Lights on, everyone’s home

When the iconic Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood reopened to tremendous fanfare in summer 2024, Motor City native Angela Dillard took a moment to reflect. Years ago, U-M’s vice provost for undergraduate education advocated for the demolition of the decrepit, windowless high-rise.

“To be wrong about things like that is a real pleasure,” says Dillard, who is a professor of African and Afroamerican studies in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA), and former chair of the history department.

Today, Michigan Central is home to Ford Motor Co.’s billion-dollar Innovation Hub. The 30-acre campus also houses Newlab, a global platform for technology startups, and Code Next, Google’s workforce development program. Meanwhile, the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit are setting a new standard for inclusive public-private partnerships, attracting local innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to the site and the city.

No longer a hollow symbol of Detroit’s demise, Michigan Central’s glittering windows represent the promise of an equitable and sustainable future for the region.

Egalitarian and inclusive.

In early 2024, Dillard wrapped the administrative paperwork on The Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis. And much like the reincarnation of Michigan Central, the project closely hewed to the ideals of “inclusive recovery,” a term popularized by Maurice Cox, Detroit’s former planning and development director (2015-19).

Research-driven outreach with community leaders is nothing new, but the Egalitarian Project tweaked the traditional model in a subtle but profound way by prioritizing the humanities — history, philosophy, literature, writing, oratory, and the visual arts – as an essential component of inclusive, urban planning. Over 10 years, the multi-phased grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported an “urban humanities initiative organized around a partnership of humanists, architects, social scientists, urban designers, city planners, and community leaders.”

With the humanities as their foundation, the participants in the Egalitarian Project sought to understand the role memory plays in renewal, how the “production of decline” influences decision-making, and other issues that influence urban planning and policymaking. Drawing upon history, public records, storytelling, the visual arts, and more, U-M faculty, students, and community partners created several new place-based initiatives. They re-examined everything from residents’ relationships to the Detroit River and Belle Isle to the obliteration of the Black Bottom neighborhood and Detroit’s identity as “a carceral space.” Funding also supported existing U-M programs, like Semester in Detroit.

“We’re working in a city struggling to learn what recovery means,” Dillard says. “And recovery for who? And recovery under what conditions? And who is part of defining what that’s going to look like? If the goal is not to be egalitarian, it’s hard to know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it.”

Any serious inquiry into inclusive recovery “has to be interdisciplinary,” says Robert Fishman, retired professor of architecture and urban planning in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He was Dillard’s faculty co-lead in the Egalitarian Metropolis Project.

“People want the truth about the history of Detroit as a way toward reconciliation,” he says. “That expresses what the humanities could contribute toward Cox’s stated goal.”

Dillard and Fishman managed the joint effort between LSA and Taubman through multiple phases, including a COVID-induced pause that prolonged the grant’s duration.

An urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal

Digital space

The wealth of relevant information resulting from the Egalitarian Metropolis project was too significant to file on a shelf, the leaders agreed. Naturally, they turned to the humanities to showcase their results and make them accessible to fellow researchers.

“We don’t think about endings enough,” Dillard says. “It was important for us to reflect and find a meaningful and thoughtful way to formally close out this expansive project, which received generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.”

The project results live in a digital warehouse designed as a self-guided 3D Virtual Gallery Exhibition. Access to the videos, historical images, interviews, data, interactive maps, and other assets may motivate researchers and urban planners in other cities to prioritize the humanities in their efforts toward urban renewal, Dillard says.

“This work was inspiring, and we wanted to create an archive so people could pick up the pieces and spin them out to meet their own goals,” she says. “It’s an invitation to do more.”

Resilient space

The archive is a vivid reminder that the humanities broadly conceived include architecture and urban planning. Viewing Detroit through that lens, says Fishman, one is apt to see residents’ resilience instead of trauma, blight, and abandonment.

“There are considerable advantages to seeing the open space as a resource, not a liability,” says Fishman. “Instead of the landscape of abandonment, you can focus on the openness and a new kind of community.”

This is just one unique aspect about Detroit and Detroit-like cities that require a counterintuitive approach to urban planning, Dillard says. “They’re shrinking for one thing. Urban planning has traditionally been about growth and expansion. You need a different logic for Detroit to ‘bring it in.’”

