The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag presentation given by Andrew Guinn (Assistant Professor, Urban Studies and Planning) and Patrick Cooper-McCann (Assistant Professor, Urban Studies and Planning) on the topic of, "Early Suburbanization in Metro Detroit".

Abstract: Detroit has long been cited as an exemplar of postwar “parasitic urbanization,” and the region’s postwar urban-suburban divide along racial and class lines is richly documented.  However, the key battles over the suburban landscape played out not in the 1950s and 1960s, but during the boom years of the 1910s and 1920s, when Detroit reached its current territorial limit, guaranteeing that most subsequent growth—and later white flight—would redound to the suburbs. Our research explains why suburbs began incorporating in the late 1910s and why Detroit stopped expanding in 1926. We consider the formation of different kinds of suburban space: “bourgeois utopias” like the Grosse Pointes; industrial-residential suburbs like Highland Park, Hamtramck, and Dearborn; and bedroom communities for automotive workers in Oakland County and downriver. We interpret these processes through a metropolitan lens, within entangled contexts of industrial restructuring, public administration and planning reforms, and private real estate practice.

RSVP for the zoom link.