Planning Detroit's Public Spaces, 1805-2018 by Patrick D. Cooper
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The Promise of Parkland: Planning Detroit’s Public Spaces, 1805-2018 by Patrick D. Cooper-McCann A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Urban and Regional Planning) in The University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Emerita Margaret Dewar, Chair Associate Professor Scott Campbell Associate Professor David Thacher Professor June Manning Thomas Patrick Cooper-McCann [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4626-141X © Patrick D. Cooper-McCann 2019 Dedication To my parents ii Acknowledgements Not every bright, ambitious kid from Hazel Park gets the chance to go to college, let alone pursue a doctorate. The fact that I’ve completed a dissertation at the University of Michigan testifies to the extraordinary support I’ve received throughout my life to follow my curiosity wherever it might lead. I’m especially grateful for my parents and siblings, who gave me the confidence that I could succeed as an intellectual. Reaching this milestone also required extraordinary financial support. Every step of my education, from grade school to graduate school, would have been unaffordable if not for the generosity of others. My parents struggled at times to pay for parochial schools, especially during spells of unemployment. When money was truly scarce, we were grateful for charity and public assistance—and I was grateful for the Hazel Park public library, which kept me happily supplied with books, free of charge. Grants and scholarships covered the full cost of college, and thanks to federally subsidized loans, I could also study abroad in Santiago, Chile. Fellowships enabled me to intern with nonprofit organizations in Detroit. After college, AmeriCorps became my entry point to a career in urban planning. When I returned to the University of Michigan as a graduate student, I was able to study cost-free for the first six years through a combination of student teaching, research, and fellowships. I was also fortunate to receive grants from the Rackham Graduate School, the Nonprofit and Public Management Center, the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship, and the Sweetland Center for Writing. These grants helped pay for research expenses, community outreach, and writing time. Along the way, friends and mentors in both Ann Arbor and Detroit provided guidance and inspiration. The Residential College—in particular, the Urban Forum and the Semester in Detroit program—connected me to the world of community development in Detroit and fed my interest in community-based scholarship. At Taubman College, I learned how to think about cities in comparative perspective, especially through the Detroit School initiative, through which I met dozens of doctoral students and professors iii who approached urban studies from every possible disciplinary angle at universities throughout the world. I benefited too from joining the Planning and Architecture Research Group, which sparked my interest in landscape architecture and urban design. I also learned every day from my peers in the doctoral program. I’d especially like to thank Thomas Skuzinski, David Weinreich, Danielle Rivera, and Carla Maria Kayanan, for their advice and friendship, and Matthew Weber, Ian Trivers, Eric Seymour, R.J. Koscielniak, Joel Batterman, and Robert Pfaff, for the same and for countless discussions about Detroit and shrinking cities. I was also glad to have friends earning doctorates in other fields with whom I could commiserate, especially Jane Lawrence Sumner, Arthur Brannon, Nico Baier, Meg Berkobien, Kelly Goodman, Alex Elkins, and Lia Wolock. Finally, in the fall of 2017, I was lucky to join the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University as a faculty member. My new colleagues have been exceptionally kind and supportive, even as my dissertation dragged on an extra year. It’s been a privilege to teach and do research at an urban university with such earnest, hard- working students who hail from all economic, cultural, and racial backgrounds. I hired a research assistant at Wayne State, Timarie Szwed, who deftly unraveled several unsolved mysteries about the history of Detroit’s parks. More broadly, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the archivists and librarians—amateur and professional, past and present—who labored to preserve the history of Detroit. My dissertation would not have been possible without the files at the Detroit Public Library and its Burton Historical Collection, the Wayne State University Library System, the Walter P. Reuther Library, the HathiTrust Digital Library, the Internet Archive, and, above all, the University of Michigan Library System—especially the Bentley Historical Library, the Hatcher Graduate Library, and the Interlibrary Loan office. I am also grateful for all the activists, past and present, who have fought to make Detroit’s park and recreation system better and more equitable. Their record of activism