The 2023 DREAM Street Fair was a free, family-friendly festival celebrating our neighborhood’s spirit of community, entrepreneurship, arts and culture, and healthy living. Hosted by Jermaine “Big Fresh” Carey and rising comedian Nadirah Pierre, and headlined by multi-platinum recording artist Freeway, the event featured performances by Khalil Ismail, Ain’t Afraid, Journalist 103, Tariq Toure, and Hardcore Detroit. It was an afternoon of empowering poetry, soulful vocals, classic hip-hop, world-class break dancing, and fun interactions with the crowd. Nearly 40 vendors, including some of the area’s best food trucks, set up shop to interact with 3,000 attendees over the course of the day. And children were treated to bounce houses, button-making, book readings, and outdoor video gaming., Primarily hosted by Dream of Detroit, a local organization combining community organizing and development to revitalize a Westside neighborhood, the Street Fair was a true community partnership. The Detroit Repertory Theatre, the city’s longest-running neighborhood theatre, opened up their lot to sell treasured props from 60 years worth of performances. The HUDA Clinic, our local free health care center, offered dental screenings, health assessments and referral services. And, at the HUDA Urban Garden, attendees picked fruits and vegetables, and learned creative ways to make tasty and healthy meals and snacks. Putting on a free neighborhood festival of this scale would have been impossible without the support of Egalitarian Metropolis and sponsors like Mercy-USA. Plainly put: these types of events don’t usually happen in neighborhoods like ours. That’s why, for nearly a decade, Dream of Detroit has been working toward a truly inclusive Detroit recovery where the idea that “every neighborhood has a future” is more than just a political slogan., and Our goal with this event was to host an excellent celebration for our community members, and to shine a spotlight on the community-led placemaking and development happening in our neighborhood. The DREAM Street Fair stands alongside other initiatives like the DREAM Community Land Trust, our partnership with ProsperUs Detroit Entrepreneurship Workshop, and our membership in the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, as just some of the programs we are involved in to do our small part in creating an Egalitarian Metropolis.
More information about DREAM of Detroit can be found at https://dreamofdetroit.org/.
Launched in response to the growing crisis of narrative infrastructure, the Detroit River Story Lab is a collaborative, public-facing initiative that leverages the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. Beginning with the premise that place-based storymaking is vital to sustaining democratic values and community capacity for self-determination, the Lab partners on projects designed to support the narrative capacities of local urban communities through the story-telling channels of community journalism, place-based education, and public history., There are many stories from across a variety of periods and contexts that foreground the prevalence of aquatic racialization in our region. These include the legal restrictions placed on Black residents’ access to the Detroit River in the aftermath of the successful escape of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn from Kentucky slave catchers in 1833, repeated episodes of the often violent expulsion of Black workers and residents from Wyandotte and other sundown towns along the Detroit River between the 1870s and 1940s – and the repeated erasure of these stories from official published histories of these towns, the Bob-Lo Excursion Company’s policy, in the 1930’s and 40’s, of barring Blacks from the ferry boats that provided access for Detroiters to the Boblo Island amusement park, a policy famously up-ended by the US Supreme Court in 1948 after being challenged by a 24-year-old Detroit, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, after being ordered to leave the boat, the demolition of the predominantly Black, riverside neighborhood of Black Bottom in Detroit in the 1950s in the name of urban renewal, the UN’s 2014 appeal, on the grounds of basic human rights, for the city of Detroit to restore access to water sourced from their own Detroit River to residents who can’t afford monthly water bills, and consumption restrictions on Detroit River fish important to local populations owing to long histories of environmental degradation., and Considered together, these cases would seem to point to an undertheorized dimension of racialized systems of hierarchy and exclusion in the Great Lakes region and possibly the US more generally. The origins and long-term effects of zones of racial exclusion in the economically decisive domains of work, education, and housing are by now well known. The role of waterways as similarly delineated spaces of privilege and oppression is less commonly noted; in a state whose history has been so thoroughly defined by its lakes and rivers and so regularly scarred by racial conflict, the phenomenon of aquatic racialization calls out for integrative examination and public reckoning.
