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Recently, the number of historic renovation and restoration projects in the US city of Detroit has been increasing to preserve the cultural heritage and to meet current needs. However, this type of project has distinct challenges from new construction projects. This paper reports the results of a qualitative study investigating challenges encountered during historic building renovations in Detroit. The objective is to fill a gap in the construction literature concerning practices for managing large domestic historic building renovation projects. Strong industry interest in the topic also motivated the completion of this study. The expert interview method was used. Semistructured interviews were conducted with six expert practitioners concerning their experiences. Data concerning common challenges, pitfalls, and other issues were gathered, analyzed, and grouped into seven categories (code compliance, historic status, organizational, design, construction, budget/schedule, and technology). The results corroborate many findings and general themes from the prior literature on historic building renovation while reporting several novel findings absent in the reviewed literature. In addition, this paper provides recommendations to avoid and mitigate such challenges. Primary recommendations include developing strong collaborative working protocols between the parties; selecting key team members based on successful past working relationships, not price or cost of service; and, if feasible, conducting hazardous material abatement and selective demolition activities prior to completion of the design to derisk the project. Additionally, 23 secondary recommendations focused on numerous tactical, management, and technical matters are provided. This study contributes to the body of knowledge in the quality and risk management research domain as well as the restoration and renovation construction domain. The practical contribution of this study is to allow industry practitioners to better understand this special type of construction project and strategize quality control and management plans by providing common challenges and recommendations. Challenges encountered during large historic renovations in Detroit were investigated to identify suggested practices for better management of this project type. In addition to verifying prior findings from historic renovations performed elsewhere, new information is presented concerning key knowledge and practice gaps, authority having jurisdiction interface issues, organizational/funding constraints, negligence and standard of care concerns, misaligned competing incentives surrounding hazardous material abatement, and detailed information about design and construction challenges for this project type in Detroit. Three primary recommendations and 23 secondary recommendations are provided for better management, including developing strong collaborative working protocols between the parties; selecting key team members based on successful past working relationships, not price or cost of service; and, if feasible, conducting hazardous material abatement and selective demolition activities prior to completion of the design to derisk the project. The findings will aid design and construction practitioners in making informed decisions about historic renovation projects, thereby improving project delivery and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gordie Howe International Bridge project is providing a new modern border crossing between Windsor, ON, Canada and Detroit, MI, USA. The centrepiece of the project is a 2.5 km long cable-stayed bridge with 853 m main span over the Detroit River and 220 m tall towers on both sides of the river. In addition to the bridge, the project includes ports of entry on both sides of the border and a new freeway interchange with Interstate-75 in Detroit. The project was procured as a public–private partnership that allowed the proponents to propose either a suspension or cable-stayed bridge, with the ultimate selection creating the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America. The paper outlines the need for the new border crossing and results of the environmental assessment process, as well as describing the project evolution from planning through procurement and into detailed design. The scoping of the bridge design parameters is discussed, including: comprehensive geotechnical investigation; load study to develop project-specific live loading; the approach for durability requirements to achieve a service life of 125 years; special considerations for security; wind engineering; and compliance with both Canadian and US design codes. The paper also discusses the approach to achieving an aesthetically pleasing bridge design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drinking water quality sensor technology has rapidly advanced, facilitating the collection of rich datasets and real-time analytics. However, sensors have not yet been widely applied to monitor drinking water quality in premise plumbing. Richer quality of data in premise plumbing offers an improved understanding of the quality of drinking water present at the point-of-use. In this paper, online drinking water quality sensor nodes were temporarily installed in twenty-four homes in Detroit, Michigan. The water quality sensor nodes took measurements of five drinking water quality parameters every five minutes for four weeks. Additionally, free chlorine and lead were sampled periodically within each home. Together, these data make up a dataset that captures drinking water quality over time in a legacy city with an oversized drinking water system. This dataset offers more