Another gem discovered by the Detroit’s greatest archive comber, Paul Sewick.
The cartoon appears to depict Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac crossing off various “suburbs” to expand Detroit’s borders. Around this time of annexation, Detroit swallowed up St. Clair Heights, Village of Springwells, North Detroit, and others until reaching its current city limits within the next three decades.
Source: The Detroit Free Press, 10/17/1903
The recent population gains Downtown and the increased purchasing, speculation, and construction are a divergence from Detroit’s past. The Downtown area was losing population as far back as 1900 largely due to the number of factories creating polluted air and water. As Detroit continued to expand outward, Downtown didn’t see a resurgence until the 1950-60s era of “urban renewal” which saw rampant inequality put to use for urban planning gains for limited success.
In the current Downtown redevelopment, a different strategy must be employed if we are to avoid the failings of the past. Perhaps if Downtown is so important then investments will be made to more easily allow the whole city and region to enjoy and benefit from its redevelopment?
Source: “Emergence and Growth of an Urban Region – The Developing Urban Detroit Area, Vol. 3”, Doxiadis Associates, Wayne State University and The Detroit Edison Company, 1970
There is far more parking these days at or around Wayne State University. Did you attend WSU in the 1960s and remember parking?
In 1960, parking rates were 15 cents per hour. This past year (2015) parking rates increased at lots across the campus with new parking lots being added as the campus footprint expands.
From Doxiadis’ “Emergence and Growth of an Urban Region” Volume 2 based on data from the Commercial Renewal Study by the Detroit City Planning Commission in 1958.
What is interesting about this map is that we can compare to today’s conditions as this “Grand Boulevard Sector” encompasses the current hotspots for redevelopment: Downtown, Midtown, Corktown, Eastern Market, and the East Riverfront. In 1958, we can already see from the map the pre-1960s economic and industrial decline in the city’s core with a cluster of poor conditioned buildings along Woodward in what is now Midtown.
Some research has said that the existence of coffee shops is a marker of gentrification (Papachristos et al., 2011). A Zillow study found a correlation between Starbucks locations and rising rent and home values. The problem is that Starbucks stores often locate in wealthier neighborhoods, so it becomes difficult to say what is the true relational direction. However, in 2008 Starbucks closed some 600 locations in relatively poorer areas. If anything the jury is still out on coffee shops being a driver or simply an indicator of broader social policies that contribute to gentrification.
Specifically in Detroit, where do home values have to go but up? Demolished seems to be the only other option. In October 2015, Dynamo Metrics release a report funded by the Skillman Foundation and Rock Ventures that attempted to model spatial-temporal impacts on home values from demolitions. The study followed commonly held knowledge that blight depresses home values combined with tracking pre- and post- home values adjacent to demolition sites.
In Detroit, demolitions are the new coffee shops?
This map generated by Data Driven Detroit and Miller Dickinson Blais accompanied a Kresge Foundation report called “Creative Vitality in Detroit: The Detroit Cultural Mapping Project.”
What is most interesting is that the cultural spaces and industries are concentrated in areas where the cultural workforce does not live. Those who are created and maintaining Detroit’s cultural assets are unable to live near them. The creative economy is often touted as an element of Detroit’s revitalization, but this map presents a stark picture of where and who is benefiting.
Detroit’s iconic beer brewer has a storied past of fire brewing beer in copper kettles, switching to near-beer during Prohibition as well as ice cream to finally losing all of its billions of dollars after the company tried to take on national brands without the necessary budget.
Currently Stroh’s is distributed 126 zipcodes in 21 states. The Stroh’s brand is now under Pabst, which manages a number of small yet iconic beer brand names.
My colleague Matt Elliott and I began wondering where can you get Strohs in Detroit right now? Is it on tap anywhere?
As with many large cities in the US, Detroit is increasingly contending with the negative effects that climate change has on its population. In particular senior populations are more susceptible to extreme heat events which are occurring at more regular rates.
