Flint, Michigan

This paper argues that the Flint water crisis stems from the city's inability to address the consequences of largescale population loss, the Flint region's unwillingness to engage in regional planning, and a societal lack of care for infrastructure and shrinking cities.

All-ages DIY music venues are important ingredients in music scenes. Once spaces largely booking punk rock bands and flying under-the-radar of local city representatives, some all-ages DIY music venues now program a wide-range of music genres and cultural events, operating as sophisticated arts-based non-profits integrated into local policy agendas. This chapter briefly examines three all-ages DIY music venues to help define their value to music scenes and the broader urban economies they inhabit. Resulting insights point to these spaces sharing similar traits with more traditional spaces for arts incubation and entrepreneurship and the activity they facilitate capable of catalyzing economic development. These insights suggest that urban planners, economic development professionals, and other city representatives should identify the all-ages DIY music venues in their communities and seek ways to help them as they would other spaces for cultural production.

The theoretical trench warfare about the meaning 'the people'-its sovereignty, ultimate authority, constituent power, and the right to self-determination-rages on. It does so, seemingly, with unabated enthusiasm. Is 'the people' a demos or an ethnos? Is 'the people' another name for plebs-all those downtrodden-or is it just another name for a demos, all those affected by the exercise of political power? Can its identity be known in advance, or must it remain mysterious until the point when we identify it, but only in retrospect? When, how, and where is 'the people' when it exercises its constituent power? Can it do so only when exhausted from suffering? Are we to find it in local assemblies, which then send their delegates to the Constituent Assembly, or can we identify its visage in mass demonstrations in city squares? When 'the people' claims its right to selfdetermination, how should we understand its rightful location-as a predetermined territory, or as the land, which it materially improved over time? Busy with giving it meaning, all such arguments seem to have forgotten-or have considered irrelevant (it's hard to tell)-one simple but non-trivial truth. Irrespective of which one among the questions above we chose to answer, the answer will be a figure, which cannot but be the work of imagination. Once seen in this light, it becomes harder to believe that its identity is really that of a demos, ethnos, plebs, populus, or something else altogether. Instead, once seen in that light, 'the people' will appear in its three-fold roles that it has played all along, beneath each and every particular mask of peoplehood. As the product of the practice of theoretical imaginations 'the people' is better seen as the arbiter, warden, and manager.

In this chapter, I connect just peace ethics with environmental racism, focusing on the water of the people of Flint, Michigan. First, I describe the context of the case in Flint. Second, I reflect on this case with a just peace ethic, with a particular focus on relevant virtues.

Vehicle City Voices Corpus – Part I was developed at the University of Michigan-Flint, and is an ongoing oral history project and survey of English language variation in Flint, Michigan. It contains approximately 16 hours of speech with corresponding transcripts from interviews of Flint residents conducted between 2012 and 2015.

The corpus was designed to provide high-quality recordings for acoustic analysis and to examine narrative structure and discursive construction of individual and collective identity in urban spaces.

https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2017S17