frequent measurements amongst more sample homes than are typically available in premise plumbing or at the tap. The data can be used to investigate temporal trends in drinking water quality, including diurnal patterns and anomaly detection. Additionally, this dataset could be utilized to evaluate water quality in comparison with other cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the 2008 financial crisis, the City of Detroit has faced significant housing challenges: the conventional mortgage market in the city has collapsed; numerous residents are precariously housed; and urban 'blight' and property abandonment are widespread. This paper offers an empirical focus on one experimental approach to governing these problems: the roll-out of new forms of housing-related loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) Detroit residents. Under the rubric of financial inclusion, private and public actors have promoted these loan programmes as a way to both improve the housing outcomes of financially excluded residents and reboot the city's mortgage market. The paper critically analyses these claims through a political economy lens, asking how, why and with what impacts housing-related financial inclusion programmes have been developed in post-crisis Detroit. The paper argues: (1) that these financial inclusion efforts are the products of an existing orientation toward market-based governance mechanisms and have grown out of a broader political project of property market revival; and (2) that in spite of their rhetorical commitments to improving the housing outcomes of LMI residents, many of the new loan programmes are ill-equipped to deliver on these promises in practice, prioritising market revitalisation over the needs of borrowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the scale and composition of emergency demand for police services in Detroit, United States. The contribution is made in replication and extension of analyses reported elsewhere in the United States. Findings indicate that police spend a considerable proportion of time performing a social service function. Just 51% of the total deployed time responding to 911 calls is consumed by crime incidents. The remainder is spent on quality of life (16%), traffic (15%), health (7%), community (5%), and proactive (4%) duties. A small number of incidents consume a disproportionately large amount of police officer time. Emergency demand is concentrated in time and space, and can differ between types of demand. The findings further highlight the potential implications of radically reforming police forces in the United States. The data and code used here are openly available for reproduction, reuse, and scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was prepared by Katharina Herold while on secondment to the OECD Network on Fiscal Relations across Levels of Government from the German Ministry of Finance. It incorporates feedback from delegates at the 2017 meeting of the Fiscal Network, which featured a dialogue with Kevyn Orr, the former Emergency Caretaker of Detroit. Comments from OECD colleagues Sean Dougherty, Peter Hoeller, Muge Adalet McGowan, Teresa Ter-minassian, and Camila Vammalle were valuable in revising the paper. Technical assistance from Celia Rutkoski was most appreciated. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the German Ministry of Finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first three children's museums in the world opened in Brooklyn, New York (1899), Boston, Massachusetts (1913), and Detroit, Michigan (1917). This paper examines the contributions of children's museum professionals to museum education through presentations at the American Association of Museums given by the curators of the first three children's museums – Anna Billings Gallup's (Brooklyn), Delia I. Griffin (Boston), and Gertrude A. Gillmore (Detroit). A review of the papers they delivered to their colleagues illustrates how their pioneering educational approaches – such as encouraging visitors to interact with objects and creating opportunities for children to become empowered and invested museum visitors – continue to shape the field. It also highlights the value of including a seat at the table for children's museum professionals in conversations about museum education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force in Detroit in the 1924 and 1925 elections. In the 1910s, the Detroit Citizens League had risen in Detroit politics through its practice of the rhetoric of political Protestantism, designed to mobilize Protestant laymen through religious appeals. In the 1920s, this style of politics backfired on the Citizens League: after spending years focusing on Detroit's business elite, Protestants abandoned the Citizens League in droves when that organization backed a Catholic for mayor. By turning to the Ku Klux Klan, many Protestant voters found an organization making the appeals that they had backed a decade before and which was better at incorporating them than the Citizens League. Ultimately, the Citizens League's response to the Klan was complicated both by reluctance to further alienate past supporters and by an inability to unite politically with past foes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building of distinct capabilities in an organization is essential; without those capabilities, organizations lose competitive edge and advantage, and ultimately market share and brand presence. Organizations utilize many tools to build human capabilities, which include interventions that seek to improve performance. The more HR can provide a line of sight to the C suite that those interventions and capability‐building activities positively impact performance