More information about Aquatic Spaces can be found at https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.
Michigan-Mellon’s renewed Egalitarian Metropolis cycle of funding focuses on the city of Detroit and ways that creative practice and the urban humanities can equitably address urban recovery. In tangible ways, The University of Michigan Architecture Preparatory Program (ArcPrep) is already doing just that: creating a sense of optimism and agency for Detroit public high school juniors interested in design and its affiliated fields. , Through an intensive, semester-long studio taught by our Mellon Fellows in Architecture, young designers learn to critically discern Detroit’s complex spatial histories as they explore ways to shape the city’s possible futures. The program takes the students’ talents, creativity, and expertise very seriously, nurturing an inclusionary pedagogical model based broadly on egalitarian educational ideals. In the process, we bring together a network of Taubman College faculty and students, Detroit institutions, community and government organizations, and professional enterprises into conversation and collaboration with students. In the past, ArcPrep has partnered with the Detroit Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust, and the Sidewalk Festival, to name a few. With each partnership, we situated culturally contingent, place-based design exercises for students to directly engage with the city and its leaders., and More information about the Michigan Architecture Preparatory Program (ArcPrep) can be found at https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/academics/pre-college-programs/michigan-architecture-prep/
What does/can/should an egalitarian metropolis look like? And how does a focus on Detroit allow us to ask and answer these conceptual—and practical—questions in ways that draw on a variety of disciplines including architecture, history, urban planning, and the urban humanities?, This course offers an interdisciplinary perspective on urban studies, urban design, and the ways that concerns around social justice and equity can influence how we think about cities in the past, present, and future. Drawing on a range of faculty expertise in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, this team-taught course also incorporates the voices of practitioners and community members involved in current attempts to revitalize Detroit and “Detroit-like” cities in the United States and elsewhere. By “Detroit-like cities” we mean urban areas that have experienced negative population growth, deindustrialization, economic disinvestment, racial stratification, environmental injustices, and concomitant crises in housing, health care, policing, criminalization, and education. At the same time, Detroit and Detroit-like cities offer opportunities to conjoin critical humanistic inquiry, urban design, and policy solutions for building more equitable and sustainable cities., and This course is co-designed and co-taught as part of the Egalitarian Metropolis Project, which is a partnership between the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. It combines traditional course materials with a team-based orientation to teaching and learning.
More information about the EM Classroom can be found at https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/egalitarianmetropolis/em-classroom/.
Launched in response to the growing crisis of narrative infrastructure, the Detroit River Story Lab is a collaborative, public-facing initiative that leverages the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. Beginning with the premise that place-based storymaking is vital to sustaining democratic values and community capacity for self-determination, the Lab partners on projects designed to support the narrative capacities of local urban communities through the story-telling channels of community journalism, place-based education, and public history., The Story Lab co-designs scalable interventions to strengthen community-based forms of narrative infrastructure. Participants draw upon archives and oral histories to document previously marginalized narratives centering the river. Drawing on this research, we prototype new approaches to place-based learning, within the university and beyond, to expand the publics involved in the production and circulation of local narratives of identity and urban memory., and More information about the Detroit River Story Lab (DRSL) can be found at https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.
Black Bottom Archives (BBA) is a community-driven media platform dedicated to centering and amplifying the voices, experiences, and perspectives of Black Detroiters through digital storytelling, journalism, art, and community organizing with a focus on preserving local Black history & archiving our present., Black Bottom Archives Presents: Sankofa Community Research (SCR) is a Black Detroiter led, year-long community research project in partnership with Detroit Peoples Platform and academic partners at the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, and Wayne State University to collect oral histories and conduct historical research to document the multi-generational impact of the destruction of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley on Black Detroiters; and to explore Black Detroiters collective vision for reparations as part of the 'I-375 Reconnecting Communities Project.', and Bringing together oral histories, census records, business records, historic maps, and other sources, we will examine how displacement impacted people, businesses, cultural centers, environment, public space, and infrastructure and produce a community report that presents evidence of impact and proposes reparative actions.
