Detroit Do Your Thing! 2005

“What we call 'dropouts' are actually 'boycotts' by young people for whom schools are more like warehouses than places of learning. Realizing that you could have a Malcolm X in your class can help teachers to keep striving to create a classroom environment in which every voice is heard. It means 'working in concert with students to know the world and, if necessary, to change it.' BE IT RESOLVED that we create a community curriculum that will empower our children to recognize the truth from untruth and develop the ability to assess information for the best possible solution for themselves and for the community.”
—Grace Lee Boggs, Freedom Schooling: A Fresh Start for Public School


This project by Damon Rich and Rosten Woo provides learning tools for educators and youth in Detroit. Incorporated into required classes on local and state history, these tools will allow students to explore the history and contemporary condition of the city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. The primary motivation of our design is to encourage students to engage in open-ended critical examinations of their living environment.


In the coming year, we hope to raise additional funding in order to distribute editions of Detroit Do Your Thing! to interested teachers across the Detroit metropolitan area.


On view here are four components of the toolkit:
(1) Detroit Metro Area Flipbook
How did the Detroit Metro Area develop over time? This flipbook shows the growing political fragmentation of the region from 1820 to 2000.
(2) Race Dots Wall Map
This map represents the population of the three-county metropolitan area with one dot per one hundred people. The color of each dot reflects a racial group as reported by the 2000 United States census report. White people are yellow. Black or African American people are blue. Hispanic people are red. Asian people are green. American Indian people are purple.
(3) Visible Detroit Map Set
This set of eight printed plexiglass panels presents infrastructures and demographics of the metropolitan area. Using the lightbox, different layers of information may be superimposed and examined for congruencies and contrasts.
Map 1. Land and Water
Map 2. Highways
Map 3. Municipal boundaries
Map 4. Area served by City of Detroit Water System
Map 5. City of Detroit Bus System
Map 6. Detroit Suburban Bus System
Map 7. Income
Map 8. Race
(4) Detroit Do Your Thing! Episode 1: City & Suburb
The first episode of the video series features interviews with thirteen people from around the metro area, including real estate developers, artists, city planners, and political activists.

Participants

Damon Rich, Designer, Project Manager
Alice Shay, Researcher
Rosten Woo, Designer
Kaz Yoneda, Researcher

Downloads

Finding the Civic in the Situation (PDF, 809.4 KB)

A paper by Damon Rich on some of CUP’s techniques

Related projects

Detroit Do Your Thing! is a part of However Unspectacular: A New Suburbanism