and business outcomes, the more effective HR can be at moving the HR strategy to the core of the business strategy. This writing explores using intersectionality to describe a confluence of design thinking, human performance technology, organizational network analysis, and influence on performance interventions. Keller (1987), Parker and Marsha (2021), and Roy (2021) have written on the various approaches to improving performance, but none of these studies utilized a confluence of the aforementioned strategies, hence the "sweet spot." That spot is the foundation and centerpiece of the reasoning in this paper. This paper chronicled a performance exercise utilized by the author at the City of Detroit as an HR practitioner and applied this intersectionality to performance in the grounds maintenance division. It was learned that all aspects of these strategies layered together yielded robust results, concluding that many more HR practitioners and human performance technologists could employ this strategy and measure the outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While small, midwestern towns across the United States have become the center of the battle against Critical Race Theory and identity politics in education over the past several years, one small town in Michigan became the launching pad for a grassroots gender-consciousness program grounded firmly in the experiences of young Black women. The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) has flourished into a program co-facilitated by previous participants across several schools in the metro Detroit area, all while national- and state-level discourse became increasingly hostile towards any material or theoretical support of Black women's lives. In this paper, we—the three pilot participants of GCP and one co-facilitator—return to the recordings of the first iteration of GCP to examine how exactly a small-town consciousness-raising project took root amidst these circumstances. We explore how the project cultivated, and how its primary facilitator and founder conceptualized, a Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology which centered the agency and capacity for consciousness of young Black women, or Black girls, specifically. Through this analysis, we offer that one such Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology is to spark small revolutions through the everyday possibilities for resistance and refusal of cooptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how local governments have addressed abandonment of a high-dollar investment: publicly funded sport facilities. The issue of abandoned professional sport facilities is becoming more ubiquitous as teams seek new, more modern, state-of-the-art venues to maximize operational revenues. This creates a scenario where the average lifespan of a professional sport facility is only 27 years. Using a comparative case study analysis, this research examines how municipalities have approached the redevelopment of abandoned stadium infrastructure in Detroit, Houston, and St. Louis. Successful outcomes related to the redevelopment of abandoned stadiums in Detroit have seen public and private stakeholders take advantage of their unique assets in public-private partnerships. However, abandoned stadium infrastructure in Houston and St. Louis have remained idle for years as local governments failed to secure private investment to aid with redevelopment efforts and/or created additional bureaucratic red tape that limits the prospects for site redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although choice experiments (CEs) have emerged as the most popular stated preference method in applied economics, the method is not free from biases related to order and presentation effects. This paper introduces a new preference elicitation method referred to as a calibrated CE (CCE), and we explore the ability of the new method to alleviate starting-point bias. The new approach utilises the distribution of preferences from a prior CE to provide real-time feedback to respondents about our best guess of their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for food attributes and allows respondents to adjust and calibrate their values. The analysis utilises data collected in 2017 in two US cities, Phoenix and Detroit, on consumer preferences for local and organic tomatoes sold through supermarkets, urban farms and farmers' markets to establish a prior preference distribution. We re-conducted the survey in May 2020 and implemented the CCE. Conventional analysis of the 2020 CE data shows that WTP is strongly influenced by a starting point: the higher the initial price respondents encountered, the higher the absolute value of their WTP. Despite this bias, we show that when respondents have the opportunity to update their WTP when presented with the best guess, the resulting calibrated WTP is much less influenced by the random starting point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focusses on the effect of aluminium oxide nanoparticles concentration on tribological properties of lubricant oil and noise response on Detroit engine 92V friction parts. The nanomaterials were produced by sol-gel production, process. The manufactured nanomaterials and the tested part were evaluated by scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis. The coefficient of friction (CoF) and noise response were studied. Results analysis illustrated that the addition of Al2O3 nanoparticles has improved the tribological properties of the lubricating oil and decreases the wear rate of engine parts according to the decrease of CoF. Adding 1% wt. of Al2O3 nanoparticles to oil has decreased the wear rate and the CoF more than 0.5% wt. of Al2O3 