Book Beat will host three distinguished authors on Sunday, June 23 at 3pm to discuss the effects of cities in crisis and how best to approach rebuilding them for future sustainability. The authors appearing to sign and discuss their work are: Gordon Young, John Gallagher, and June Manning Thomas. This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available at the event. If you would like to reserve copies of any of the books prior to the event, please call Book Beat (248) 968-1190.

San Francisco journalist, author, blogger and Flint native Gordon Young will present his book, Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, a vibrant tale of the once-thriving Automobile city Flint fighting-despite overwhelming odds-to rise from the ashes.

After living in San Francisco for 15 years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and “star” of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that once boasted one of the world’s highest per capita income levels, but is now one of the country’s most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer can afford a lavish mansion, speculators scoop up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson is often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification.

Visit Gordon Young’s website -full of memories and more; “FLINT EXPATRIATES -a blog  for the long lost residents of the Vehicle City”

“One can read Teardown and go ‘My, my, my! What a horrid town! Thank God I don’t live there!’ Oh, but you do. Just as the Roger & Me Flint of the 1980s was the precursor to a wave of downsizing that eventually hit every American community, Gordon Young’s Flint of 2013, so profoundly depicted in this book, is your latest warning of what’s in store for you–all of you, no matter where you live–in the next decade. The only difference between your town and Flint is that the Grim Reaper just likes to visit us first. It’s all here in Teardown, a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city.”–Michael Moore

“Young sees Flint’s problems as emblematic of challenges felt across the nation, and has made the point that the city’s struggles with a shrinking population and changing economy hold lessons that apply to people everywhere. ”I think of Flint as kind of a New Orleans in slow motion,” he said, comparing the devastation to his hometown’s economy with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.In both cities, events beyond their control conspired against them, and no one was able, or willing, to help.” –Interview with the author  at “I Love Flint” -MLive

John Gallagher, author of the award-winning book Reimaging Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City, will be presenting it’s follow-up: Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention.

After decades of suburban sprawl, job loss, and lack of regional government, Detroit has become a symbol of post-industrial distress and also one of the most complex urban environments in the world. In Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention, John Gallagher argues that Detroit’s experience can offer valuable lessons to other cities that are, or will soon be, dealing with the same broken municipal model. A follow-up to his award-winning 2010 work, Reimagining Detroit, this volume looks at Detroit’s successes and failures in confronting its considerable challenges. It also looks at other ideas for reinvention drawn from the recent history of other cities, including Cleveland, Flint, Richmond, Philadelphia, and Youngstown, as well as overseas cities, including Manchester and Leipzig.

“John Gallagher turns what could be a dry academic treatise into a vibrant page turner, a carefully constructed narrative that weaves the colorful stories of politicians, city planners and ordinary people into identifying and solving the great challenges presented by the global move from a manufacturing economy to one that is knowledge-based.“– Randal Charlton, former executive director of TechTown, Detroit

“If many of the world’s urban places grow at an uncontrollable pace — megalopolises like Mumbai and Sao Paulo and Shanghai, and, to a lesser degree, places like Phoenix and Los Angeles — many other urban centers the world over are heading in the direction of where Detroit finds itself today, a city so drained of its lifeblood that it can no longer govern itself in the traditional way, can no longer provide jobs for large numbers of its people, and can no longer find productive uses for great swaths of urban landscape slowly returning to nature.” – excerpt from Revolution Detroit, from The Detroit Free Press

John Gallagher interview in the Detroit Free Press public Q & A talks publicly on his two books about Detroit urban renewal.

John Gallagher is a veteran journalist who writes about urban and economic development for the Detroit Free Press. He joined the newspaper in 1987. John’s other books include Re-imagining Detroit, Great Architecture of Michigan and, as co-author, AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture.

June Manning Thomas is the author of Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit.

In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city’s physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs.

Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.