detroitography

[detroitography]

Map: The Place of Many Beavers, Detroit

by: Joanne Coutts This map is one of my first explorations of how I might interpret the data I researched and collected on Detroit’s buried waterways to share visualizations of the city. I am very convinced that the way we talk about a place impacts our relationship with it. I created this map to learn the Ojibwe names of some of the Indigenous plants and animals of Teuchash Grondie (The Place…

[detroitography]

Detroit Coffee Map 2025

The ever constant search for coffee around the city continues. Since last year there have been 20 new coffee shops and only 3 closures since I last updated the map in 2024. This is the smallest number of closures year-over-year since 2015 which is why Detroit has the greatest number of coffee shop ever with 130 coffee spots. Almost all of the new coffee shops opened within a 3 mile radius of…

[detroitography]

Map: Detroit Tax Foreclosure Windfalls Outreach 2025

View interactive map by Shiva Shahmir on Felt by: Shiva Shahmir Following two Michigan Supreme Court rulings, Rafaeli v. Oakland County in 2020 and Schaeffer v. Kent County in 2024, Michigan residents who experienced property tax foreclosure between 2015 and 2020 were granted the right to retroactively claim surplus proceeds from their homes being auctioned for more than the tax debt owed. For…

[detroitography]

Event: Detroit Data Forum: Clean Energy

Welcome to our Data Forum where we will discuss clean energy advancements in Detroit. Join us in-person or online for lunch-and-learn filled with insightful discussions, tips, and tricks on all things related to the data. We’ll be joined by the Tepfirah Rushdan, Director of the City of Detroit Office of Sustainability, Gary Ringer, Executive Director of Joy-Southfield CDC, and Arena Johnson,…

[detroitography]

Detroit By The Numbers: May 2025 Data Roundup

400 election precincts (cleaned up version) down from 502 precincts in the 2020 election and 450 in the 2022 election with 401 polling places, yet some people travel more than 3 miles past 6-7 polling places to reach their assigned polling place (DETROITography) 1,437 neighborhood submissions by users on Detroit-Neighborhoods.com. Add yours too! Check out the data on DetroitData.org 76 air…

[detroitography]

Map: Analysis of Speed Hump Efficacy in Detroit

Check out the interactive version of this map: by: Ted Tansley, Data Analyst The city of Detroit has been installing thousands of speed humps all around the city in the last couple of years, but are they having any measured impact on the safety of our streets? To look, we took publicly available data of locations where speed humps were installed, combined it with SEMCOG’s crash data, and…

[detroitography]

Mapping Detroit's Buried Waterways

by: Joanne Coutts When I started the Mapping Detroit’s Buried Waterways project in 2022, I had no idea I would still be trying to complete it 3 years and 283 miles later. This map is a screenshot of the current state of the project from my GAIA account, which I use to record tracks as I follow the routes of the buried waterways as closely as I can in real time on today’s streetscape. The base…

[detroitography]

Event: Detroit Data Forum: Health Data and Assessments

Welcome to our Data Forum where we will discuss City, County, and Hospital health assessments in Detroit. Join us online for lunch-and-learn filled with insightful discussions, tips, and tricks on all things related to the data. We’ll be joined by the Tiffani Stewart and the Detroit Health Department team releasing their latest Community Health Assessment (CHA), Katerina Stylianou sharing the…

[detroitography]

Map: The Geography of Voting in Detroit

Voting in Detroit is not known to be easy and the numbers of voters reflect that difficulty. Election Day confusion is well-known and documented even amongst regular voters. Polling places have changed and in some cases changed again. In 2020, the City Clerk noted that some 40,000 Detroiters were subject to a polling place update two weeks prior to the election. A result of the 2024 statewide…

[detroitography]

Mapping and Mobilizing the Vote: Fertile Ground in Detroit

by: Jeffrey Herbstman, PhD, data scientist Voter Mobilization efforts should focus on a simple equation that indicates the potential available voters in each U.S. census block. The Voter Participation Rate (VPR) as defined as the Voter Totals / Voting Age Citizens located in each block indicates the untapped quantity of voters available in each tract. Using reliable data sets for each of the…

[detroitography]

Detroit By The Numbers: April 2025 Data Roundup

25,000 trees planted as part of the Tree Equity Partnership’s goal of 75,000 by 2027 (WDET) 56 mentions of “neighborhood” by Mayor Duggan in his State of the City speech in 2024 after a previous high of 43 in 2015 (DETROITography/Ted Tansley) Check out the data on DetroitData.org 28th round of Motor City Match awards to 13 new brick-and-motor businesses (Detroit Chamber) 6,164 visitors on…

[detroitography]

Event: Detroit Data Forum: Race and Ethnicity

Welcome to our Data Forum where we will explore how race and ethnicity data are captured and tracked as well as improvements in the works. Join us online for lunch-and-learn filled with insightful discussions, tips, and tricks on all things related to the data. We’ll be joined by the Kristine Ajrouch, professional professor at Eastern Michigan University working on Middle Eastern-North African…

[detroitography]

Event: Detroit Regional Transit Fantasy Support Group with TRU

Join the annual and unofficial Detroit Regional Transit Fantasy Support (DRTFS) Group. Come see the great transit fantasy maps of the Detroit region and make your own! Propose people mover expansions or subway tunnel routes. Rocket buses or rail lines. We’ll focus the evening with Transit Riders United (TRU) sharing steps we can all take to improve mass public transit in the Detroit…

[detroitography]

Map: My Detroit Life

by: Joanne Coutts This map combines the classic Detroit hand map with an outline of Detroit’s buried creeks – sketched from tracks recorded while following the creek routes on my bike – to share my relationship with Detroit. The hand map is the first map I created of Detroit after attending a DETROITography event in 2017. The map focuses on places that were and mostly still are important to my…

[detroitography]

Map: Detroit Regional Rail Fantasy Map

by: Neel Marathe, University of Michigan urban technology student completing a GIS internship What if SEMTA, the one-line commuter rail from the 70s, grew instead of dying out? Inspired heavily by Metra and GO Transit, this project that I worked on over spring break imagines that Detroit had a regional/commuter rail system that matured through the ages (not like a brand new proposal). This…

[detroitography]

Detroit by the Numbers: State of the City 2014 - 2025

by: Ted Tansley, Data Analyst Mike Duggan’s tenure as Mayor of Detroit has been focused on data. The number of residents in the city, number of demolitions, number of jobs brought to the city, number of affordable housing built or preserved. All data points get brought up in his yearly State of the City address where he makes his case to the public that he and his team have been doing a good job…

[detroitography]

Map: Little Village Detroit

This new arts focused effort claims to be attempting to bring the redevelopment of Detroit beyond Downtown. The effort is spearheaded by the Library Street Collective owners Anthony and JJ Curis, who are part of Curis Enterprises. Primarily a real estate operation, Curis Enterprises currently owns Mack Alter Square, Shops at Woodward Place in Highland Park, and Riverbend Plaza near the…