nanoparticles addition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In jurisdictions throughout the United States, thousands of sexual assault kits (SAKs; also known as a "rape kits") have not been submitted by the police for forensic DNA testing. DNA evidence may be helpful to sexual assault investigations and prosecutions by identifying perpetrators, revealing serial offenders through DNA matches across cases, and exonerating those who have been wrongly accused. This paper describes a longitudinal action research project conducted in Detroit, Michigan after that city discovered approximately 11,000 untested sexual assault kits in a police department storage facility. We conducted a root cause analysis to examine individual, organizational, community, and societal factors that contributed to the development of the rape kit backlog in Detroit. Based on those findings, we implemented and evaluated structural changes to increase staffing, promote kit testing, and retrain police and prosecutors so that cases could be reopened for investigation and prosecution. As we conducted this work, we also studied how this action research project impacted the Detroit criminal justice system. Participating in this project changed stakeholders' attitudes about the utility of research to address community problems, the usefulness of DNA evidence in sexual assault cases, and the impact of trauma on survivors. The results led to new protocols for SAK testing and police investigations, and new state legislation mandating SAK forensic DNA testing. Highlights: Thousands of sexual assault kits have not been submitted by the police for forensic DNA testing.This paper describes a longitudinal action research project conducted in Detroit, Michigan.We also studied how this action research project impacted the Detroit criminal justice system.Participating in this project changed stakeholders' attitudes about the utility of research.The results led to new protocols for SAK testing and new legislation for SAK forensic DNA testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The July 1967 riot in Detroit, Michigan, was one of the most violent race-related conflicts in American history. Common themes developed in both local and national media coverage of the event, including widespread use of wartime imagery. This archival framing analysis examines the frames and techniques used by three major newspapers—the Detroit Free Press, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times—when covering the riot. While warfare and criminality were frequently used as framing devices, journalists at all three papers highlighted ideological divisions within Detroit's Black community. Ultimately, the study argues that reporters' marginalizing word choices and the racialization of riot-related violence depicted African-Americans as a dangerous "other." The coverage created an interpretive lens for readers, cementing existing racial divisions, and shaping how newsrooms and the American public would understand racial violence for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Detroit, pockets of gentrification can be found amid larger processes of neighbourhood decline. Emerging gentrification is rapidly shifting the city's dominant narrative from one of urban failure, to a comeback city. Both these interpretations, however, are problematic. In Detroit, race is central to understanding these narratives and the different meanings of gentrification. In this paper, I draw on in‐depth interviews with key visionaries and community leaders, all of whom share a broad concern for social justice. Two narratives that both challenge the dominant perspectives on Detroit become clear. The first sees gentrification is a necessary evil whose negative effects need to be carefully managed. The second is the perspective from many African American activists that gentrification is part of a continuum of racial discrimination. An analysis of these narratives helps to expose injustices, propose socially‐just solutions and politicise gentrification and its consequences, key elements of critical urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of the coronavirus has led to containment policies in many places, with concomitant shifts in routine activities. Major declines in crime have been reported as a result. However, those declines depend on crime type and may differ by parts of a city and land uses. This paper examines burglary in Detroit, Michigan during the month of March, 2020, a period of considerable change in routine activities. We examine 879 block groups, separating those dominated by residential land use from those with more mixed land use. We divide the month into three periods: pre-containment, transition period, and post-containment. Burglaries increase in block groups with mixed land use, but not blocks dominated by residential land use. The impact of containment policies on burglary clarifies after taking land use into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has documented the complexity of parent decision-making within school choice marketplaces, including the ways in which individual preferences, social networks, and geography influence where parents choose to enroll their children in school. Yet, parent choices are constrained by the ways in which these dynamics intersect with existing school characteristics and locations. By constructing unique choice set 'landscapes' for 194 Detroit neighborhoods, taking into account where current neighbors attend school in the city, this paper contributes new evidence on the influence of peer enrollment on school choosing, and how peer choice sets differ from students' nearest schools. We find that parents are responsive to lower quality schools