More information about Black Bottom Archives can be found at https://www.blackbottomarchives.com/.
In 2009, an American-Georgian team of four archaeologists, four archaeology students, and a geophysicist carried out a four-week season of “extensive” survey of known archaeological sites, together with geophysical prospection at selected locations. In a second four-week season in 2010, with the additions of a geologist and an archaeobotanist, we continued our program of documentation of known sites and of exploratory geophysical prospection, and we also carried out limited test excavations at a number of sites. We returned for a shorter (one- to two-week) study seasons in 2011 and 2014, focusing on museum and archival research in Vani, Kutaisi, and Tbilisi., The area covered by our survey extends 15 km both east and west of Vani, and as far as 10 km south of Vani, from the Phasis River plain at approximately 50 m above sea level to the lower slopes of the lesser Caucasus, at approximately 1000 m above sea level. The purpose of the program was to visit all the previously identified archaeological sites in the region, and to integrate existing knowledge into a database of sites and a Geographical Information System. Each entry into this database is recorded as a dataset in this deposit. Entries recorded in 2009 are prefaced with the letter “A,” those recorded in 2010 are prefaced with the letter “B.” A single entry added in 2011 received the preface, “C.” In carrying out the survey, we depended heavily on the unpublished dissertation by Sulkhan Kharabadze, “Vanis Qveq’nis” Arqeologiuri Ruk’a (dzv.ts. VIII – akh.ts. III ss.) – Archaeological Map of the Territory of Vani (8th Century BC – 3rd Century AD) (Ph.D. dissertation: Georgian Technical University 2008). A map showing the locations of all the sites recorded by the survey is attached to this dataset., Our procedure for each site visit was as follows: we drove to the nearest village and searched out a local guide who could take us to the place we wished to see. We drove as far as we could to each site, then got out and walked, using GPS-equipped field computers (Trimble Geo-XM) to make a continuous record of our path. We recorded the lay of the land and any artifacts we saw en route (pottery sherds, traces of burnt daub, lithics and stone objects, architectural features in situ). We designated as points of interest any significant archaeological remains (concentrations of pottery, in situ features, notable stray finds, etc.), and every place we could identify where earlier discoveries had been made or archaeological excavations carried out. For every point of interest, we recorded the latitude, longitude, and elevation; took a series of digital photographs; and made a grab bag collection of pottery and other finds if possible. Where appropriate, we took basic measurements of architectural features (e.g., of Mediaeval towers). We also kept records of local place names, the names of our local guides, and any miscellaneous information they gave us. , Certain sites were selected for further investigation. These included Saqanchia A001, where we carried our geophysical survey and limited excavation; Shuamta, Melashvilebisgora A033, where we also carried out geophysical survey and limited excavation; Kveda Bzvani A047, where we carried out controlled collection of surface finds; and Zeda Bzvani, Meskhebisgora, A053, where we also carried out controlled collection of surface finds., The datasets recorded in this deposit include basic descriptions of each site, citations to previous publications, and links to relevant maps, photographs, and drawings. Where they exist, maps for individual datasets are labeled according to the name and number of the site, e.g., DapnariA002Map.jpg. The labels for photographs taken during the field season record their numbers in the sequence of photographs taken that season, e.g., Vani09.0047.jpg. A complete list of all photographs recorded in this way is available for download. Photographs and drawings of artifacts from individual sites made after the season are labeled with the names of the sites followed by the numbers assigned to the objects, with photographs saved as jpeg files, and drawings saved as tiff files; thus KvedaBzvani11-14.jpg is a photograph of objects 11-14 from the site of KvedaBzvani, while KvedaBzvani11-14.tif is a set of drawings of the same objects. Finally, drawings of sites where excavations were carried out are labeled with the name of the site, the number of the trench (if applicable), and the type of drawing, so that Shuamta2010.1Plan is a plan of Trench 2010.1 at Shuamta., and In addition, the collections in this deposit group datasets together according to important characteristics such as period (Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.) or type (settlement, fortification, burial, and so on).