inspired my dissertation, and I’m proud to share their stories. I especially owe thanks to Meagan Elliott—parks planner for Detroit, fellow MUP and Ph.D., and good friend—and Joe Rashid—founder of the Detroit Parks Coalition—for all their support and encouragement for this project. For the rigor of my dissertation, I owe thanks to my brilliant committee—Margi Dewar, Scott Campbell, David Thacher, and June Manning Thomas—who pushed me to iv think big and do my best work. Margi, in particular, has read almost every word of my academic output—quickly and with well considered comments—since she first signed on as my senior thesis advisor a decade ago. She has championed me and modeled the very highest standards of scholarship, teaching, and service. I cannot thank her enough. Finally, my thanks and love to Marisa. She bore witness to all the agony of dissertation writing: the late nights, the missed deadlines, the library books piling up on the floor. Not only did she help me soldier on—reading the dissertation at its roughest stage and encouraging me to keep going—she also made sure I kept living my life: seeing films, traveling, staying connected with friends and family, and otherwise having fun. Best and luckiest of all, she agreed to marry me—where else?—on beautiful Belle Isle. v Preface In the fall of 2010, I began an AmeriCorps position at Focus: HOPE, a storied nonprofit on the west side of Detroit dedicated to “practical and intelligent action to overcome racism, poverty, and injustice.”1 I was assigned to the HOPE Village Initiative, a comprehensive, community-based campaign to revitalize the 100-block area around Focus: HOPE’s campus. The initiative had just launched when I arrived, and the nonprofit and its partners were still defining their goals and strategizing how to fulfill them. I was hired to run a small grant program to improve the neighborhood’s commercial corridors, but in keeping with non-profit praxis, I found myself doing a bit of everything: writing a community newsletter, boarding up vacant homes, planting trees, leading neighborhood tours, helping a group of business owners launch a community association, and contributing to strategy sessions for the HOPE Village Initiative itself. It was in this context that I began to think about the topics at the heart of this dissertation: the reconfiguration of urban governance, the purpose and “publicness” of parks, and the pursuit of social and racial equity in the public realm. The first topic— how to organize the provision of city services—came up in discussion with seemingly everyone I met, whether at work, on the bus, or in the checkout aisle of the grocery store. Detroiters were desperate to live in a city where the streetlights would turn on at night, the police would show up when called, and children would receive a good education at their neighborhood school. But with the city teetering toward bankruptcy, none of these expectations were being met, prompting urgent debate over how to shift roles and responsibilities for public service provision. Could the city do more for its residents despite its precarious finances? Should the county or state step in? Should new regional authorities be created? How much work should residents take on themselves, individually or collectively through block clubs and neighborhood associations? What 1 Focus: HOPE adopted its mission statement on March 8, 1968, in response to the urban uprising of the previous year. Focus: HOPE, “Mission,” http://www.focushope.edu/about-focus-hope/. vi should corporations and foundations be doing to help? All of these alternatives were in the mix as politicians debated how to restructure public service provision to make Detroit safe and livable again. They also debated the ramifications. If the provision of a public service shifted from local government to some other agency, whether public or private, what might the consequences be for local democracy?2 At Focus: HOPE, we were striving to create a neighborhood where every resident would be “educationally well-prepared, economically self-sufficient, and living in a safe and supportive environment.”3 Achieving that latter goal—a safe and supportive living environment—would require not only reordering responsibility for service provision but also remaking the neighborhood’s open spaces. One of the neighborhood’s assets was its abundance of open land: several city parks, a community garden, three schools with playgrounds and athletic fields, two small parks on Focus: HOPE’s campus, a landscaped boulevard, an vacant rail corridor, and numerous vacant lots. When neglected, these spaces became unsightly with knee-high grass and illegally dumped trash. If maintained, these spaces could beautify the neighborhood and solve collective problems. Parks could provide children with safe places to play. Vacant lots could be turned into rain gardens or community farms. But who would pay to maintain them? Most of the neighborhood’s open spaces belonged to the city of Detroit, but the municipality could barely afford to mow the grass.