in their choice sets when choosing to exit and that choice set quality varies by race, with Black students having lower quality schools in their Detroit choice sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detroit is a dynamic city with a dynamic history, yet it has come to symbolize both White flight (beginning in the 1940s and accelerating in the late 1960s) and Black flight (beginning in the 1990s and reaching its apex in 2000). While Detroit's Black population continues to decline, its White population increased by 22% between 2010 and 2015. Along with these shifting demographic trends comes shifting residential and educational landscapes that amplify the racial, economic, and spatial inequalities marking present-day Detroit. Drawing upon the literature of human geography and sociology of education, and utilizing GIS software, we overlay the mapping of demographic realities with the mapping of human stories. As a case study of how a non-profit, public charter school can be a vehicle for resisting gentrification, this paper examines the role of "place" in one school's navigation of an increasingly gentrified Detroit and its commitment to primarily serving youth of its neighborhood. Using a multimodal and multiscalar approach, we find evidence of endogenous gentrification, intergenerational topophilia, and the school enacting resistance within a dialectic of its market-driven charter school status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As two White, privileged educators and researchers, we have questioned, challenged, and examined how to best operate in diverse classrooms, keeping in mind our joint goals of advancing socially just teaching agendas alongside our desire not to "whitesplain" issues centering on race to students of color. Through narrative case phenomenology and Critical Whiteness Studies frameworks, we analyze separate classroom events in which racialized content was both unexpected and foregrounded. Our responses in these moments, and our ensuing conversations and intellectual discussions, serve as data for this paper. Additionally, these scenarios are ripe for analysis as we have served either as teachers or researchers with distinct priorities and roles. The classroom scenarios we present have caused both our personal introspection and professional growth. Implications for practice include our assessment of antiracist teaching as a moral and ethical issue that belongs in classroom space, no matter the educational circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from two studies: a national study of digital inclusion programmes managed by community-based organisations in the USA that help people gain access to low-cost broadband and digital literacy skills; and a study of internet access and use in Detroit. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to gain a deeper understanding of the ability of low-income individuals and families to spend money on broadband access at home. Findings show that although those with a limited monthly budget have an acute understanding of the value of home broadband, the costs associated with home broadband service make it difficult for them to afford. In considering this approach and its implications for digital inclusion policy in the USA, we argue that ability to pay provides a framework for understanding the local, cultural drivers and barriers to broadband adoption in low-income communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Windsor in Ontario, Canada and Detroit in Michigan, USA are Great Lakes border cities on the Detroit River that have a long history of water pollution. Public outcry over water pollution in the 1960s led to the enactment of environmental laws starting in the early 1970s. As these laws were implemented and water quality improved, citizens started calling for improved public access to the river, including establishing linked riverfront greenways. This paper presents a case study of greenway development in these border cities based on indicator reporting to comprehensively assess ecosystem health. Findings show that waterfront greenways were catalyzed by cleanup of the Detroit River. As greenway systems expanded on both sides of the border, greenway stakeholders began to envision cross-border greenway connections that would stimulate ecotourism, help encourage healthy lifestyles, and enhance quality of life in southwest Ontario and southeast Michigan. Recommended next steps include investing in greenway capacity building, identifying and testing creative financing options for greenways, formalizing institutional arrangements between Canada and the United States for a binational greenway network, and strengthening cross-border greenway connections by reestablishing a cross-border ferry, offering free access to the tunnel bus on weekends for cyclists, and hosting Windsor-Detroit open streets' events. Robust transboundary greenway partnerships are critical to realizing the full potential of cross border greenway systems, including expanding outdoor recreation and ecotourism, conserving natural resources, and inspiring a stewardship ethic for shared ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of today has been increasingly described in post-apocalyptic terms. This paper is dedicated to the ruin as an emblematic image of this post-apocalyptic present. In contrast to the debates surrounding 'ruin porn', which critically engage ruin imagery as creating apocalyptic fantasies that distort the non-apocalyptic social realities of places facing urban decline, this paper claims that the ruin image is providing a proper image of today's post-apocalyptic condition. Based on Jacques Lacan's concept of the Real, which is defined as designating 'what