Detroit - CAS Theme 2021-2022

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 water corridor that defines southeast Michigan sits at the heart of the world's largest freshwater ecosystem, the Great Lakes. Over forty-three trillion gallons of water a year flow through the Detroit River, providing a natural conduit for everything from fish migration to the movement of cargo-bearing one thousand-foot freighters, and a defining sense of place. But in both government policies and individual practices, the freshwater at the heart of the lakes was long neglected and sometimes abused.

Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth- to early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city's industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality. As the city's social landscape became increasingly uncontrollable, Detroiters turned to parks, gardens, yards, and other outdoor spaces to relieve the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how today's urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city's past.   

How small-to-midsize Rust Belt cities can play a crucial role in a low-carbon, sustainable, and relocalized future. America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities--Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others--increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, small industrial cities seem to be part of America's past, not its future....

The Detroit Observatory was completed in 1854 and named to honor the city of its major benefactors. Reflecting on his great achievement years later, President Henry Philip Tappan wrote: "I cannot speak of the Observatory without emotion. No one will deny that it was a creation of my own." A Creation of His Own: Tappan's Detroit Observatory delves deeply into the Observatory's early biographical, architectural, and scientific history.

Honoring Our Detroit River looks at key aspects of the river's history and impact on the surrounding ecosystem since its formation some 14,000 years ago. The book identifies what is needed to protect and further rehabilitate the Detroit River, exploring specific topics that range from its history with the Native Americans to the river's current-day planning and management.

A captivating guide to the natural wonders of the Great Lakes State and a handy reference in our Michigan series

There is no river quite like Detroit's Rouge River. Named by French explorers, the Rouge's moniker was borrowed by Henry Ford for his huge automobile factory near the river's mouth...The series of articles in the Detroit Free Press on which this volume is based won the Water Environment Federation's 2006 Harry E. Schlenz Medal for Public Education. Anyone interested in environmental issues or conservation of Michigan's waterways will appreciate this unique and attractive volume.

Also available as an ebook.
There is growing interest in re-connecting urban residents with nature, but most conservationists want to work in pristine areas, and most urban areas are considered too degraded to rank high on conservation priority lists. Bringing Conservation to Cities is a timely and informative exposé of what it takes to foster a conservation ethic in a major urban area--complete with critical lessons learned--and to simultaneously inspire and develop the next generation of urban conservationists. The book explores the new urban conservation frontier, with its numerous challenges and opportunities, and fosters more urban conservation initiatives throughout the world.

Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband had been priced out of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Seeing this as a great opportunity to start over again, they decide to cash in their savings and buy an abandoned house for 35,000 in Detroit, the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy....

The New York Times bestselling author of Bitter Brew chronicles the birth and rise to greatness of the American auto industry through the remarkable life of Harley Earl, an eccentric six-foot-five, stuttering visionary who dropped out of college and went on to invent the profession of automobile styling, thereby revolutionized the way cars were made, marketed, and even imagined...

In Detroit Disassembled, photographer Andrew Moore records a territory in which the ordinary flow of time-or the forward march of the assembly line-appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse...