Please join us for our next seminar and book signing event:

Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

George Galster

Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit

 

George Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.  Dr. Galster has held positions at the Universities of: Harvard, Berkeley, North Carolina, Amsterdam, Delft, Glasgow, Mannheim, Oslo, and Western Sydney, among others.  He served as Director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute before coming to Wayne State University in 1996.  His research has focused on urban neighborhoods and housing markets, exploring how they change and how they change the people who live within them.  This has resulted in over 130 peer-reviewed articles, 30 book chapters and seven books.  His latest book is Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (2012).  He has provided housing policy consultations to public officials in Australia, Canada, China, Scotland, and the U.S.  He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.

 

 

    Friday, February 28, 2014
    12:15pm – 2pm
    Executive Dining Room, Camden
    Campus Center
    Lunch will be served

 

     book available for purchase at seminar

 

Detroit is the international icon for a once-thriving industrial powerhouse transformed within half a century into a dysfunctional metropolis.  George Galster’s Driving Detroit paints a stunning portrait of Metropolitan Detroit through an eclectic application of urban planning, economics, sociology, political science, geography, history, and psychology.  But Driving Detroit is also partly a self portrait, wherein Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories.  This remarkable mix of scholarly disciplines and media of communication make the book distinctively insightful, accessible, and memorable.  Driving Detroit is uniquely powerful because its portrait not only helps the reader clearly see the subject but, more importantly, understand why Metropolitan Detroit’s social, cultural, political, institutional, commercial, and built landscape has been transformed.  Though appropriate for graduate and undergraduate courses in urban studies, geography, planning, social sciences and history, the book should be of interest to the general public, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.