does not work in a world', the paper traces how the ruin can be considered as a 'piece of the Real' that allows to condence and materialize the non-working dimensions of the world today. The paper identifies three motifs in ruin porn as Reals of the post-apocalyptic present: the wastelands produced by the catastrophic drive of capital, the unnatural natures faced by the ecological crisis, and the absence of humans, which resembles the radical absence of any common sense of humanity today. By identifying these motifs in ruin porn, the paper aims to offer a referential frame for navigating through a world haunted by the specter of permanent crisis. In the conclusion, the paper addresses the hopelessness expressed in ruin porn as a starting point to reflect on the possibilities of building a future in the ruins of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Detroit, Michigan, the urban poor fear they are being displaced and replaced by water. As part of the city's recent redevelopment efforts, planners have proposed creating green and blue infrastructure zones to manage urban flooding and mitigate the volume of overflow storm and sewer waters that pollute the Great Lakes each year. The areas slated for these water retention zones are the same marginal neighborhoods where Black residents face frequent foreclosures due to water debts and mass shutoffs from water and sewer services. This paper explores how water materializes and mediates uneven landscapes of livability, as well as new modes of living in common among those excluded from the urban commons. I introduce the concepts of "bluelining" and "blues infrastructures" in order to think through the contested assemblages of water, race, and space at the margins of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholarly attention to vanishing cities is fairly recent so, to guide future research, a comprehensive evaluation of prior findings is required. This study is a network analysis of 333 publications authored in English, published over the last two decades. The findings are as follows: (1) shrinking city research has increased significantly since 2016; (2) the key themes are planning, decline, depopulation, policy, regeneration, vacant land, green infrastructure, and case studies such as Detroit; and (3) major academic groups have not yet collaborated effectively on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript describes a telephone outreach project for members of a research registry program for older adults in Detroit, Michigan. From April until December 2020, the Healthier Black Elders Center designed and implemented a telephone outreach program, calling 1204 older adults utilizing 15 staff and volunteers. The calls served to check in on registry members and collect data on mental health, coping mechanisms, access to services, masks, testing, and tele-health. This paper details the methods of developing and implementing an innovative engagement program that collected time-sensitive data from older Black adults that has directly been applied to create virtual health education programs, share resource information, and create a program to reduce social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship on participatory design has indicated continued struggles to develop processes that genuinely include citizen feedback in an inclusive manner. This paper explores whether Detroit's Community Benefits Ordinance, that has allowed for residents to negotiate community benefits like parks, public spaces and streetscape improvements is a possible avenue for improved participatory design. This research shows that the Ordinance allowed for citizens to negotiate benefits related to the built environment, accounting for about one third of benefits won. However, there are significant barriers towards the Ordinance providing a transparent, non-elitist, and non-tokenistic environment for citizen participation in urban design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carfax (2018) estimates that 20% of U.S. vehicles that are on the road have outstanding recalls: they have a known defective part or design. Recalled vehicles represent future costs to manufacturers and pose safety risks to the public. Only two prior studies examine the determinants of recall completion rates—the percent of recalled vehicles that are repaired—and both use cross-sectional data from the 1980s. This paper uses panel data on 677 U.S. vehicle recall campaigns from 2006 to 2015 to identify the correlates of completion rates for the Detroit 3 and the three largest foreign vehicle manufacturers. In addition to using more recent data, we include variables that were not previously examined: multiple recalls, vehicle type, and reporting period. The analysis confirms the earlier finding that domestic manufacturers' completion rates exceed those of the foreign producers. We also observe higher completion rates on recalls for severe defects, on vehicles under multiple recalls, and on luxury vehicles. In contrast, older vehicles and trucks exhibit lower recall completion rates. The observed patterns in recall completion rates suggest that refinements in how manufacturers estimate recall costs in the litigation process and in strategies to improve completion rates are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the pathways through which Lebanese immigrants come to own small businesses in the Detroit metropolitan area. It utilizes case study analysis as a methodological tool and the literatures on immigrant entrepreneurship and social capital theory as frameworks. Lebanese immigrants initially undergo a process of downward mobility on account of their inability to utilize their human capital in the host context. However, a