Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have been in steady decline since the mid twentieth century, when the industry that built it began to downsize and relocate production away from the United States. Decades of disinvestment and racial division left a city with central neighbourhoods sparsely populated and crumbling, while resources and services were concentrated in wealthier suburbs. In recent years, the city's landscape has come to be emblematic of post-industrial decline, urban blight and civic abandonment. My research adopts a mixed-methods ethnographic approach to argue that this framing of the city is in fact a deeply ideological one, with constructions of Detroit as empty and chaotic serving to lay the groundwork for a large-scale project of re-colonisation, which draws simultaneously on discourses of greening and redemption. Narratives of abandonment and the re-emergence of urban 'nature' work together to reclaim the city in the interests of a mobile elite whose 'white flight', widely cited as the source of Detroit's problems, never flew much further than the suburbs. Drawing on news media, documentary film, television, photography, semi-structured interviews and extended periods of participant observation in Detroit between 2012 and 2014, I show how constructions of emptiness, a wilful fictionalisation of Detroit's recent history, narratives of greening and a pervasive investment in structures of white supremacy serve to create a Detroit in which wholesale gentrification may be put forward as a social good.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-119).

Thesis (PH. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914. / "A Private edition distributed by the University of Chicago Libraries." "University series, III. The Michigan historical commission, Lansing, Michigan." Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-337) and index. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914 / At head of title: University of Chicago. "A private edition distributed by the University of Chicago libraries." Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-337) and index. Also issued in print and microfiche.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Wayne State University, 1979. / Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Wayne State University, 1979.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914. / "A Private edition distributed by the University of Chicago Libraries." "University series, III. The Michigan historical commission, Lansing, Michigan." Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-337) and index.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-89). / The social, political and economic history of Detroit has been inextricably linked to the development of its most dominant industry: automotive manufacturing. This thesis suggests a strategy to overcome the disadvantages of this industrial legacy, drawing from the city's viable contemporary social resources and dynamics in order to incite the informal gathering of individuals together for the performance of music. It is at the scale of the individual and the neighborhood that such a transformative process can occur. In order to combat the slow erasure and abandonment of neighborhoods near Detroit's downtown area, this project seeks to take advantage of the indigenous resources available to it, by using abandoned structures and materials. It acknowledges the primacy of sound and nature on the experience of the site. / by Laura Marcella Bouwman. / M.Arch.

Tesis (maestro en artes de español)--Universidad Interamericana, Saltillo, México. / Typescript (carbon copy). eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Tesis (maestro en artes de español)--Universidad Interamericana, Saltillo, México. / Typescript (carbon copy). eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.