DETROITography

by: Rod Arroyo Milwaukee Junction was the heart of early automotive manufacturing in the United States, and many consider it the cradle of Detroit’s auto industry. The area takes its name from the railroad junction formed by the Detroit, Grand Haven and Milwaukee Railway (later the Grand Trunk) and the Chicago, Detroit and Canada Grand Trunk Junction Railroad (later the Grand Trunk Railway of…

Welcome to our Data Forum where we will discuss the opportunity for startups with data APIs, specifically Detroit’s Open Data Portal. We’ll be joined by the Diop Shumake, Endo World and 98Forward, Jimmy McBroom, data engineer at City of Detroit, and Taegan Humphries, CivilSavvy. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect with fellow data enthusiasts and expand your knowledge. WHEN: Friday,…

by: Janet Anderson I’ve spent my entire career, and my six decades of life, living with the results of unplanned land use. I watched Detroit’s legendary decline from my front porch and in my city of Detroit work, and I continue to see and feel the disconnects between what people need to thrive and what is built near them. As a planner of public services, I’ve heard so many laments that city of…

This mapping effort is a broad coalition of organizations working together to map school gardens led by the School Garden Support Organization (SGSO) Network, including GenThrive, The Edible Schoolyard Project, USDA, and others. I found this map to be amazingly full while I also expected more locations in Detroit. I know the original School Garden Collaborative is no longer, Elon Musk’s brother…

This post will be both a soapbox and a rant. Recently, Mayor Mary Sheffield’s transition team led by HR&A Advisors published the results of their large-scale survey of residents and the priorities they would like to see from the incoming mayoral administration. All of the marketing copy includes language that all of Detroit’s “39 ZIP Codes” were canvassed in order to arrive at these numbers.…

Showing a map of the City of Detroit with an overlay of tree canopy cover and highlighting the boundaries of city parks. Further, there are over a quarter million points on the map representing bird observations that have been submitted to the eBird application. The legend shows the exact colors of the point data. Where alternative colors arise (e.g. green or black dots), it is a result of…

Detroit has had a significant Latino and Mexican American population since the 1920s when merchants and restaurants started showing up in the Irish enclave of Corktown. Today a Mexican-Irish festival has been held for a number of years showing the blend of cultures in Detroit’s oldest neighborhood. Regionally, the migration of the Hispanic/Latino population can be seen as higher overall…

This map from the Library of Congress adorns the wall of the exhibition hall at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle. I recently visited the museum for the first time with my son and just could not place this map from the wall. Typically I like to say that Windsor has been holding Detroit’s map legend since 1876, but that was not the case on this map. Windsor was labeled and the shoreline…

by: Hannah VanWingen Eckertova This case study visualizes yearly housing cost burden across Detroit’s census block groups using 2024 American Community Survey data. A density chart plots block groups reporting both renter and owner median housing costs as a percent of yearly income. The near-zero regression slope between renter and owner cost burden suggests these pressures are structurally…

by: Rod Arroyo Before Motown put Detroit on the popular music map, the city was already swinging with jazz and blues venues. From the mid-1930s through the early 1950s, Paradise Valley and Sugar Hill — vibrant and mostly-Black neighborhoods clustered north of Gratiot, east of Woodward, south of Warren (Sugar Hill), south of Mack (Paradise Valley), and extending to Hastings Street (now the…

by: Andy Frantz “Public Art, the Post-Industrial, and Economic Opportunity in Detroit” examines the geospatial and demographic relationships between Detroit’s physical and creative infrastructure with community financial prosperity. The practice of creative placemaking asserts that public art supports community and economic development, and Rust Belt cities such as Detroit have utilized their…

A colleague was recently talking about Civil War history and this map popped back up on my radar. Published by Silas Farmer & Co., this map was digitized by in the NYPL Map Division. In 1863, everything of importance was half a mile away from Campus Martius from government buildings, colleges, high school, hospitals and churches. Notably, a number of “colored” churches are listed along Beaubien…

As a follow up to our post analyzing former Mayor Mike Duggan’s last State of the City (SOTC) address, we ran our analysis on a transcript of current Mayor Sheffield’s first address to the city to see what differences, if any, appeared in the data.  This analysis is done by running an exact keyword analysis on the transcript text which, as we noted previously, has its own strengths and…

by: Julian Bruinsma This map shows the billboards in Detroit using a dataset from MDOT. You can find the complete dataset at DetroitData.org. The placement of billboards along major roadways reflect the busiest throughfares in the city. In a world of increasingly individualized and targeted advertising, billboards represent one of the last communal advertising experiences. The relative…

Since 2014, I’ve tracked 52 different coworking spaces (not including spaces where one could “co-work,” but specific places marketed for coworking). As of May 2026, 25 coworking locations are open. Six locations have been around since 2014, including: Junction440 at Techtown, OmniCorpsDetroit, Grand Circus Co., Bamboo Detroit, Grand River Workplace, and Green Garage. These locations seem to have…

Summer Fridays, Midnight Basketball, and expanded Recreation Center hours – Mayor Sheffield is tackling youth opportunity head on with the same kind of focus we’ve seen in past administrations from Kilpatrick’s “Mayor’s Time” to the exponential growth of “Grow Detroit’s Young Talent” (GDYT) under mayors Bing and Duggan. The effort is powered by the United Way with groups from Slow Roll, Motown…