The article discusses extreme heat, which poses a threat to the livability and sustainability of cities, and disproportionally harms marginalized groups. The frequency of extreme heat events is expected to increase in the future as climate change exacerbates urban heat island (UHI) effects. Common UHI mitigation strategies – such as cool pavements (light-colored surfacing or permeable pavements), cool roofs (often categorized as “white”, “blue”, or “green” roof strategies to differentiate the approaches), and increased planting of vegetation – vary in effectiveness depending on a city’s baseline climate, as well as on city size and layout.(source)
This birds-eye view looking north from Downtown Detroit provides a good representation of the density of the Downtown area compared to today as well as the heavy pollution that drove wealthier residents to the soon to be annexed “suburb” areas of Detroit.
The rays of light to the north appear to be calling people to move away from the polluted Downtown. Perhaps that was the goal of this map published by the Imperial Life Insurance Company?
I’ve been interested in the impacts of various issues on children in Detroit, from traffic fatalities to areas with the most children. The flip side, focusing on the elderly, is also very important and often overlooked in current development efforts in the city.
The age balance or imbalance across the geography of Detroit results in some interesting areas where children or the elderly make up a majority. Not surprisingly many of the areas with the most children also have fewer elderly residents. The riverfront has a larger elderly population often associated with the senior apartment high rises. Grand River cuts an interesting pattern along the Westside where there are more elderly above the Avenue and more children below.
This map is featured in “Trafficways for 3 million people” published in 1954 by the Detroit City Planning Commission and the Detroit Streets and Traffic Commission. The map presents a look at the history of how people moved in our region long before European settlers displaced local populations and automobiles dominated transportation.
The metro Detroit region already had a hub-and-spoke street pattern long before Augustus Woodward was inspired by Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s design of Washington D.C.
Researchers have long been working to better analyze and model the impact of environmental pollutants. Stuart Batterman, Rajiv Ganguly, and Paul Harbin have a new model that also is visually impactful.
Vehicle traffic is one of the most significant emission sources of air pollutants in urban areas. While the influence of mobile source emissions is felt throughout an urban area, concentrations from mobile emissions can be highest near major roadways. At present, information regarding the spatial and temporal patterns and the share of pollution attributable to traffic-related air pollutants is limited, in part due to concentrations that fall sharply with distance from roadways, as well as the few monitoring sites available in cities. This study uses a newly developed dispersion model (RLINE) and a spatially and temporally resolved emissions inventory to predict hourly PM2.5 and NOx concentrations across Detroit (MI, USA) at very high spatial resolution.
Read more: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/12/4/3646/htm
SEMCOG’s traffic volume map represents Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) for roads in Southeast Michigan that are eligible for Federal Funds.
The three types of AADT’s represented:
1. Observed – actual counts taken on the segment
2. Interpolated – calculated based on adjacent counts
3. Default – calculated based on county, number of lanes, and functional class.
This is a sequence of maps depicting the transformation of downtown Detroit over the past 150 years, redrawn from various archival sources. The maps depict the rapid growth and subsequent decline of the urban core’s built form. All maps have been drawn by myself or my graduate assistants at the University of Michigan and the University of Cincinnati and are copyrighted. – Conrad Kickert
HT @RethinkDetroit
This is an incredible sequence of maps: https://t.co/2SRXJdvb2V Detroit was already losing density in the 1920s!
— Cooper (@rethinkdetroit) November 11, 2015
This map from the Free Press is a bit confusing. It appears that only major roadways have new lighting while starting soon the expressways and Downtown will get new lights. Are we to assume all the areas in white already have new streetlights?
“While most city neighborhoods now have the new lights, Jones said there are still a few pockets in the city that remain stuck in the dark, mostly due to underground wiring issues that will get fixed as progress continues on relighting major thoroughfares.” (source)
I’ve often shared information here that notes 40% of Detroit households have no access to internet, both broadband and cell phone access. In a city that faces countless issues with connectivity and communicating with pockets of people spread across a large area, there is great potential for internet to bring Detroit together, improve communications, and equalize access – jobs, education, resources, etc.
The latest numbers from the 2014 American Community Survey show Detroit has 95,825 households or 37% of all Detroit households have no internet access. The city sadly ranks #2 nationally for cities with over 50,000 households. The logical next step in saying that 37% of Detroit households have no internet is to then ask where are those households located? Who is impacted?
