Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City
Principal speaker
Professor George Galster
Detroit is the international icon for a once-thriving industrial powerhouse transformed within half a century into a dysfunctional metropolis. George Galster’s Driving Detroit paints a stunning portrait of Metropolitan Detroit through an eclectic application of urban planning, economics, sociology, political science, geography, history, and psychology. But Driving Detroit is also partly a self portrait, wherein Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories. This remarkable mix of scholarly disciplines and media of communication make the book distinctively insightful, accessible, and memorable. Driving Detroit is uniquely powerful because its portrait not only helps the reader clearly see the subject but, more importantly, understand why Metropolitan Detroit’s social, cultural, political, institutional, commercial, and built landscape has been transformed.
Though appropriate for graduate and undergraduate courses in urban studies, geography, planning, social sciences and history, the book should be of interest to the general public, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Driving Detroit contends that Metropolitan Detroit can be understood as two dimensions of tensions, capital vs. labor, blacks vs. whites. It documents the region’s geo-political environment, evolving economic and population patterns, and longstanding inter-class and inter-racial struggles. It shows how geography, local government structure, and social forces created a regional housing development system that perpetually produces sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Driving Detroit breaks new ground in urban studies by drawing upon psychological principles of human fulfilment to diagnose the region’s ills. It argues that the region’s automotive economic base and housing development system have chronically frustrated the populations’ quest for “respect:” basic physical, social and psychological resources. These frustrations generated the extreme adaptations that distinguish the region: distrust, scapegoating, identity politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional fragmentation. Unfortunately, these individually rational adaptations have proven collectively irrational, leaving Metropolitan Detroit in an uncompetitive, unsustainable position.
George Galster is a Professor of Urban Affairs from the Wayne State University, Detroit. His research in-terest and expertise lies in metropolitan housing markets, racial discrimination and segregation, neigh-borhood dynamics, residential reinvestment, community lending and insurance patterns, and urban poverty.
