Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9.2
Detroit, Michigan.
The Lafayette Building once
housed the offi ces of the Michigan Supreme Court.
This photo from 2008 shows the boarded-up fi rst
and second fl oors and broken windows on the third
fl oor. Urban explorers broke into and photographed
abandoned buildings in Detroit (several websites are
devoted to their photographs and videos), and van-
dals painted graffi ti on the windows of Lafayette and
other so-called ghosts of Detroit.
© Erin H. Fouberg.
Geographers are leading the study of cities today through the application
of scale, globalization, and political economy to the city and urbanized spaces.
Urban geographer Edward Soja urges scholars to think of cities, including Detroit,
as integral to the development of societies and to change, not as stages upon
which humans act. Soja defi nes
synekism
as the “conditions that derive from
dwelling together in a particular home place or space” (2003, 273). As a result of
people dwelling together in cities, a set of conditions occur that make change
possible. To Soja, cities do not simply refl ect changing economies and politics.
Rather, cities create the conditions necessary for economies and politics to
change.
Using the concept of synekism, Grand Circus Park and the Lafayette
Building in Detroit are not merely refl ections of the changing political economy
of Detroit. This block of buildings and the larger city of Detroit created the con-
ditions necessary for industrial production to expand to the global scale and are
creating the conditions necessary for portions of Detroit to rebound.
In our study of urban geography in this chapter, we study the city spatially,
looking at the forms of cities around the world, the role of people in building and
shaping cities, and changes in cities over space and time.
