Living Detroit

In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life. Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and physical decay – in short, it has become the poster child for the urban crisis. This is not a place in which one would expect to discover a history of vibrant expressions of environmentalism; however, in the post-World War II era, while suburban, middle-class homeowners organized into a potent force to protect the natural settings of their communities, in the working-class industrial cities and in the inner city, Detroiters were equally driven by the impulse to conserve their neighborhoods and create a more livable city, pushing back against the forces of deindustrialization and urban crisis. Living Detroit juxtaposes two vibrant and growing fields of American history which often talk past each other: environmentalism and the urban crisis. By putting the two subjects into conversation, we gain a richer understanding of the development of environmental activism and politics after World War II and its relationship to the crisis of America’s cities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental, urban, and labor history.

This book is full of true stories about performing artists at Living Arts, a small nonprofit in Detroit, Michigan, who formed a national affiliate of the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning through the Arts. That’s the early childhood outreach of the Wolf Trap Foundation, which is part of the world-renowned Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. In Detroit, this team of artists—dancers, actors, musicians, storytellers, puppeteers and more—developed training experiences with Wolf Trap’s guidance. Now, these teaching artists are bringing lessons to children aged 3 months to 5 years, many of them in low-income neighborhoods with few other opportunities to experience the arts. The Wolf Trap teaching artists also are training classroom teachers and opening doors for family involvement workshops as well. The stories in this book capture the excitement of those interactions. As you will learn in these pages, research is stacking up to demonstrate the dramatic contribution arts education can make in early childhood development—as well as specific skills in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) subjects. In these pages, you will meet all 12 of the 2016 teaching artists at Living Arts’ Detroit Wolf Trap affiliate. Each tells an inspiring—and often surprising—story about interactions with children and adults. By the end of the book, readers will have learned lots of creative ideas from these professionals. Readers also are left with further opportunities. The book includes videos of the artists at work, tips for establishing or expanding your own nonprofit and ways to connect with this Wolf Trap program. The book is intended for individual reading or group discussion with friends, parents, educators and community leaders anywhere across the U.S.

In one of Curbed: Detroit’s Top 11 Books about Detroit, Aaron Foley, editor of The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook, offers the definitive inside look at one of America’s most talked-about and least understood cities. With a wry sense of humor, Foley, a native Detroiter, walks you through the most difficult questions about the Motor City, offering seven simple rules for making it there. Perfect for coastal transplants, wary suburbanites, unwitting gentrifiers, or start-up disruptors, this recently updated guidebook offers advice on everything from the glories of Vernors ginger ale to how to rehab a house to how to not sound like an uninformed racist. In twenty short chapters, Foley walks you through: How Detroiters do business The unofficial guide to enjoying Faygo How to be gay in Detroit How to raise a Detroit kid How to party in Detroit. Both hilarious and insightful, this no-frills look at Motown is written for those who live there but also, as Vanity Fair put it, “for anyone participating in contemporary global urbanization who would like to avoid behaving like a subjugating dick.”

Detroit is the first city of its size to become bankrupt and policy-makers have argued that, since then, it has entered a ‘new beginning’. This book analyses whether Detroit’s patterns of inequality on race and class lines still exist and whether the city is truly reversing its decline.

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. As she and her husband restore the 1914 Georgian Revival, a stately brick house with no plumbing, no heat, and no electricity, Amy finds a community of Detroiters who, like herself, aren't afraid of a little hard work or things that are a little rough around the edges. Filled with amusing and touching anecdotes about navigating a real-estate market that is rife with scams, finding a contractor who is a lover of C.S. Lewis and willing to quote him liberally, and neighbors who either get teary-eyed at the sight of newcomers or urge Amy and her husband to get out while they can, Amy writes evocatively about the charms and challenges of finding her footing in a city whose future is in question. Detroit Hustle is a memoir that is both a meditation on what it takes to make a house a home, and a love letter to a much-derided city.

Unskilled workers once flocked to Detroit, attracted by manufacturing jobs paying union wages, but the passing of Detroit's manufacturing heyday has left many of those workers stranded. Manufacturing continues to employ high-skilled workers, and new work can be found in suburban service jobs, but the urban plants that used to employ legions of unskilled men are a thing of the past. The authors explain why white auto workers adjusted to these new conditions more easily than blacks. Taking advantage of better access to education and suburban home loans, white men migrated into skilled jobs on the city's outskirts, while blacks faced the twin barriers of higher skill demands and hostile suburban neighborhoods. Some blacks have prospered despite this racial divide: a black elite has emerged, and the shift in the city toward municipal and service jobs has allowed black women to approach parity of earnings with white women. But Detroit remains polarized racially, economically, and geographically to a degree seen in few other American cities. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.