The working map links historical records to places and dates. Conflicting sources and reconstructed dimensions remain explicitly qualified.
After Chinatown investigates what happens when a community outlasts the spatial enclave through which its history is usually told. Detroit provides a case for examining how displacement, relocation, and metropolitan dispersal alter the proximity of businesses, institutions, and everyday places. A building’s demolition establishes the loss of a site; it does not, by itself, establish the disappearance of the community relationships connected to it.
Developed with Zhen Cheng, the project combines archival research with computational urban and spatial modeling. Historical sources are registered to locations and time periods so that records can be examined alongside changing buildings and infrastructure. The map connects a documented event or use to its urban setting and allows that relationship to be revisited when new evidence changes an address, date, or interpretation.
Method
The project links fragmented archival evidence to a changing urban model. Its research distinguishes the loss of a physical enclave from the relocation, persistence, and reorganization of the relationships that sustained it.
- 01
Locate evidence
Associate photographs, maps, newspapers, oral-history references, and property records with addresses, dates, and source descriptions.
- 02
Model urban change
Reconstruct building massing, historical streets, railways, and freeway corridors; distinguish construction, use, alteration, closure, and demolition.
- 03
Navigate across time
Search by address and year, move between urban and street views, and inspect the archival records associated with a selected place.
- 04
Expose uncertainty
Keep approximate locations, conflicting dates, later visual references, and inferred geometry visible in the evidence record.
A model that changes with the evidence
The working platform now combines historical 3D massing with changing street, railway, and freeway alignments. Building records distinguish construction from later renovation and changes of use. Photo-guided refinements add courtyards, connected volumes, and facade features, while timeline rules control when buildings appear or disappear.
Address-and-year navigation, street-level exploration, source-category filters, and linked archival records make the model an interface for examining evidence. The surrounding Cass Corridor and Cass Park context places community sites within the larger physical transformations that affected access, proximity, and continuity.
From places to relationships
The next research phase will connect addresses to businesses, people, associations, and successor locations, with a source and time range for each relationship. This extension is intended to trace how community connections move across the metropolitan region after particular buildings or commercial centers disappear.
A fuller relational dataset would support comparisons of clustering, distance, and institutional continuity across periods and cities. Community-contributed memories could help recover destinations, routes, and relationships absent from official records; that contribution workflow and its evaluation remain to be developed.
Evidence and limits
Source dates can refer to construction, renovation, publication, or occupancy; the record preserves these distinctions and unresolved disagreements. Later photographs inform some historical geometry, and model dimensions remain interpretations where measurements are unavailable.