Peter Eisinger

Is Detroit Dead

ABSTRACT: An effective way to understand the slow death of the city of Detroit is through the prism of the course of a terminal disease, tracing the stages of symptom assessment, diagnosis, and curative intervention. This essay explores that notion by taking off from several recent books about Detroit’s catastrophic decline that employ the language of urban morbidity and mortality to describe the city’s condition. Urban death is a function of the withering or failure of crucial vital urban functions involving, principally, governance and economic opportunity. By that standard the essay concludes that it is becoming hard to call Detroit a living city anymore.

Detroit Futures: Can the City Be Reimagined?

Many Detroit business and political leaders, as well as many ordinary citizens, believe that the city can be restored to vitality. At least four visions of the future city animate their efforts: the city as a great international model for green planning and technology leadership, the city as an entertainment destination, the city as a metropolitan center, and the city as a pioneer destination on the urban frontier. As these visions have simultaneously played out, they have perhaps improved daily life in Detroit in the last decade, but each is finally a partial and inadequate vision. None speaks directly to the interests of the bulk of the citys working class and poor population. Some of the visions lack sufficient scale relative to the citys problems, and some cannot be realized for lack of resources. All of these visions finally represent failures of city–building.

Patterns of Interracial Politics: Conflict and Cooperation in the City.

The dataset consists of responses to questions about important problems facing Milwaukee and what the city government is doing about these problems, Presidential and mayoral vote in 1968, degree of political participation, level of political information on government, educational, social welfare programs and officials, knowledge of and participation in CAP, Model Cities, and consumer associations, attendance at meetings, protest activities (types, reasons for, attendance, participation, level of violence, arrests) and their affect on Milwaukee, blacks, US and city governments, community control, educational policies, quality of government in Milwaukee, political action to carry out an objective, black-white relations.