Detroit (Built Environment City Studies)

Detroit: A City Imagined in Film is a survey of prominent feature films depicting or referring to Detroit, and how they have captured and fed popular perceptions about the Motor City. Detroit, a magnifying glass, through which one sees an exaggerated portrait of America, has rendered itself to the eye of the cinematographic camera for over a century as background, stage, and even character.

Guided by Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, the authors analyse an array of fiction films filmed and/or set in Detroit from 1928 until today and examine filmic practice as one through which the city has been perceived, conceived, and lived, and thus continually reproduced, socially and materially. The book thus sheds light on how the imaginary around a city can shape or reinforce perceptions that affect it in return, making the reading informative about the tangible power of cinema, the cinematic nature of the city, and ultimately the common threads that weave the story of Detroit.

The book is for film lovers, students and enthusiasts of Film Studies, Architecture, and Urban Studies, and all those who are interested in Detroit, its history, places, and culture.

Carmela Cucuzzella, PhD, is the Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Design and Full Professor at the School of Design at the Université de Montréal. She is a member of the inter-university and interdisciplinary team at the Laboratoire d'étude de l'architecture potentielle (LEAP). Previously, she was Full Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, founding co-director of the Next Generation Cities Institute (NGCI), and held the position of Concordia University Research Chair in Integrated Design, Ecology and Sustainability for the Built Environment (IDEAS-BE). Her research focuses on the spatial justice of urban form, ecological design, and architecture as well as the didactic phenomena of ecological art and design in the city as a means of raising awareness of various socio-ecological issues. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, in academic collective books, without mentioning books and collective editions.

Aristofanis Soulikias is an architect, filmmaker, and writer, interested in capturing and expressing essential and often intangible qualities of urban built spaces. His animated films and installations deal with this quest and are produced using the under-camera stop motion technique, which involves handmade objects and silhouettes. He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture of the Université de Montréal, engaged in an interdisciplinary research project with the title: "Sensing the city: revealing urban realities and potentials through handmade film animation", which aims at examining the practices of architectural representation through film, especially through the haptic experience of artisanal filmmaking, in order to reveal qualities and meanings of the built environment that often elude computer-based imagery. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.