Detroit is no dry bones : the eternal city of the industrial age / Camilo José Vergara.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vergara, Camilo José, author, photographer.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Inner cities--Michigan--Detroit--Pictorial works.

Inner cities.

Social change.

Urban renewal.

Buildings--Remodeling for other use.

Historic buildings.

Detroit (Mich.)--Social conditions--Pictorial works.

Detroit (Mich.).

Buildings--Michigan--Detroit--Pictorial works.

Buildings.

Michigan--Detroit.

Detroit (Mich.)--Biography--Pictorial works.

Historic buildings--Michigan--Detroit--Pictorial works.

Buildings--Remodeling for other use--Michigan--Detroit--Pictorial works.

Urban renewal--Michigan--Detroit--Pictorial works.

Social change--Michigan--Detroit--Pictorial works.

Social conditions.

Genre:

Pictorial works.

Biographies.

Illustrated works.

Physical Description:

v, 295 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 x 29 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

Summary:

"Detroit has lost nearly sixty percent of its population since the mid-1950s. Ethnographer and photographer Camilo José Vergara has traveled to Detroit to document not only the city's precipitous decline but also how its residents have survived. Through annual visits to Detroit over the past twenty five years, Vergara has sought to capture the image of the inner city and its changes over time. From the 1970s through the 1990s, these changes were almost all for the worse, as the built fabric of the city was erased through neglect and abandonment. But over the last decade Detroit has seen the beginnings of a positive transformation, and Detroit Is No Dry Bones provides unique documentation of the revival and its urbanistic possibilities. Beyond the fate of the city's buildings themselves, Vergara has consistently sought to illumine the lives of Detroit's people. Not only has he shown the impact of depopulation, disinvestment, and abandonment on their lives during the worst years of the urban crisis; but he has shown their resilience as well. The photographs are organized in part around the way people have re-used and re-purposed structures from the past. Vergara, for example, is unique in his documentation of local churches that have re-occupied old bank buildings and other impressive structures from the past and turned them into something unexpectedly powerful architecturally as well as spiritually"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Camilo Vergara's Detroit / by Robert Fishman

Game changers

American acropolis: the end of an idea

Urban fabric

Traces fo past grandeur

Neighborhood landmarks

This is no Rome: ruins and desolate cityscapes

New life for former banks

To reach the lost: churches where everybody is somebody

Spirits of motor city: folk signs and murals

In Detroit, Jesus is the only star

Business-oriented signs

Celebrating black heroes and heroines

"It has nothing to do with race": Snow White, Snow Green, Snow Brown

"Gone but not forgotten": memorials

"You all came here and just marked up our entire city"

Brightmoor: the search for a Bucolic uptopia by the Rouge River

African American artists: history, remembrance, turf

Persistent blight, concentrated: an abbreviated street guide

Inner-city billboards

Extinguished neon signs

Street vendors

Doing business behind plexiglass

Oases admist desolation: Detroit's new architecture

"Farm city": replacing blight with beauty

Detroiters

"In the ghettohood": things get better slowly

Conclusion

Detroit's evolvoing ruins

Giving back to the community

No dry bones.

ISBN:

9780472130115

0472130110

OCLC:

935987792