Conrad Kickert, Dream City: Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit (MIT Press, 2019)
The committee finds that the book Dream City – Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit is excellent, innovative, and well-deserving of the Bosma Prize. The committee praised your meticulous research that addresses Detroit with the respect, complexity, and depth that the case deserves. Committee members commented on the structural choice of seasonality, and how it further complicates the many fates and cycles of the Downtown and its metropolitan circumstance. The conclusion in particular, “A New Beginning: The Past as the Future,” underscores the complexity of conjugating urban pasts (fabric, economy, social groups, politics, etc.) forward.
The Downtown as a locus for a forced chronological recognition demonstrates precisely the hubris, and ensuing crisis, of a Fordist pattern of urban production. The committee also recognizes the additional efforts in grant writing that enabled the high-quality maps and images. They are superb. The work is as insightful as it is challenging, and truly exemplifies the qualities that the Bosma Prize celebrates.
