Work Description

Date: 31 December, 2023

Dataset Title: Egalitarian Metropolis Classroom: Urban Studies, Urban Design, & Social Justice in Detroit

Dataset Creators: Vincent Carducci, Anna Mascorella

Dataset Contact: Anna Mascorella, amasco@umich.edu; Vincent Carducci, vcardu@umich.edu

Funding: The Michigan–Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis

Research Overview:
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.

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/.

Methodology:
The data in this deposit are primarily documents including the course syllabi for each term the class was taught, and various examples of student work for different assignments and/or projects. A representative set of items were posted to the Egalitarian Metropolis site (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/egalitarianmetropolis/).

Instrument and/or Software specifications: NA

Folders contained here:
-EM Classroom.zip
> Course Syllabi & Description contains a syllabus for each time the course was taught.
> Dawn of Detroit contains student work based on Tiya Miles’ book, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.
> Detroit Future City Video Reflections contains student reflections of the video featured on the homepage of Detroit Future City, a think-tank aiming to create an equitable and sustainable Detroit.
> Detroit Music Scene contains student work on some aspect of the Detroit music scene.
> Final Research Project contains student work that applies the knowledge gained over the semester to explore the impediments to an egalitarian metropolis as it might be realized in Detroit and imagine solutions that seek to address them.
-EMClassroom_Egalitarian Metropolis.html - HTML capture of project page from Egalitarian Metropolis site

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

To Cite Data:
Carducci, V., Mascorella, A. (2024). Egalitarian Metropolis Classroom: Urban Studies, Urban Design, & Social Justice in Detroit [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/gavz-st83