These maps are part of the Liquid Planning Detroit report from the Detroit Sustainability Indicators Project that sought to reimagine urban infrastructure in Detroit as population is not expected to grow significantly for some time.
“. . .the redrawing of territorial boundaries within the city of Detroit thereby shifting from an infrastructural logic to water-driven one (from sewersheds to watersheds).”
Back in 2009, Rob Linn dug through City of Detroit Assessor data to look at private land ownership specifically looking at some of the city’s largest private land holders. Michael Kelly and Matthew Tatarian had nearly 1,500 properties in 2009.
“Investors such as Allen Shiffman, Matty Moroun, Michael Kelly and Matthew Tatarian often buy property from the city and county at steep discounts with hopes to resell the properties to other parties – including, ironically, the city and county – at a huge profit. The business models of each speculator range drastically, however, so it is difficult to predict their behavior at auctions.”
The Property Praxis project has found similar high numbers of property under Michael Kelly and Matthew Tatarian’s names in the 2015 City of Detroit Assessor data.
Land in Detroit has been widely covered in the media as the city and it’s residents have grappled with widespread subprime mortgage lending, myriad tax foreclosures, and targeted blight removal.
The primary connection between these major crises and efforts in Detroit is property speculation.
At least 20% of land in Detroit is owned by property speculators, defined by the amount of property they own that is not registered to an owner that lives in the same neighborhood. Property speculators benefited from the new inventory of property created by the mortgage crisis, but in turn fueled the decline into blight of once intact neighborhoods.
This collaborative mapping project is not the first to examine individuals and corporations that have held large swaths of land in Detroit, but it is the first to examine the true extent of property speculation by digging into the records of shell companies and LLC that are often used to hide ownership or skirt tax payments. Not all property speculators are bad people, but the process of speculation has far reaching negative impacts on neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
Explore the map here: http://propertypraxis.org
From the New York Public Library (NYPL) digital collections, this map from 1939 shows all the main roads and their status as paved or dirt. Main roads are highlighted in brilliant green.
However, there is no indication of streetcars or any alternative transportation options other than roadways, which seems odd since Rand McNally began by printing timetables for the railroad industry. I guess initiating the numbered highway system and shifting business to publish road atlases for Gulf Oil in the 1920s shifted their focus to roads over rails.
This is the project map from “PIONEERS,” which was commissioned for the “Shrinking Cities” exhibit cohosted by MOCAD and Cranbrook Art Museum in 2002-2008. The PIONEERS project consisted of 12 mini-programs broadcasting on 107.9FM as a way to lift the voices of Detroiters’ to tell the stories of their histories, goals, neighborhoods, communities, and city.
WHEN: May 12, 2016
WHERE: Riopelle Gallery, 1492 Gratiot Ave. (Eastern Market)
WHAT: We’ll be utilizing our senses to make walking maps of the Eastern Market area.
Psycho-geography (Dérives – “drift”) is an activity designed to take a person “off the beaten path” and take a more critical look at their surroundings.
You’ll need:
Beginners are welcome, mapping is for everyone!
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It’s always nice to see Detroit as the focal point for national or regional maps.
“Detroit’s proximity to the geographical center of the nation’s population is obvious.”
This map comes from the 1949 master plan for the “Detroit Festival of the Great Lakes” to be held in 1951 at the 250th anniversary of Detroit’s founding. The Michigan State Fair Grounds were the chosen spot because of easy access via U.S. 10 (Woodward Ave.) and Michigan 102 (Eight Mile) as well as U.S. 16 (Grand River) and U.S. 112 (Michigan Ave.). The new Grand Trunk Railroad passenger platform at the Fair Ground was also projected to be used.
It was written that:
“The Michigan State Fair Grounds is conveniently located for both the farm families and the city families of Michigan. It is central to the heavily populated southeastern part of Michigan. 3.5 million people live within 50 miles of the grounds, almost 3/5 of the residents of Michigan, plus 150,000 in the neighboring Canadian province of Ontario.”
Major changes have been taking place in the Cass Corridor and those changes have accelerated in recent years. Concerns were raised by nonprofits in the early 2000s with the creation of “Midtown” and those same concerns are being raised as the new Red Wings arena is being constructed and property values skyrocket.
This map is a representation of the pathways of the often invisible people in the Cass Corridor. Detroit’s Neighborhood Services Organization (NSO) provides programming and resources to the city’s vulnerable neighbors, many of whom are located in the Cass Corridor area. Desire lines or desire paths are the wore trails that people create between places and spaces when there isn’t necessarily a planned route. The mobility of the vulnerable people in the Cass Corridor is visible here as the desire lines have a clear radial pattern around the NSO building.
In the new City Report, “The Storefront Index” from City Observatory, the Detroit metro area ranks 51st as one of the least dense city centers with storefronts (businesses within a 3 mile radius of a Downtown).
“One of the best indicators of the vitality of an urban space is the presence of customer-facing retail and service businesses.”
Important to note is that the database utilized by the report found that the Customs List under-reported businesses in Detroit and had to then rely on a secondary sources, USAInfo.
During last year’s Porous Borders Festival in Hamtramck there were a handful of great examples of engaged mapping projects:
“Index of Inaccessibility” attempted to re-draw one of the borders of the GM Assembly Plant by walking around it. The intent by the artist-organizers Ludmila Ferrari, Juan Leal, and Félix Zamora was to create a new map of the border that is not constituted by the presence of the GM Assembly Plant.
“The Border Plant Mapping Project” set out to document any accessible plants along the Detroit/Hamtramck border and result in a map that anyone can use to find the mapped plants. This project was developed by Maia Asshaq, a writer and performer living in Hamtramck.
