gritty and determined. It has faced the worst kind of adversity, and supposedly now it’s back. But what does this narrative of “new Detroit” leave out? Beautiful Wasteland reveals that the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. They’re not. As Rebecca J. Kinney shows, the narratives of Detroit’s rise, decline, and potential to rise again are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness. By remapping the narratives of contemporary Detroit through an extension of America’s frontier mythology, Kinney analyzes a cross-section of twentieth and twenty-first century cultural locations—an Internet forum, ruin photography, advertising, documentary film, and print and online media. She illuminates how the stories we tell about Detroit as a frontier of possibility enable the erasure of white privilege and systemic racism. By situating Detroit as a “beautiful wasteland,” both desirable and distressed, this shows how the narrative of ruin and possibility form a mutually constituted relationship: the city is possible precisely because of its perceived ruin. Beautiful Wasteland tackles the key questions about the future of postindustrial America. As cities around the country reckon with their own postindustrial landscapes, Rebecca Kinney cautions that development that elides considerations of race and class will only continue to replicate uneven access to the city for the poor, working class, and people of color.