Source: Taubman College
Martin Murray’s latest research in Detroit has its roots 4,000 miles away in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a region once home to a booming coal and steel industry. As employers left and towns shrank, Germany invested in transforming the abandoned infrastructure into public parks and historic monuments, explains Murray, professor of urban planning at Taubman College.
Murray has long researched places like the Ruhr post-industrial region and others globally. He’s written a number of books and articles exploring, “What happens to these leftover spaces right after abandonment?” When COVID halted global travel five years ago, Murray turned his focus closer to home. He and his Taubman College colleagues María Arquero de Alarcón, associate professor of architecture and urban and regional planning, and Olaia Chivite Amigo, M.Arch ’18, and recent architecture fellow, began studying patterns of distress in five Detroit neighborhoods.
In April, Murray received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship — one of 198 out of 3,500 applicants. The fellowship recognized his scholarship and his upcoming book, which connects dots between Detroit’s current realities through research countering both “apocryphal” tales of a “destroyed city” and recent boosterism over its thriving sports and entertainment district. “The argument is that decline is uneven, and that what happens in those spaces is very much tied to the process of abandonment,” Murray says. “If you go to the seven square miles along Woodward Avenue, you’ll find a vibrancy, but you don’t have to go very far to see that that’s very limited.”
His research draws on Brightmoor, Delray, Mapleridge, Poletown, and Riverbend — neighborhoods challenged by vacancy, abandonment, foreclosures, and diminished municipal services. Murray says a “kind of triage” is occurring, with some areas willfully neglected so others can be prioritized. “The city administration has basically decided that there are places they’re going to do nothing for,” he says. “They’re going to talk about doing things, but in fact, nothing is going to happen.”
