Lewis Mumford Prize, Honorable Mention, SACRPH Prize Selection Committee

With top tier academic presses unlikely to allocate resources for extensive community recovery and inquiry, much less even undertake it, the Awards Committee is grateful to the Wayne State University Press, in particular, for its People’s Atlas of Detroit. Sadly, academic presses today simply do not have the ability or staff to undertake a project as vast as this: in this People’s Atlas alone there were literally dozens of active contributors to a volume, boasting text, cartography, charts, and images – all of which attest to the expertise that was required here and the care with which the work was undertaken. A People’s Atlas of Detroit provides an ambitious and inspiring example of this kind of multidisciplinary public project, but as Makani Themba of Higher Ground writes on the back cover, “Detroit organizing has always been among the smartest, sharpest, and most innovative work.” This collection is a participatory research project that centers race and resident experience as key components of understanding the history and future of Detroit. With its feminist, spatial, and overtly decolonized methodologies in action, A People’s Atlas provides extensive interviews, public history, and revelatory cartography to deliver an encyclopedic preview of the sort of exhaustive book project that our colleagues Mary Corbin Sies, the late Clyde Woods, Genie Burch, Gail Dubrow, et al, have also worked to deliver throughout their careers. By providing an example of what is possible in planning history, policy, and advocacy, A People’s Atlas also acts as a welcome antidote to hometown Fordism and recent Michigan state revanchism and should be required reading starting today in all U.S. planning history and urban studies courses.

As intersectional, BiPOC, and queer theory come to the forefront, the editors of A People’s Atlas have emerged from both academic and activist Detroit communities to build on emerging and established theoretical literatures. Editor Andrew Newman of Wayne State University adeptly combines ethnographic, historical, and collaborative approaches to urban research in the pages of A People’s Atlas. Sara Safransky of Vanderbilt University traverses the intersections of urban and environmental studies broadly while engaging critical race studies, as a way forward towards social and ecological justice. Editor Linda Campbell has had an illustrious career in the Detroit community nonprofit movements including the Detroit People’s Platform and the Building Movement. Tim Stallman has worked tirelessly with communities to facilitate social change through the use of maps, data, and technology. This edited collection effectively brings together their areas of expertise as scholars and practitioners in service of Detroit’s complex racial, economic, and political planning histories.

The first several chapters alone in A People’s Atlas of Detroit’s table of contents are evidence of its decolonizing ambitions. “Detroit and the Long Struggle for Liberation” opens the Atlas with a timeline of colonization in Detroit and features (among others) essays on the Underground Railroad, Detroit’s fraught labor history and finally an essay entitled “1967: ‘Riot Is a Four- Letter Word’” that frames what is now understood as the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. A People’s Atlas continues with the chapter “This Land is Our Land” that provides a sensory rich evocation of Detroit’s indigenous and pre-colonized landscape along the Detroit River between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. As A People’s Atlas segues into the colonized and post-industrial, the chapter entitled “Growing a Revolution” is also a comprehensive look at the city’s subsistence agricultural economies from the thrift farms of the Depression era to Detroit community anglers or River Rats – those people taking fish from Lake St Clair and the Detroit River – to the subsistence farms now found throughout Detroit that help put food on the table. A People’s Atlas of Detroit engages with urban history, planning policy, and political power to expose the long history of fiscal disinvestment and industrial decline and at the same time showcases the equally long tradition of movement culture, for worker’s rights, Black liberation, and immigrant justice.

Campbell, Newman, Safransky, and Stallmann inevitably pose the question: “Who has a right to the city?” – specifically the city of Detroit. A People’s Atlas makes clear that the right to Detroit remains in the hands of an ethnically and racially diverse population and that through collaboration and co-creation between its many stakeholders another city is possible.