Author Archives: Alex B. Hill

Map: New Detroit – A Decade of Progress 1967-1977


This is a map comes from the report by New Detroit Inc.: a decade of progress 1967-1977. The map displays all of their partners, beneficiaries, and efforts since 1967. It shows their widespread impact (and the Detroit northwesternly pattern) as well as map design flaws that might obscure the organizations full impact.

The report was broken down into core categories:

  • Public Safety and Justice
  • Minority Economic Development
  • Health and Action Against Drug Abuse

The final page of the report shows pictures of their presidents and chairmen over the last 10 years, with only one African-American member.

Map: Detroit’s North End 2014

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In 2014, the New York Times took a data-driven look at Detroit’s storied North End as a juxtaposition of the newly promised redevelopment and the enormous challenges that the city faces. At the edge of Midtown and New Center, the North End will likely see expanded investment.

There are many reasons to be hopeful and cynical about the North End from new initiatives at Vanguard CDC, the recently relocated Detroit Animal Care and Control (DACC) paired with brand new facilities for the Michigan Humane Society, and everything happening on Oakland Avenue from ONE Mile to the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm. The flip side is that cheap real estate has been snapped up by a handful of land speculators and the hope of “transit-oriented development” (TOD) related to the M1-Rail streetcar has displaced some while driving up prices for others.

Map: South Detroit Mobility

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Mapzen has developed a new tool to explore transportation networks around the world. In good fun they tweeted out a map looking at transit in “South Detroit” if you were looking for a midnight train going anywhere. Better known as locally as Windsor, trains in South Detroit aren’t really available (even from the New Center Amtrak station).

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Map: Presidential Campaign Stops in Detroit 2016

 

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The Presidential election brought a strong focus on the State of Michigan and the cities of Flint and Detroit specifically. The City of Detroit became a rallying point for both candidates, but for very different reasons. Hillary Clinton first came to Detroit for a campaign fundraiser in January 2016. Donald Trump’s first campaign visit was during the Republican debate at the Fox Theater in March 2016.

The candidates continued to return to Detroit for speaking engagements and campaign stops, but their geographical focus was quite different. The Trump campaign spent most of its time Downtown for exclusive events, while the Clinton campaign often made multi-stop tours of different neighborhoods in Detroit. Both campaigns neglected the Eastside where there are higher vacancy rates and lower incomes.

Map: Gerrymandered Detroit

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In the entire state of Michigan, the City of Detroit includes the most gerrymandered congressional districts by scores assigned by the Washington Post. However, the scoring relied on “compactness” which may not always be the best measure of gerrymandering.

“The compactness of a district, measured using the ratio of the district area to the area of a circle with the same perimeter, can serve as a useful proxy for how gerrymandered the district is. The map below colors Congressional districts according to their compactness, for states with at least three districts.”

Across the whole United States, Michigan’s 14th congressional district ranks high and well above the state average.

Map: Disconnected Youth in Detroit 2014

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The National Equity Atlas has released new indicators and data visuals at the Census Tract level. One of their new indicators is on “disconnected youth” (16-to-19-year-olds who are neither working nor in school).

The site lets you select data for 2000 and 2014. In 2000, “disconnected youth” in Detroit were more clustered, but the 2014 data shows more dispersion. 

The project explains why that matters:

Ensuring that youth are educated, healthy, and ready to thrive in the workforce is essential for economic prosperity, but too many youth—particularly youth of color—are disconnected from educational or employment opportunities. Not accessing education and job experience early in life can have long-lasting impacts including lower earnings, higher public expenditures, lower tax revenues, and lost human potential.

Event: DETROITography Pop-up Gallery

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If you’re at the University of Michigan or just visiting Ann Arbor, be sure to check out the DETROITography pop-up exhibit at the UofM Institute for the Humanities as part of their year-long theme on the “Humanities and Public Policy.”

Detroitography

Nov 1 – Dec 15, 2016, Institute for the Humanities Common Room, M-F 9am-5pm

This exhibition features maps of Detroit from Detroitography, an organization whose focus is on democratizing map making and refocusing data for people-centered innovation. The maps include ones other people make about the city as well as their own maps of Detroit.

Map: Detroit’s Inner City 2016?

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The current presidential election has renewed the regular use of veiled racism in language. In particular the use of “inner city” has often been used as a negative term for communities of color. In a recent report, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) has defined nearly all of Detroit as “inner city:”

ICIC defines an inner city as a set of contiguous census tracts in a city that have higher poverty and unemployment rates than the surrounding metropolitan area and, in aggregate, represent at least five percent of a city’s population. These neighborhoods also must have a poverty rate of at least 20 percent, and unemployment rates at least 150 percent of metropolitan area unemployment (or a median household income that is 50 percent or less than median income for the metropolitan area).

Note: Windsor, Canada has also been consumed by the Detroit River.

Map: Devil’s Night only in Detroit

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This map comes from Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, who’s 2013 project to visualize data from the Harvard Dialect Study went viral on the New York Times.

Detroit and Michigan are the only places in the US where the night before Halloween has infamously become known as “Devil’s Night.” Recent efforts under Mayor Dave Bing have reintroduced the night as “Angel’s Night,” but it may be too ingrained to rebrand. In all 11% percent of respondents called it Devil’s Night while 70% respondents across the country had no name for the night before Halloween.

 

Map: Reimagining the Riverfront 2012

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Lars Graebner of Volume One Studio and the UM Taubman College submitted this entry to the “Detroit by Design” competition in 2012 with a radical reimagining of the Hart Plaza/Downtown Riverfront area. His conceptual drawings create a modern and ecologically focused series of islands that help to maximize use of the waterfront.

