Touring Detroit: Ruins, Representation, and Redevelopment

Abstract

In the face of economic, demographic, and infrastructural decline, Detroit, Michigan has become a destination for tourists interested in viewing the city's iconic ruins. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, this thesis examines these emerging practices of ruin tourism in order to understand how such tourism operates, how it is related to representations of the city in popular media, and how it contributes to economic redevelopment in Detroit. Situated in literature about ruination and liminality, tourism geography, and critical urban geography, the study contributes to understandings of urban redevelopment in the post-industrial United States.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.