The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (through Allied Media Projects) and Detroit Community Technology Project are partnering with Grace in Action to present a Data DiscoTech, April 23rd, 11:00am – 2:00pm at the Grace in Action church (1725 Lawndale 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:
Read more about the DiscoTech here. See you there!
This concept comes from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Sustainable Design Assessment Team report titled: “Leaner, Greener Detroit” (2008). In this concept the “urban villages” are the traditional, sometimes titled “viable” neighborhoods such as Mexicantown, Midtown, and New Center. The AIA team assumes these urban villages to be self sustaining, walkable, and community-focused.
The first official land survey of Detroit was conducted by Aaron Greeley. After the US gained control of the Michigan Territory they needed an official record of land holdings. Greeley surveyed land in Detroit from 1809 to 1810 and his records were approved by Congress in 1812 which made his survey map the authoritative source of land claims.
However, Greeley’s survey did not include informal land grants or awards. As a result many Southeast Michigan residents appealed to Congress and eventually around 100 land claims were approved. Yet the boundaries of land claims continued to be contested for years following.
Wondering where all this rain ends up? The EPA’s Environmental Atlas provides some really interesting tools, including tracking where a raindrop ends up when it lands in Detroit. After zooming into Wayne County, Michigan, in the gray navigation bar choose “Analysis Tools” and select the “Raindrop Tool.”
This is a great way to check out sewer/drainage infrastructure and how a raindrop nearly always ends up in the Detroit River.
A while back I saw this analysis completed by the WNYC Data News team on park access and wanted to recreate it for Detroit.
There has been a lot of change with parks over the years from the near closing of 50+ parks during Mayor Bing’s time, to an influx of funding to keep them open, then the widespread adoption of parks by community groups, now the new parks master plan, and $11.7 million being dedicated to 40 smaller neighborhood parks this summer.
The map was created by giving every census tract a half-mile buffer and then calculating how many acres of park space fell within those extended boundaries for each census tract. Those acres were then matched to the number of residents living within each census tract.
Some of Detroit’s more populated areas have much smaller parks. With more people and smaller park spaces that leaves fewer acres per person. Many people in the city benefit from Detroit’s many large parks, however the key missing variable here is safety/crime in parks as well as community perceptions of using park space for leisure or physical activity.
This map comes from the Detroit Department of Health’s report titled “A birdseye view of Detroit’s health status for the year 1922.” The city existed as 23 districts with “populations sufficiently large to make the comparison of rates worth while.” Infant mortality was tracked the same way we track it today as, “deaths under 1 year … per 1,000 living births.”
Some things don’t change which makes it possible to track improvements. Detroit’s infant mortality rate has improved significantly from 1922, but there is still work to be done in 2016.
The Renaissance Center (RenCen) can be seen from just about anywhere in the city. Why is that?
It is easy to forget that Detroit as a big city is in reality a city and suburbs combined. The outer neighborhoods first functioned as suburban enclaves to retreat to after a day’s work in the inner city and increasingly suburban factories.
Of Detroit’s 419,882 buildings, the tallest is the RenCen stands at 73 stories.
With only 47 unique building heights including just 5 buildings reaching 40 stories or more, Detroit is a stout city. There are only 44 buildings in the 20 – 39 stories range. The vast majority of buildings in Detroit are below 2 stories tall (n=397,744).
The tallest buildings are located Downtown.
This map ran as part of a 2014 Washington Post piece featuring 6 maps that show people abandoning Detroit. Now we are more than halfway through the next decade and Downtown is reporting population growth while investments have increased in some neighborhoods and others are still in great need.
The most important story that this map tells is that not everyone’s Detroit story is the same. The people and their experiences change in the small distance between blocks.
Nothing beats a good ol’ dot density map. In this case each land parcel was assigned a centroid (center point) and visualized by the year a building was built on the parcel. This accounts for newly vacant parcels, but not parcels that have more than one building.
Most of the newer construction has occurred in the more vacant areas, which could also represent larger land parcels being reduced to a point location (i.e. a hospital). There is some very interesting clustering of Pre-1900 and 1980-Present construction in Midtown, west of Midtown, and Corktown. At least in construction, Old Detroit and New Detroit prefer to be closer together?
The geographic distribution of jobs and access to opportunity is a major issue of the current revitalization effort. Many people cannot easily reach jobs that they need because they are too far away in the suburbs. These maps give an interesting picture of where people lived and worked when Detroit’s major industries were moving full tilt. All in all, people mostly lived fairly close to where they worked. The Henry Ford River Rouge Plant (above) was a key employer of the day in 1942, the jobs are not as many these days. Much of their workforce was pulled from Dearborn, but a substantial number of people lived nearby across Detroit. 
The Connor-Jefferson industrial area may be one of the few that is still very active with the Chrysler Plant going strong.
The Boulevard-Russell industrial area is not so active anymore. There are some smaller companies left, but the Russell Industrial Center houses artists and lofts rather than industrial jobs.
I’m not aware of any continued industrial activity in the Michigan-Livernois area besides some logistics and trucking activity. Anything else?
In 2010, Lars Gräbner of Volume One Studio and the University of Michigan Taubman College, began conducting a mapping study of Detroit in order to conceptualize a future for the city. The above series of maps were based on the Official Hearne Bros. Real Estate Atlas of the City of Detroit, Plats Map, Edition 500-50.
More from Lars Gräbner:
Colonial Farming
Colonial French Farming, structured in ribbon farms ensuring dependable access to the river since 1701.
Industrialization
Residential neighborhoods developed in dependable relationship to industrial corridors since 1806.
Ecologic Transition
Residential neighborhoods densify in dependable relationship to the productive landscape park (energy-park) in the future.
These maps were featured in Mapping Detroit (Chapter 8: Mapping the Urban Landscape: Revealing the Archipelago) available from the WSU Press.
DETROITography 