Dream City: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit – Conrad Kickert
The Detroit School Series seeks to stimulate an interdisciplinary conversation on how research on Detroit—a city often seen as an extreme outlier of decline—can produce knowledge that is original and
April 19, 2019
4:15 pm - 6:00 pm
East Conference Room (4th floor) in the Rackham Building (Ann Arbor Central Campus).
Contact Information: detroitschool@umich.edu
Join the Detroit School Series for a book talk with Conrad Kickert - Assistant Professor of Urban Design, University of Cincinnati - to celebrate the upcoming release of Dream City: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit. In Dream City, Kickert explores how the history of downtown Detroit has differed from the familiar decline of the city's neighborhoods: downtown grew faster, declined differently, and has been forced to reinvent itself time and again while battling the influential forces of the automobile and the suburbs. Introducing a varied cast of downtown power players and original morphological maps, the book traces downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. Throughout, Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the materialized expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams.