Between 1960 and 2000, Detroit experienced a 43% population drop. Of Detroit’s 138 square miles, 20 are reported to be vacant. Yet the city is more populous and more dense than Memphis, Denver, Portland, or Atlanta. How can Detroit’s abundant available land and buildings be transformed into an asset that serves the over 700,000 residents of the city? How does vacant landscape become productive, enabling Detroit to “right-size” without resident relocation and additional urban erasure? Built in 1903 by Albert Kahn for the Packard Automotive Company, the Packard Plant is a Detroit landmark. Kahn, “The Builder of Detroit,” revolutionized American industrial design with Packard #10. Now, the plant is famous for being one of the world’s largest ruins and the adjacent neighborhood nearly vacant. Packard Farms is an adaptive reuse project that utilizes vacancy at the ground level for bioremediation and fuel crops while using vertical farming techniques within the building. Packard Farms capitalizes on Michigan green energy initiaties and the growing urban farming movement to create a largely self-sustaining building and community. / acase@tulane.edu

In the History of major American metropolitan areas, Detroit stands out as a particularly interesting study. At its height, Detroit was the center of America's "Arsenal of Democracy", today it stands as a shadow of its onetime greatness. My thesis attempts to examine root causes for the city's ultimate failure dating back to the World War II era. In my research I found that the greatest failures for the city were not within its people, but rather within its political institutions and its leadership.

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the new mode of industrial organization associating mass production with mass consumption in the early twentieth century--what we call Fordism--had profound cultural repercussions on urban spatial practices. I address Fordism as a mode of socialization that deployed industrial techniques to reconstitute the very nature of social relations. This attempt at broad socialization through technological means reflected a type of technical thought coalescing in the industrial practices of the early twentieth century that both brought spatial practices into its service and radically altered existing social relations. As such, Fordist ideas formulated to address efficiency in industrial production extended to the city, its architecture, and its inhabitants, construing them as technological artifacts subject to the same economies of scope and scale, and requirements of production and consumption as the manufacture of automobiles, demonstrating that Fordist modes of production permeated not just manufacturing processes but also the organization of management structures, the architectural layout of factories and offices, the social spaces of the city, and popular conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and the body.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Michigan, 1998. / "Summer 1998." Includes bibliographical references.

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

Thesis (M.H.S.A.)--University of Michigan, 1982.

Thesis (M.S.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1941.

Thesis (M.H.S.A.)--University of Michigan, 1984.

Thesis (M.S.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1942.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Michigan, 1988. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-200).