Detroit-Windsor: The World’s largest international suburban donut. As the minivan has been a staple of auto manufacturing in Southwestern Ontario since the 1980s, it corresponds in a number of ways to a moment in late twentieth century urbanism when suburbanization had become the dominant model of spatial planning and land use in North America. Detroit was one of the first big cities to undergo this transition to the suburbs and the city is often said to be shrinking; however up until recently its population was moving, slowly and steadily away from the urban core to satellite cities and townships on the periphery. A similar pattern has ensued in the Windsor region on the Canadian side to the point where we are left with a loose and disjointed collection of developments on both sides: townships and small cities that form a large ring around the original urban centers that spans both sides of the border. The Detroit-Windsor region forms one of the largest international urban areas in North America and was built up on the Canadian side as a manufacturing and export processing zone in the early part of the twentieth century as the auto industry developed its overseas markets. The minivan was Chrysler’s Windsor invention and the vehicle was designed to traverse the vast distances that constitute the post-urban landscape of this region.
Cities in the Motor Age (1959) by Wilfred Owen (below) is one of the first books to warn against the perils of suburban development. However, Owen’s early analysis points to Detroit’s then emerging freeway system as an elegant solution to the ‘city’ problem as it had been posed in the late 1950s. The Interstate Highways Act (1956), which enabled the freeways to be built quickly, was followed by federal and municipal policies that shut down investment in the city.
Both Kyong Park and Thomas Sugrue variously chronicle the way in which these policies took their toll on Detroit’s development from the 1950s onward. As the freeways were built, banks funded suburban development which was privileged over new building within city limits. Racist policies prohibiting blacks from getting mortgages in these new suburban developments led to a kind of unofficial apartheid between Detroit’s inner city and suburbs.
By the 1980s the suburb had become the new “edge city” in North America and Chrysler launches one of the first minivan lines in 1984 at the newly built Windsor Assembly plant. Lee Iacoca waves as he drives the first vehicle off the assembly line (pictured below in Pioneering the Auto Age, by Herb Colling, 1993). In 1983 the minivan was conceived as a “less stodgy” alternative to the station wagon:
“Chrysler is betting there’s a big market for a van of this size and is aiming it at current station wagon owners; those who already own larger, less efficient club wagons; growing families; those who need station wagons but hate the stodgy suburban image; women who aren’t comfortable driving large conventional vans; people who used to own full-sized sedans and like plenty of interior room, and those who just enjoy the sheer novelty of the vehicle.”
