Situated Urban Research

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16.10.11 - 23.10.11 - The S.U.RE. exhibition at Cave Gallery

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19.10.11 - City & Suburb

Detroit – for descendants of the ‘white flight’ that saw the professional classes forming suburban towns around the city limits – signifies the huge metropolitan area much more than it does the semi-derelict downtown. So in recognition our bias towards the increasingly active inner city, we headed for the suburbs to try to understand better the relationship between an affluent and relatively dense residential ring and the dramatically thinned urban core. The city of Grosse Pointe Park, bordering Detroit on the southeast, is one of the wealthiest and most historic suburbs and demonstrates this phenomenon particularly clearly.

We had been told about a stark dividing line between city and suburb along Alter Road, which due to its strangely apt name began to take on almost mythical connotations. Here, looking west towards Detroit from the decoratively heralded entrance to Grosse Pointe Park, the divide is immediately visible in the quality of buildings and public space investment. Antonio Wiley, a researcher in planning at Detroit’s Wayne State University, told us this stretch of Jefferson Avenue was once a bustling shopping street where the two cities merged both socially and physically with little distinction.

Alter Road itself is a 3.5-mile stretch running north from the Detroit River waterfront, separating the administrations of Detroit in the west and Grosse Pointe Park in the east. On the Grosse Pointe Park side neat but modest houses line Alter Road in a traditional configuration. On the Detroit side a wide dyke and strict metal fence line the rear of much more dilapidated houses, creating an almost aggressively clear physical and visual segregation.

In Grosse Pointe working local shops serve as a reminder of this time, though are still sparse in this car-reliant community, and lavish planting and signage demonstrate public-sector wealth. Immediately west of the entrance to the Grosse Pointe on Jefferson Avenue is the boundary beginning of Detroit, where almost all the old shop fronts are vacant and an instantly visible reduction in the quality of the street-scape is a clear representation of lack of council investment.

In South East Detroit houses were mainly subdivided into flats to create rental properties for the large but transient workforces employed in factories along the then-industrial Detroit riverfront while Grosse Pointe consisted of permanent single family units descending from the villas and holiday homes of early 20th century industrialists who settled this area as an out-of-town resort. Fuelled by a still active industrial sector, though, the blue- and white-collar workers living in neighboring districts maintained co-existence through their sharing of an active Main Street as is the case in a normal well-functioning town.

Diversity once thrived on the Detroit side where a glut of labor jobs and cheap housing attracted the multicultural mix usually associated with dense inner cities. Evidence remains in the form of a Hare Krishna temple, a yoga ashram and various denominations of monastery. These now sit awkwardly against a landscape of socially impoverished housing and gated new-builds capitalizing on the cheap waterfront land.

Antonio Wiley, pictured here outside the Detroit house once owned by his grandmother, remembers this area in the 1980s as a safe and culturally rich place to grow up. Now, recognizing that some of the most physically damaged and socially troubled neighborhoods are beyond repair, Antonio proposes some sensible solutions. Clear failed neighborhoods, relax land zoning laws and incentivize big business to invest in innovative green power generation and food growing technologies that can co-exist with the remaining concentrations of housing.

Further into the Grosse Pointe Park area, the socio-economic differences between this city and the struggling neighboring section of Detroit become quite dramatic. Multi-million dollar replicas of various styles of grand European home from various eras compete architecturally. Buildings are set back from the street to create dramatic approaches along driveways. Although it is extremely spacious there are no vacant plots as are common just over the border into Detroit. Here the generous land surrounding each house is a conscious part of its display of wealth. The little street activity we saw, this being a working daytime, consisted of the archetypally suburban activities of dog walking and home improvements. Just five or six blocks west in Detroit streets consist of a mix of occupied homes in various states of repair from well maintained to severely dilapidated, with scrubland and abandoned houses.

This striking socio-economic divide is a result of governance and one of the clearest visible delineations of a non-international administrative boundary imaginable. Migrant workers poured out of Detroit as industrial opportunities waned and the thinned commercial and residential tax bases put strain on the city council. As a result, resources became diverted from rapidly depopulating areas such as that bordering Grosse Pointe and focused into the still densely-populated ‘successful’ neighborhoods such as midtown, Mexicantown and Boston-Edison.

As a result of lacking public funds and the unwillingness of Grosse Pointe to stretch its own resources, sporadic rubbish collections, high drifts of unploughed snow and underfunded public schools undermined Detroit right up to the border with Grosse Pointe. Antonio reported that just over the fence from these extreme displays of wealth, Detroit had become a haven for unreported crime and known as a spot for disposing of evidence like stolen cars. With the city’s back turned policing here has become self-generated and the neighborhood is dotted with community watch signs.