ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1910s, thousands of migrant workers poured into Detroit to work at Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant (1909) to produce the world’s rst complex assembly line product: Ford’s Model T. By 1917, when Ford opened his even more technologically advanced River Rouge plant there were 23 automotive companies in Detroit, but unfortunately, Detroit’s status as the center of US car manufacturing could not last. As Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and Jason Young point out, “Detroit’s reliance upon the economic monoculture of automobile production virtually ensured the city’s nearly complete planned obsolescence as experienced half a century later”.1
