of the national population was in cities (P. 55 of text). By 1920, more than 50% of the population was in urban areas (P. 60 of text). “ “ Across North America, more than four our out of five of us live in urban places” (P. 2 of the text) From 1870 to 1920 , the US urban population increased from less than 10 million to more than 54 million “ (P. 60 text). The overall US population grew from 38.5 million to 106 million in that time period. (Wikipedia “demographic history of the United States ‘). This was due mainly to immigration from Europe and from rural areas. This population explosion was due primarily to the origin and rapid development of industrial capitalism in the US. I threw you a bit of a curve ball with Test Question 3.3 as I modified the wording from the item 3.3 (P.53 of the text) to focus on Detroit . Lets make that Metropolitan Detroit. In question 1.5 I asked a similar question – Why has Detroit lost population in recent decades ? So , why has Detroit grown and then shrunk ? It will take some class discussion and internet searching to learn of the specific history of Detroit City, Motown . However, most people are already familiar with the origin and development of the US automobile industry at the beginning of the 20th Century as the engine of economic development and population growth. And naturally, The partial “deindustrialization” of Detroit beginning in the early 1950’s through the 1980’s is the main cause of Detroit’s population decline. This is business-economic determinism of the growth and development or shrinking and undevelopment of a city. It was part of a relative scattering of some main points of industrial production from a concentration in the city of Detroit ( and neighboring Dearborn) to the surrounding suburbs. It was a breaking up of the World War II era Arsenal of Democracy. It was a shifting of the location of basic industrial production from not only Detroit , but the Midwest to the South, from the U.S. to other countries, in what gets termed post-industrialism, post-Fordism, industrial restructuring. This was possible because of a revolution in transportation and communication ( just-in-time delivery, world cars, robots, containerization , satellite based communication )created by the microchip-computer-digital scientific and technological revolution the latest since the assembly line invented by Ford, and a general automation revolution. It is mainly business actions that determine changes in cities. But in Detroit there was an added factor of “white flight” from the Black population which began to move out of the confined segregated living in the Southeast section of the city (Black bottom). As Historian Thomas Sugrue teaches : The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit is the first book by historian and Detroit native Thomas J. Sugrue in which he examines the role race, housing, job discrimination, and capital flight played in the decline of Detroit. Sugrue argues that the decline of Detroit began long before the 1967 race riot. Sugrue argues that institutionalized and often legalized racism resulted in sharply limited opportunities for African Americans in Detroit for most of the 20th century. He also argues that the process of deindustrialization, the flight of investment and jobs from the city, began in the 1950s as employers moved to suburban areas and small towns and also introduced new labor-saving technologies. The book has won multiple awards including a Bancroft Prize in 1998.[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_the_Urban_Crisis#:~:text=The%20Origins%20of%20the%20Urban%20Crisis%3A%20Race%20and%20Inequality%20in,in%20the%20decline%20of%20Detroit.) By the 21st Century , all of Michigan, especially Detroit, fell into a “One State Recession”; before that national Great Recession ! ( https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2007/04/11/onestate-recession-hampers-michigan ). And was part of the following national Great Recession caused the Wall Street Crash of 2007-2009 especially as General Motors and Chrysler, major Detroit employers went bankrupt ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganization ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Chapter_11_reorganization ). These were major business causes of Detroit’s population further diminution on top of the loss of population that began in the early 1950’s. Population ( and business) loss means tax base loss. This led to Detroit’s City government bankruptcy about ten years ago. This was not good for the spirit of Detroiters. The State takeover was insulting to City government leaders, as the bankruptcy was not due to elected officials mismanaging, but loss of tax base from business and population flight since the early 1950’s. It began long before that urban riot of 1967; it was accelerated by that riot. The several articles I link at the end of this essay are NOT accurate that the economic and population decline of Detroit itself began in 1967 with the riot. And another interesting question is “is Detroit’s shrinking population- that accompanied loss of much manufacturing from Detroit city limits proper beginning in the early 1950’s - all bad ?”