number of factors interact to facilitate their move into small business enterprise. First, in the face of exclusions in the mainstream primary economy, Lebanese immigrants who have access to fungible social capital resources forsake expectations of return on their human capital and settle for opening a business. Second, the urban conditions in Detroit and the growth of the Arab immigrant community in Dearborn have opened a viable economic niche to Lebanese immigrants who could become small business owners. This paper suggests that an understanding of the delicate interactions between capital resources immigrants bring with them and structural conditions in the host context is crucial to describing the pathways through which Lebanese immigrants become owners of small businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crime has an inherent geographical quality and when a crime occurs, it happens within a particular space making spatiality essential component in crime studies. To prevent and respond to crimes, it is first essential to identify the factors that trigger crimes and then design policy and strategy based on each factor. This project investigates the spatial dimension of violent crime rates in the city of Detroit for 2019. Crime data were obtained from the City of Detroit Data Portal and demographic data relating to social disorganization theory were obtained from the Census Bureau. In the presence of spatial spill over and spatial dependence, the assumptions of classical statistics are violated, and Ordinary Least Squares estimations are inefficient in explaining spatial dimensions of crime. This paper uses explanatory variables relating to the social disorganization theory of crime and spatial autoregressive models to determine the predictors of violent crime in the City for the period. Using GeoDa 1.18 and ArcGIS Desktop 10.7.1 software package, Spatial Lag Models (SLM) and Spatial Error Models were carried out to determine which model has high performance in identifying predictors of violent crime. SLM outperformed SEM in terms of efficiency with (AIC:5268.52; Breusch-Pagan test: 9.8402; R2: 16% & Log Likelihood: −2627.26) > SEM (AIC: 5275.24; Breusch-Pagan test: 9.7601; R2: 15% & Log Likelihood: −2630.6194). Strong support is found for the spatial disorganization theory of crime. High percent ethnic heterogeneity (% black) and high college graduates are the strongest predictors of violent crime in the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This study assesses the diversity and abundance of Human Herpesviruses (HHVs) in the influent of an urban wastewater treatment plant using shotgun sequencing, metagenomic analysis and qPCR. Methods and Results: Influent wastewater samples were collected from the three interceptors that serve the City of Detroit and Wayne, Macomb and Oakland counties between November 2017 to February 2018. The samples were subjected to a series of processes to concentrate viruses which were further sequenced and amplified using qPCR. All nine types of HHV were detected in wastewater. Human Herpesvirus 8 (HHV‐8), known as Kaposi's sarcoma herpesvirus, which is only prevalent in 5–10% of USA population, was found to be the most abundant followed by HHV‐3 or Varicella‐zoster virus. Conclusions: The high abundance of HHV‐8 in the Detroit metropolitan area may be attributed to the HIV‐AIDS outbreak that was ongoing in Detroit during the sampling period. Significance and Impact of the Study: The approach described in this paper can be used to establish a baseline of viruses secreted by the community as a whole. Sudden changes in the baseline would identify changes in community health and immunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes an impasse as "what it feels like to be in the middle of a shift." This paper mobilizes that notion of impasse to critically analyze the position of Detroit's "maker" community against the background of a rapidly changing city. Makers, who might crudely be described as small craft-manufacturers, have found themselves entangled in an emergent narrative of place transition captured by the juxtapositional monikers of "Old Detroit" and "New Detroit." The goal of this paper is to think through what gets taken up by these Old/New representations of Detroit – and what the shift between the two feels like – as described by makers. I interpret Old and New Detroit to be unique-but-inseparable place imaginaries; they are the representational bracketing around a transitional lifeworld in which the optimism makers brought to Old Detroit has largely come unraveled in New Detroit. This unraveling, I suggest, is not only a collective melancholy associated with feelings of eroding creativity and autonomy, but also a percolating confrontation with the privileged fantasies of Old Detroit. For makers, New Detroit meant professionalization and gentrification: on one hand, the exigencies of New Detroit have occluded the creative and egalitarian form of change they envisioned for the city; on the other, it opened new financial benefits for their small businesses. The resulting impasse tasked makers with adjusting to the economic and moral uncertainties posed by still-unfolding circumstances in a changing Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Urban Health Assessment Response Tool (Urban HEART) was developed by the World Health Organization. In 2016, the Urban HEART was adapted and used by the Healthy Environments Partnership, a long-standing community-based participatory research partnership focused on addressing social determinants of health in Detroit, Michigan, to identify health equity gaps in the city. This paper uses the tool to: (1) examine the geographic distributions of key determinants