From the above map you can see the obvious outline of Detroit with low broadband internet access. Downtown, Boston-Edison, Grandmont-Rosedale, Palmer Woods, and a handful of other ‘higher’ income areas on the website have greater internet access. The Improve Detroit app submissions are clustered in areas with more internet, but you can see people are reporting from across the entire city.
Broadband access in Detroit and the metro region maps on perfectly with the region’s socioeconomic geography. The FCC recently visit Detroit to talk about the digital divide and noted that 38% of Detroit households don’t have broadband, but also for low-income households no broadband reaches 63%. The surrounding Detroit suburbs have significantly higher broadband rates. Pew Internet Research found that a growing majority of internet users access the web via their phones (31%). Pew also noted that young adults and non-whites are more likely to access the internet on their phones with 45% of 18-29 year olds and 51% of African Americans. They’ve also found that young adults, minorities, and those with no college experience, and lower household income levels are more likely than other groups to use their phone as their primary access point to the internet.
All of this information points to the great potential of breaking down the digital divide in Detroit and other cities with low internet access. The Open Technology Institute drafted a Methodology for Identifying and Addressing Urban Areas with Low Broadband Adoption based on work being done in Detroit with mesh networks. The Detroit Community Technology Project of the Detroit Digital Stewards has been building wifi mesh networks within communities and other groups are trying to bring more fiber networks to the city. The important part will be building inclusive internet infrastructure networks. Water is a human right and so should access to information!
EDIT 11/16/15
There were 19,590 submissions to the Improve Detroit smartphone app between December 2014 – October 2015. While I don’t believe that smartphones are the only answer to better communications in cities facing major hurdles in access, poverty, and inequality, the results in Detroit are promising where users have been able to submit issues from across the city 70% via the smartphone app.
Francis Grunow found this fun map and shared:
“That map is a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from sometime between 1915-1920. It’s weird because the population it lists is for 1920, but it doesn’t seem to correspond with the Census figure from that year. Also, the boundary for the city it depicts doesn’t show annexations in 1916+. I just colorized it with GIMP. So it’s probably not a specific date, since Sanborn’s were additive and periodically updated”
The 1920 Census lists a population of 993,678 for the City of Detroit. Check annexations here.
This gem of a map comes from the 1843 bound volume of “A collection of maps, charts, drawings, surveys, etc, published from time to time, by order of the two houses of Congress.” from the Library of Congress online archives.
Detroit was merely a strip in 1820 and Belle Isle was simply Hog Island in the strait.
Loveland has been doing some important reporting and analysis (After the Fire) on fires in the city over the past year.
Alex Alsup created the above map to support Angel’s Night efforts based on the following criteria:
Vacant properties adjacent to occupied homes are critical to note for three reasons:
- 10% of fires (167, from January 1 ’15 thru August 1, ’15) in Detroit over the past year have been “exposure fires” — fires that spread from one building to an adjacent building.
- There have been more than twice as many fires categorized by the fire department as suspicious or arsons in vacant structures than in occupied ones (570 vacant, versus 251 occupied, from January 1 ’15 thru August 1, 2015).
- Publicly owned vacant properties can be demolished, removing potential fuel for fires and risk from occupied homes. In Hardest Hit Fund zones there are myriad instances where vacant structures adjacent to occupied homes have been removed through city demolition efforts. We hope this map can be useful to that continued work as well.
“Mapping the Motor City’s Cinemas” is a digital humanities collaborative project in progress at the University of Michigan. This joint venture between a film studies librarian and a spatial and numeric data librarian aims to contribute to our collective understanding of the movie going experience in 20th century America and to inspire others to think about ways they can contribute to more thoroughly and preserving the past, understanding its impact and making inaccessible materials available. Multifaceted in scope, it attempts to reveal the intersection of geographic location and film exhibition schedules to see what they can tell us about both film and urban life in the 20th century. Previously difficult to access materials used with new technology will enable researchers and scholars to visualize the patterns of exhibition trends in new and different ways and come to new conclusions that were until now too difficult to make.
DETROITography 