For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American
industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity
where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone
through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known
for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and
alarmingly high murder rate. In Driving Detroit, author George
Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known
urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both
the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half
century. Galster invites the reader to travel with him along the streets
and into the soul of this place to grasp fully what drives the Motor
City.
With a scholar's rigor and a local's perspective, Galster uncovers why
metropolitan Detroit's cultural, commercial, and built landscape has
been so radically transformed. He shows how geography, local government
structure, and social forces created a housing development system that
produced sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Galster
argues that this system, in tandem with the region's automotive economic
base, has chronically frustrated the population's quest for basic
physical, social, and psychological resources. These frustrations, in
turn, generated numerous adaptations--distrust, scapegoating, identity
politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional
fragmentation--that collectively leave Detroit in an uncompetitive and
unsustainable position.
Partly a self-portrait, in which Detroiters paint their own stories
through songs, poems, and oral histories, Driving Detroit offers an
intimate, insightful, and perhaps controversial explanation for the
stunning contrasts--poverty and plenty, decay and splendor, despair and
resilience--that characterize the once mighty city.
