Detroit—the most populous city in Michigan—has a rich history. Founded in 1701 by a French trader, Detroit thrived as a center for the US automobile industry in the early part of the 20th century. The city’s fame rose with the popularity of music recordings from Motown Records.
The 20th century also brought challenges. Suburbanization, increased crime, and the gradual loss of auto industry jobs caused many Detroit residents to move out of the city. According to the US census, Detroit’s population peaked at more than 1.8 million in 1950 but fell to just over 639,000 by 2020. To many people, it seemed that Detroit’s best days had passed.
But Detroit has defied reports of its demise. With investments in neighborhood revitalization, job creation, and affordable housing, the city is focused on innovation—including products using GIS technology.
GIS in the Motor City’s Government
As part of the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology, Detroit’s enterprise GIS team leverages geospatial data and technology to empower city operations and decision-making. Led by its supervisor Ted Schultz, the team supports hundreds of GIS users across city departments. Detroit also has an open data portal, operated by Detroit’s Data Strategy and Analytics team and built with ArcGIS Hub, that provides public access to the city’s GIS data, maps, and apps.
For Schultz, a key priority for the city’s nine-member GIS team has been defining Detroit’s GIS service delivery model.
“We’ve been kind of in startup mode over the last few years,” he said. “Before me, there was no GIS supervisor. It was very decentralized, with GIS staff embedded in other departments.”
Given the team’s small size relative to Detroit’s population, managing all of the city’s GIS users, data, apps, processes, and systems is challenging. Building trust and cross-department collaboration is crucial to achieving the team’s mission. GIS staff have successfully promoted GIS-based solutions by working closely with people at all levels in various city departments—even providing GIS tools to city employees.
For example, with Schultz’s assistance, the city’s General Services Department modernized paper-based field inspections and data collection. City employees now use mobile devices and ArcGIS apps to capture photos and locations of blight issues and document completed work. With GIS technology, the data is collected, analyzed, and shared more efficiently, leading to better results and insights around graffiti removal, alley and commercial corridor cleanups, and other blight-remediation efforts.
A GIS Community and Training
Establishing a sense of GIS community is important to Schultz, who leverages the Esri Advantage Program and works with an Esri adviser on geospatial strategy. This approach also supports a governance initiative for maintaining accurate building footprints and addresses, as well as information related to property units, parcels, and rights-of-way, led by a data strategy and analytics team.
At the same time, Schultz promotes training to empower GIS users. His team has provided access to Esri Academy for GIS users on the city’s staff and facilitates instructor-led training for those who frequently use ArcGIS software.
“As [city staff] are starting with GIS and they say, ‘Do you have any resources for us?,” the first thing we do is add them to our My Esri organization and tell them to use the learning plans at Esri Academy,” Schultz said. “If they want instructor-led courses or a customized learning plan, we connect them with Danielle Kleinman.”
An Esri training consultant, Kleinman helped Schultz arrange a pivotal private offering of an instructor-led ArcGIS Pro: Essential Workflows class. During the three-day course, participants engaged with the instructor and one another, connected course topics to their own work, and were inspired by ways that GIS can help revitalize Detroit.
For example, participants were eager to learn how to bring the city’s parcel data into ArcGIS Pro so that they could visualize vacant property locations and remediation needs. While parcel data workflows were not covered in the class materials, Esri senior GIS instructor Lisa Juru shared an extensive list of resources for participants to explore after class.
A Class Creates Community
About 50 city employees applied for the course’s 15 seats, Schultz said. One was Emilee Lopez, an information technology specialist and GIS analyst with the enterprise GIS team. Although her ArcGIS Pro knowledge was beyond the introductory level of the course, Schultz saw value in having a team member participate.
“Emilee knows the organization and our data and could respond to questions asked by other students,” Schultz said, adding that Juru “was an outstanding instructor and did a great job of creating that community mindset.”
Juru was impressed by the energy that participants brought to the classroom every day.
“The class was full of students who were passionate about their city,” Juru said. “They talked to me about some of the challenges Detroit has faced and how they want to actively change people’s narrative about the city.”
Participants’ GIS skill levels varied, but as they discussed the course material and used ArcGIS Pro in step-by-step exercises, ideas for how ArcGIS tools could be applied to their projects surfaced quickly.
“A lot of people made connections between their work and GIS,” Lopez said, adding that on the last day of the course, participants stayed late to talk with one another and Juru. One participant started a group chat so that everyone could stay connected and continue conversations.
“It’s really nice that a lot of people are trying to keep in contact because it’s easy to stay in your own team,” said Lopez. “When you realize that other people are doing the same thing and you can share resources, everyone grows from that.”
From Startup to Grownup
When Schultz became Detroit’s enterprise GIS team supervisor, he focused the team’s attention on configuring apps to meet city GIS users’ immediate operational and information needs. With that accomplished, the team is now thinking holistically about other departments’ data and needs.
“I want to get to the point where GIS is not just a specialty service,” Schultz said. “We have our apps and enterprise systems, and geospatial information is just at the core of what we do.”
A second private ArcGIS Pro class, like the one that had been held two months earlier, attracted participants from many city departments. Schultz said that bringing GIS users together for these classes has not only spurred an enterprise mindset around GIS use, but also helped provide Detroit GIS users with new ideas that can help revitalize their beloved city.
For more information about Detroit’s GIS program, email Ted Schultz at schultzt@detroitmi.gov.