The city also is characterized by hyper-segregation in both its past and present. The humanities play a role here as well, she says.

“A core Black city ringed by what are in many cases predominantly white suburbs means you can’t think about urban planning, policy, history, culture, or anything else without dealing with race and racism deep within its structure. They are just there — front and center,” says Dillard. “This has not always been something that urban planners and policymakers have been inclined to do: to think with race in the foreground.”

Displaced space

Research teams worked with the Detroit Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust, to name a few. More importantly, they aligned with leaders from lower-profile but essential community organizations and nonprofits.

“You need to co-create with the people who don’t have corporate power, institutional prestige, or political pull,” Dillard says.

Participants in the Black Bottom Archives project, for example, worked with residents to explore the reverberating impacts of Detroit’s early-1960s decision to displace a once-vibrant community – plagued by urban poverty – to build I-375.

“It amounts to one of the most destructive acts of urban planning anywhere in the country,” Fishman says, “and it’s as if it happened yesterday. The history is all around us, very present. It’s not in the dark stacks in some library.”

Oral histories, census records, business records, maps, and other resources uncovered by research teams provide evidence of the displacement’s impact on modern-day Detroit. Project findings can inform future proposals for reparations and political organizing grounded in the lived experiences of city residents.

“You need to respect and nurture that history; it’s a very significant factor in revitalization,” Dillard says.

Related projects included “Detroit After Abandonment” and “Racializing Space,” further exploring the decision-making processes that turned Detroit into one of the nation’s most segregated cities. Documenting original properties through insurance records, photographs, and other sources, project participants managed “in an incredibly creative way to give people a sense of a community that has since been lost,” says Dillard. “And that might influence how you think about redesign and policy debates.”

Grant funding also supported the existing “Detroit as a Carceral Space,” sponsored by LSA’s Carceral Space Project, in which an intergenerational team of participants tracked every known or suspected police killing on record, uncovering a remarkable amount of Detroit history by way of public records. The researchers’ scholarly work is solving family mysteries in some instances and reopening cases in others.

Aquatic space

The Egalitarian Metropolis project also supported the “Detroit River Story Lab” and the “Aquatic Spaces” programs. Both leveraged the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine the international waterway as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. One aspect of the program was supporting the community-based bid to UNESCO to inscribe the Detroit River as a world heritage site.

Training the humanities lens on the river opened oft-neglected lines of inquiry, Dillard says. “What does it mean to have a fluid international border? Or what is a racialized aquatic space? It’s an interesting way to think about water, not only ecologically but culturally.”

Participants in the ongoing “Detroit River Story Lab” also are engaging with the Gordie Howe International Bridge project, contributing to some of the public history and signage.

Living space

The effects of excessive property taxes, a foreclosure crisis, and a lack of affordable housing also impact how inclusive Detroit’s recovery can be. The Egalitarian Metropolis Project supported “The Architecture Preparatory Program (ArcPrep),” established in 2015. Through ArcPrep, Detroit Public School juniors experience hands-on learning in architecture, urbanism, and studio design presented by U-M faculty and student instructors.

Statistically, 2% of licensed architects in the United States are African American, and fewer are Latino. The immersive course expands students’ sense of agency in the built environment while bringing diverse voices into the field. About 500 students have gone through the program so far; some early adopters are now college graduates working in architecture firms. Arc Prep also generated a book project in collaboration with Cornell University to create pathways for more underrepresented students to engage with the profession.

Other programs supported by the Egalitarian Metropolis project included the long-running “Semester in Detroit’s Detroiters Speak Series,” “Institute for AfroUrbanism,” “Dream of Detroit,” the Friends of Royal Oak Township’s “Truth Toward Reconciliation,” and “Wahnabezee” (also known as Belle Isle Park).

Cumulatively dozens of faculty, staff, students, and community partners were involved. Their active participation was essential to any success that can be claimed, Dillard says.

A full list of participants and projects can be found on the archived website.
 
 
(Lead image courtesy of the Egalitarian Metropolis Project.)