Citation to related publication:
Kharabadze, S.(2008). “Vanis Qveq’nis” Arqeologiuri Ruk’a (dzv.ts. VIII – akh.ts. III ss.) – Archaeological Map of the Territory of Vani (8th Century BC – 3rd Century AD). (Ph.D. dissertation).Georgian Technical University.
In an upland clearing occupied partly by agricultural fields, partly by farmland, Raphiel Kartvelishvili showed us a cornfield dense with pottery ranging in date from Iron Age to Mediaeval.
Local farmer Anzor Tchapodze told us that there was also pottery on both sides of the hill to the north called Nasaqdrigora.
No official archaeological work has been previously conducted at the site., Gamqrelidze, G. 1982. Tsentraluri kolkhetis dzveli namosakhlarebi [Ancient settlements of Central Colchis]. Tbilisi. p. 33. (In Georgian with summaries in Russian and English.), and Kharabadze, S. 2008. “Vanis Qveqnis” Arqeologiuri Ruka (dzv.ts. VIII – akh.ts. III ss.) [Archaeological Map of the “Vani Region” (8th Century BC – 3rd Century AD)]. Tsardgenilia Doqtoris Akademiuri Khariskhis Mosapoveblad. Saqartvelos Teqnikuri Universiteti. Tbilisi, 0175, Saqartvelo. Seqtemberi. p. 11. (In Georgian with an English summary.)
On the eastern edge of the modern town of Vani, just across the Sulori river from the town’s central traffic circle, lies a hill called Mshvidobisgora, the northeastern edge of which is crowned by a Mediaeval fortress. Mshvidobisgora comprises a long chain of hills rising to an elevation of 175 masl and oriented northwest-southeast, separating the right (east) bank of the Sulori from the Phasis river. The fortress is situated at the northeast edge of the westernmost hill in this chain.
The fortress forms the focal point of a modern recreational park. It is roughly square in plan, oriented north-south, east-west, and is constructed of lime mortared rubble masonry, consisting mainly of smoothed cobblestones. All four of the walls are preserved to a height of about 1 m. The wall thickness is about 0.4 m. The length of the east wall is 3.25 m, while that of the south wall is 3.40 m. It is unclear whether a break approximately 1 m wide piercing the south wall near the southeast corner was once a doorway. The hill on which the fortress stands is visible due almost directly east from the “Stepped Altar” on the Middle Terrace at the site of Vani.
Hughes, R. C. 2015. The Archaeology of a Colchian Landscape: Results of the Eastern Vani Survey. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of Michigan. p. 144-145.
B019 ( https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/data/concern/generic_works/c534fp131?locale=en) and A series of cornfields on the southeast slopes of a hill in the region of Saprasia known as Jijouri was investigated for pottery, but the high corn made visibility very low. Pottery was collected along the northeast side of a hill south of Inashauri at approximately 340 masl, including Classical period pithos fragments. Once in Inashauri, pottery sherds of local fabric were discovered in a small tomato patch (”Lower Saprasia”).
A bronze hoe of the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age was found accidentally in 1999 in the region of Saprasia called Jijouri and is now held in the Vani Archaeological Museum (Kharabadze 2008). In this area pottery of the Classical period has also been found.
A chance find was reported in an area known as Jijouri in 1999. Otherwise no archaeological work has been conducted here. and Kharabadze, S. 2008. “Vanis Qveqnis” Arqeologiuri Ruka (dzv.ts. VIII – akh.ts. III ss.) [Archaeological Map of the “Vani Region” (8th Century BC – 3rd Century AD)]. Tsardgenilia Doqtoris Akademiuri Khariskhis Mosapoveblad. Saqartvelos Teqnikuri Universiteti. Tbilisi, 0175, Saqartvelo. Seqtemberi. (In Georgian with an English summary.)