Detroit is just one example of a post-industrial city that has been struggling with the decline of the American industrial economy. In the past 100 years, Detroit city has gone from one of the largest and most promising cities in the world to a widely vacant, run down, and crippled metropolis. A shell of its former self, Detroit has become the poster child for all the problems that many North American cities experience, including: pollution, crime, urban sprawl, suburban flight and struggling education systems. Among others, these deterrents have driven Detroit residents from their homes and left the City largely abandoned. Since the mid 1950s the population has fallen from 1,900,000 to 713,000 in 2010. Enrolment in Detroit public schools has fallen from approximately 300,000 in 1966 to 52,000 in 2012. Today there are an estimated 40 square miles of vacant land and more still with abandoned buildings plaguing the landscape. This thesis asks the question of how best to utilize abandoned public schools as an asset for the neighbourhoods of Detroit. Once symbols of hope and prosperity these vacant schools located in the heart of many struggling neighbourhoods, now serve as a reminder of the disparity and blight that plagues Detroit. The adaptive reuse of abandoned schools as community driven educational centres, with a focus on urban agriculture, can lead the way towards self-sufficient neighbourhoods that allow residents to challenge the social and economic paradigm that is Detroit. The subject of this thesis concerns the transforming of burdens in a blighted city into the assets needed to improve the quality of life for distressed citizens. This thesis argues that this is possible by formulating an architectural response utilizing existing abandoned schools and vacant land to nurture a growing Urban Agriculture initiative that has the potential to play a role in the rebuilding of city neighbourhoods.

Andrew Moore’s series of photographs, Detroit Disassembled (2010), debuted in the United States in the midst of an escalating recession, mortgage and foreclosure crisis, and political fallout from federally-backed bank and automaker bailouts. Due to their subject matter, a number of viewers have interpreted the photographs as apt visualizations of contemporary crises. The photos depict the ruins of a cityscape scarred by decades of deindustrialization, economic decline, and significant outmigration. Shown in galleries, museums, on the Web, and published in a popular photo book, Moore’s images have circulated relatively widely. Viewers have responded to the photos through a variety of media outlets, and their impressions of the images have been melancholic, visceral, distressed, and deeply uncertain. Some viewers have attacked Moore for exploiting and aestheticizing Detroit’s suffering, others have perceived the images as a disturbing commentary on the state of the nation, and many have found the images beautiful, if desolate. The tensions between viewer responses, carrying the inflections of contemporary concerns, provide a valuable snapshot of how Moore’s photographs of Detroit have furnished a flashpoint and modulated a public discourse encompassing a number of interconnected apprehensions about the economy, deindustrialization, the environment, and social responsibility. However, Detroit’s protracted experience of decline and abandonment has made the intersection of aesthetics and urban politics in Moore’s photographs particularly controversial and troubling for some viewers. Because photographs are only partial glimpses of social and spatial phenomena, Moore’s images have proven versatile in their ability to distill and illustrate multifarious viewer concerns. / text

This paper explores several narratives of race and racialized music production in postwar American popular musics, to study the ways in which race has played an intrinsic role in structuring not only contemporary expectations of popular music-making, but also the frameworks by which we continue to study American popular musics today. The essay discusses two case studies from Detroit's music cultures of the 1960s – black pop star Marvin Gaye and the white hard rock group the MC5 – to illustrate how entrenched expectations of racialized performance served to inform contemporary and still-current critiques of these groups; these case studies also reveal the inadequacy of some standard musico-racial narratives in interpreting the racialized dimensions of these artists' performances.

No description available.

Detroit is just one example of a post-industrial city that has been struggling with the decline of the American industrial economy. In the past 100 years, Detroit city has gone from one of the largest and most promising cities in the world to a widely vacant, run down, and crippled metropolis. A shell of its former self, Detroit has become the poster child for all the problems that many North American cities experience, including: pollution, crime, urban sprawl, suburban flight and struggling education systems. Among others, these deterrents have driven Detroit residents from their homes and left the City largely abandoned. Since the mid 1950s the population has fallen from 1,900,000 to 713,000 in 2010. Enrolment in Detroit public schools has fallen from approximately 300,000 in 1966 to 52,000 in 2012. Today there are an estimated 40 square miles of vacant land and more still with abandoned buildings plaguing the landscape. This thesis asks the question of how best to utilize abandoned public schools as an asset for the neighbourhoods of Detroit. Once symbols of hope and prosperity these vacant schools located in the heart of many struggling neighbourhoods, now serve as a reminder of the disparity and blight that plagues Detroit. The adaptive reuse of abandoned schools as community driven educational centres, with a focus on urban agriculture, can lead the way towards self-sufficient neighbourhoods that allow residents to challenge the social and economic paradigm that is Detroit. The subject of this thesis concerns the transforming of burdens in a blighted city into the assets needed to improve the quality of life for distressed citizens. This thesis argues that this is possible by formulating an architectural response utilizing existing abandoned schools and vacant land to nurture a growing Urban Agriculture initiative that has the potential to play a role in the rebuilding of city neighbourhoods.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1968. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Paul Vahanian. Dissertation Committee: Arleen Otto. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.H.A.)--University of Michigan, 1961.

Thesis (M.H.S.A.)--University of Michigan, 1981.

Thesis (M.U.P.)--Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science. Dept. of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, 1957. / Also issued in print.

Thesis (M.H.A.)--University of Michigan, 1965.