Driving Detroit : the quest for respect in Motown / George Galster.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Galster, George C., 1948-

Series:

Metropolitan portraits.

Metropolitan Portraits

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Suburban life--Michigan--Detroit Metropolitan Area.

Suburban life.

Detroit Metropolitan Area (Mich.)--Social conditions--21st century.

Detroit Metropolitan Area (Mich.).

Detroit Metropolitan Area (Mich.)--Economic conditions--21st century.

Detroit Metropolitan Area (Mich.)--Race relations--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (316 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface

Prologue. Two Daughters of Detroit

1. Riding on the Freeway: A Riff on the Place Called Motown

2. Sculpting Detroit: Polity and Economy Trump Geology

3. From Fort to Ford to ... ?

4. From Old World to Old South and Old Testament

5. Who Will Feast on the Fruits of Labor?

6. Turf Wars

7. Wrestling for Pieces of the Proletarian Pie

8. Feasting on Fear

9. The Dynamics of Decay, Abandonment, and Bankruptcy

10. What Drives Detroiters?

11. From Motown to Mortropolis

Epilogue. Two Daughters of Detroit Revisited

Selected References

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283898829

1283898829

9780812206463

0812206460

OCLC:

822017746