of health in Detroit, across the five Urban HEART specified domains: physical environment and infrastructure, social and human development, economics, governance, and population health, and (2) determine whether these indicators are associated with the population health indicators at the neighborhood level. In addition to the Urban HEART matrix, we developed various tools including graphs and maps to further examine Detroit's health equity gaps. Although not required by Urban HEART, we statistically analyzed the associations between each indicator with the health outcomes. Our results showed that all the domains contained one or more indicators associated with one or more health outcomes, making this an effective tool to study health equity in Detroit. The Urban HEART Detroit project comes at a critical time where the nation is focusing on health equity and understanding underlying determinants of health inequities in urban areas. A tool like Urban HEART can help identify these areas for rapid intervention to prevent unnecessary burden from disease. We recommend the application of the Urban HEART, in active dialog with community groups, organizations, and leaders, to promote health equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crime has an inherent geographical quality and when a crime occurs, it happens within a particular space making spatiality essential component in crime studies. To prevent and respond to crimes, it is first essential to identify the factors that trigger crimes and then design policy and strategy based on each factor. This project investigates the spatial dimension of violent crime rates in the city of Detroit for 2019. Crime data were obtained from the City of Detroit Data Portal and demographic data relating to social disorganization theory were obtained from the Census Bureau. In the presence of spatial spill over and spatial dependence, the assumptions of classical statistics are violated, and Ordinary Least Squares estimations are inefficient in explaining spatial dimensions of crime. This paper uses explanatory variables relating to the social disorganization theory of crime and spatial autoregressive models to determine the predictors of violent crime in the City for the period. Using GeoDa 1.18 and ArcGIS Desktop 10.7.1 software package, Spatial Lag Models (SLM) and Spatial Error Models were carried out to determine which model has high performance in identifying predictors of violent crime. SLM outperformed SEM in terms of efficiency with (AIC:5268.52; Breusch-Pagan test: 9.8402; R2: 16% & Log Likelihood: −2627.26) > SEM (AIC: 5275.24; Breusch-Pagan test: 9.7601; R2: 15% & Log Likelihood: −2630.6194). Strong support is found for the spatial disorganization theory of crime. High percent ethnic heterogeneity (% black) and high college graduates are the strongest predictors of violent crime in the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore legalising urban agriculture as a contested way of planning for decline, beyond the usual ‘mutual benefits’ narrative of urban agriculture in shrinking cities. Through the case study of Detroit (MI), we examine the content, implementation, and debates concerning zoning legislation legalising urban agriculture adopted in 2012 and assess both its advantages and drawbacks. This paper derives from fieldwork carried out in 2012–2013 and a qualitative method based on interviews with urban agriculture stakeholders, including several with the designer of the legislation as well as readings of the documents legalising urban agriculture. Our results show that legalising urban agriculture is not a beneficial practice per se, allowing a city to shrink ‘better’. We thus encourage advocates of legalising urban agriculture to encompass the complexity of decline as well as acknowledge the role of public policies in shaping a ‘just’ urban agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about ruins and photography and especially so in the context of Detroit's declining urban landscape. Numerous books present us with beautiful ruined buildings and landscapes, and further explanations why we might be drawn to images of decay. While some claim that ruin imagery triggers a form of resistance to the forces of capitalism, others stand critical to the beautification of ruins by arguing that such imagery removes viewers from any reflection on what causes ruins. Detroit's new saviour Dan Gilbert is one of those ruin detractors who blames Detroit's image as the poster child of ruin photography for all failed investments. This paper focusses on these image battles in the construction of a city's place identity and argues for an understanding of ruin photographs as performance. Instead of offering a trace of an object once in front of the camera, I investigate how a collection of forgotten photo-installations curated by Detroit's Urban Center for Photography gesture performatively to the ongoing event demolished by neglect whereby buildings are intentionally left to rot for profitable real estate development. Strategies of advertisement campaigns, it will be shown, are appropriated to make such live gestures. Investigating the doing aspect or force of ruin photographs contributes to cultural geography's recent concerns around the potential 'force of representations: their capacities to affect and effect' and as such moves away from one of the central tasks of cultural geography, namely its focus on what representations mean. The spectre of Detroit's image battle ultimately should provide us with questions about the construction of a city's identity through visual documents and enable us to question the mechanism of neoliberal urban planning and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]