AIA Detroit Chapter’s Urban Priorities Committee just launched their Detroit by Design 2012: Detroit Riverfront Competition, which is open to students and professionals world-wide. The project site consists of the area between Cobo Hall and the Renaissance Center and between Jefferson Avenue and the Detroit River.

Digital rendering:

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Map: Land Abandonment near Heidelberg Street in Detroit 1951-2014

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Jason Hackworth, a professor of planning and geography at the University of Toronto., has been examining the change in rust-belt cities. Specifically, he has been looking into “demolition only” policies that have cleared more land than during the entire urban renewal period.

“[…] demolition-only is not the progressive effort to rebuild struggling cities it is being billed as. It represents a collapse of policy imagination, public resources, and serious concern for the underlying causes of blight. Whatever the intent of its proponents, the past 40 years have seen extensive house demolition in the region, and it has not spontaneously generated revival—it has just removed a large number of houses.”

Map: Cass Corridor Land Owners 2016

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In comparison to the 1971 map based on similar data, this map of the 2016 property information posted on the Detroit Open Data portal shows changes over time and space. The data that was mapped is based on the tax payer address for each property and some properties are held by the same tax payer or “owner.”

Ownership in the Cass Corridor area has remained spotty with no real concentrations, however ownership within the Corridor Area has continued to be most dense for land parcels in the northern half of the area rather than the southern half. Similarly, ownership of Corridor land in the USA has not significantly changed, but there are a handful of additional US States represented.

The biggest change in ownership has been within the City of Detroit and Region. In 1971, there were strong concentrations of land owners in the neighborhoods at the north end of Woodward (Palmer Woods, Green Acres, University District) where more well to do Detroiters lived. However, in 2016 the most dense concentration of land owners is now focused around the Corridor area (Midtown) and Downtown. Additionally, the suburban sprawl process seems to have expanded land ownership to more far flung regional suburbs. For example, Ann Arbor was not represented in 1971, but now has a number of land owners. There have also been suburbs such as the Grosse Pointes that have less ownership in the Corridor area than in 1971.

Population Density Map 1925 Detroit City Census

This excellent dot map was published in “The Detroit Educational Bulletin” Research Bulletin No. 9 – October 1925. The report gave population totals for each of the 570 Census zones (now called Census Tracts).

The nationality breakdown for 1925 showed the top five groups as:

  1. U. S. White – 598,041
  2. Poland – 115,069
  3. Canada – 83,685
  4. U. S. Colored – 81,831
  5. Germany – 54,223

 

Event: Data Discotech – Community Science Fair about Open Data

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The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (through Allied Media Projects) and Detroit Community Technology Project are partnering with Butzel Recreation Center to present a Data DiscoTech, October 15th, 11:00am – 2:00pm at the Butzel Recreation Center (10500 Lyndon St.) . The event is free and open to the public!

“DiscoTech” is short for “Discovering Technology.” The DiscoTech will offer interactive stations to demystify technology concepts related to open data and the City of Detroit’s Open Data Portal.

At the DiscoTech we will:

  • Demystify data.
  • Understand the risks of open data.
  • Understand how to use data in community organizing efforts.
  • Use data in creative ways.

See you there!

Map: Detroit River and Adjacent Country 1813

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This map based on work by a British Engineer shows how Detroit fit into a different kind of region as controlled by the British in the early 1800s.

Today we think of the Detroit region as Southeast Michigan, but for a very long time “Detroit” was all about the river as a center point and the region that it touched along the way.

Map: Detroit New Urban Configuration 1920 – 2010

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In the book, New Urban Configurations, the City of Detroit and City of Turin (Italy) are compared for their former industrial power and post-industrial decline. Turin was once called the “Detroit of Italy” and the process of mass production has had similar effect on the local economy. The authors write:

“We suggest that Fordist mass production manifesed specific spatial patterns that had profound impacts on the urban character of both cities and their capacity to adapt to changing economic models.”

In particular, the authors are focused on the impact of road network expansion contributing to the loss of manufacturing in the city (see maps below).

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Map: Ride the Green Dragon in Detroit, Route 16 Dexter

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The Dexter #16 bus route can be seen slithering and clawing it’s way north from Downtown Detroit to Northland Mall (now closed) in the northern suburbs of Southfield.

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As well as being one of the longest, Route 16 Dexter is also one of the busier routes, right behind the 3 major artery Avenues (Woodward, Gratiot, Grand River). I assume because the route passes through the more densely populated Northwest side as well as stopping at the former Northland helped increase the number of trips.

The marketing could be awesome for this route, “Ride the Green Dragon!”

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Map: Detroit Business Investment and Streetcar Lines 1915

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This map comes from the Library of Congress and depicts both the growth of industry and rail transit in Detroit. In the early days of streetcar development, real estate developers funded new rail lines to be able to link their new developments to other city amenities.

Seems the city was thinking early of “transit oriented development.”

Map: Detroit Murals in the Market vs. Graffiti Tickets

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The city has ramped up ticketing for blight violators and that includes properties with graffiti. In some reported cases the graffiti tickets included sanctioned murals and street art, for example Eastern Market, Brooklyn Street Local (restaurant), and the Grand River Creative Corridor. Those tickets led the Mayor to apologize and dismiss all graffiti tickets for murals and signs.

As the artwork for Murals in the Market 2016 has started coming together. I started wondering how many of these graffiti offenses involved buildings in Eastern Market, where there is already a high number of sanctioned murals.

In some cases there have been buildings with both a new mural wall location and a graffiti ticket, but the majority of those have been dismissed graffiti tickets for sanctioned murals. There were 28 graffiti tickets in Eastern Market between 2015 – 2016 and 14 have been dismissed. The majority of businesses ticketed for graffiti along Division St. and Winder St. remain responsible for paying their fees, some are hosting new murals this year.

Citywide graffiti ticketing:

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