. The loss of businesses and jobs has created many social problems of course. And in general, urban population growth is portrayed, on balance , as a positive indication about a city. This is logical in that people are sort of “voting with their feet” in favor of city life over rural life ( or life in another country) by migrating to cities. A main motive for moving from the country to the city is to improve migrants’ material standard of living , participating in the material abundance of capitalism. On the other hand, some of cities’ problems are due to the very density of population ( relative to a periodic thinness of jobs in recessions ) that is a main part of the definition of the city. So, I’ve been thinking maybe Detroit’s much lamented big population loss over that last 70 years may have some upside to it. Mass unemployment leading to mass poverty and therefore the mass misery , crime, social and psychological problems caused by poverty ( in any city) are known to most of us without taking a sociology class. It is “mass” or bigger than in the rural areas, because of the trivial logic that there are more people to be unemployed and poor in cities than in the country. The “promise” of higher standard living that brings people to cities is often not fulfilled. Detroit is a _partial_ capitalist “ghost town” because of business decisions not riots. (“A ghost town or alternatively deserted city or abandoned city is an abandoned village, town, or city, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it (usually industrial or agricultural) has failed or ended for any reason (e.g. a host ore deposit exhausted by metal mining). The town could also have declined due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, extreme heat or extreme cold, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear disasters. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighbourhoods that are still populated, but significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.[1)Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve period-specific architecture, have become tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack, Montana in the United States, Barkerville, British Columbia in Canada, Craco in Italy, Aghdam in Azerbaijan, Kolmanskop in Namibia, Pripyat in Ukraine, Dhanushkodi in India and Fordlândia in Brazil.( ]; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_town; Charles Brown are an example of business economic determinism of changes in a city) Dearborn, Michigan The Detroit adjacent suburb, Dearborn, presents a good example of business determinism in the form of a kind of Company City , augmented form of the classical “ Company town” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town; Flint , Michigan is General Motors City , substantially ghosted, however) ; a city dominate by the Ford Motor Company. It was thoroughly created under the power of the famous Henry Ford. Ford had a lot of influence in Detroit itself as well. He lived in the adjacent suburb of Grosse Pointe, which was high incomed.: “Stimulated by industrial development in Detroit and within its own limits, in 1927 Dearborn was established as a city. Its current borders result from a 1928 consolidation vote that merged Dearborn and neighboring Fordson (previously known as Springwells), which feared being absorbed into expanding Detroit. According to historian James W. Loewen, in his book Sundown Towns (2005), Dearborn discouraged African Americans from settling in the city. In the early 20th century, both whites and African Americans migrated to Detroit for industrial jobs. Over time, some city residents relocated in the suburbs. Many of Dearborn's residents "took pride in the saying, 'The sun never set on a Negro in Dearborn'". According to Orville Hubbard, the segregationist mayor of Dearborn from 1942 to 1978, "as far as he was concerned, it was against the law for a Negro to live in his suburb."[8] Hubbard told the Montgomery Advertiser in the mid-1950s, "Negroes can't get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire."[9] The area between Dearborn and Fordson was undeveloped, and still remains so in part. Once farm land, much of this property was bought by Henry Ford for his estate, Fair Lane, and for the Ford Motor Company World Headquarters. Later developments in this corridor were the Ford airport (later converted to the Dearborn Proving Grounds), and other Ford administrative and development facilities. More recent additions are The Henry Ford (a reconstructed historic village and museum), the Henry Ford Centennial Library, the super-regional shopping mall Fairlane Town Center, and the Ford Performing Arts Center. The open land is planted with sunflowers and often with Ford's favorite crop of soybeans. The crops are never harvested. With the growth and achievements of the Arab-American community, they developed and in 2005 opened the Arab American National Museum (AANM), the first museum in the world devoted to Arab-American history and culture. Arab Americans in Dearborn include descendants of Lebanese Christians who immigrated in the early twentieth century to work in the auto industry, as well as more recent Arab immigrants and their descendants from other, primarily Muslim nations.[10] In January 2019, Dearborn Mayor John "Jack" O'Reilly, Jr., terminated the contract of Bill McGraw, new editor of the Dearborn Historian, a city publication. He refused to allow distribution of the Autumn 2018 issue to subscribers. That issue, on the 100th anniversary of Henry Ford's acquisition of the Dearborn Independent newspaper, discussed the influence that Ford exerted in expressing his anti-Semitism. The mayor's suppression of the issue received national publicity.[11][12] The Dearborn Historical Commission held an emergency meeting and passed a resolution calling for the mayor to reverse these actions.[13] The suppressed article was published in DeadlineDetroit and may be read here.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearborn,_Michigan Charles Brown: In 2022, Ford is still in Dearborn; its headquarters and Ford Rouge Plant. It’s population is close to its peak: Historical population Census​Pop.​​%± 1860​355​​— 1870​530​​49.3% 1880​410​​−22.6% 1900​844​​— 1910​911​​7.9% 1920​2,470​​171.1% 1930​50,358​​1,938.8% 1940​63,589​​26.3% 1950​94,994​​49.4% 1960​112,007​​17.9% 1970​104,199​​−7.0% 1980​90,660​​−13.0% 1990​89,286​​−1.5% 2000​97,775​​9.5% 2010​98,153​​0.4% 2020​109,976​​12.0% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearborn,_Michigan Dearborn is part of the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn Metropolitan Statistical Area of the Census Bureau https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US19820-detroit-warren-dearborn-mi-metro-area/ -------------------------- https://theweek.com/articles/461968/rise-fall-detroit-timeline http://websites.umich.edu/~ac213/student_projects06/neerhdo/postwar.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Detroi