The automobile clearly played a major role in shaping the American city, facilitating the development of suburbs and dispersed economic activity. Henry Ford would have a prominent place in this geographic history simply by virtue of having done so much to make automobile ownership commonplace. In her new book, Heather Barrow argues that Ford also played a more direct role in the restructuring of one American metropolitan area, Detroit, through his promotion of a suburban model of manufacturing and residence, primarily in Dearborn, Michigan, in the 1920s and 1930s. Ford built the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, he paid his workers wages that made suburban home ownership feasible for many, he helped to create suburban housing developments, and he promulgated a vision of suburban living as a civilizing force. Barrow provides a lively and readable account of this history, illustrating how Ford's labor policies and social views were written into the geography of the region.

Barrow begins by describing the establishment of the massive Rouge plant in the town of Springwells, later consolidated into Dearborn. Beyond building the plant, Ford also developed housing projects in Dearborn to serve the Rouge workers. He favored smaller-scale communities as having beneficial effects on the values and habits of workers and their families, relative to larger cities. (Barrow also suggests that Ford's anti-Semitism may have contributed to this view of large cities due to his suspicions about the practices of Jewish landlords in urban areas.) The movement of production workers out of the city and into the suburbs was a natural outgrowth of “Fordism,” defined here as an industrial policy “linking mass production with mass consumption through high wages” (p. 6).

Many Rouge workers were able to settle in Dearborn, and their high wages helped them establish an unusually high rate of home ownership in the suburb. But many others continued to live in Detroit, especially in areas near Ford's declining Highland Park plant. African American workers were excluded from Dearborn in general and from Ford's housing developments there in particular. So a “reverse commute” developed, in which workers left Detroit to travel to Dearborn to work their shift at Rouge. This gave rise to very long commute times on public transit. As a result, Ford, somewhat surprisingly, became an advocate for an improved transit system. Ultimately, with Ford's support, new streetcar lines linked the Northwest belt to the Rouge plant, with seven lines terminating near Rouge and bringing in 30,000 workers per shift. Over time, though, Ford's advocacy for transit waned, and the more diffuse development that he promoted helped to undermine the viability of vigorous public transportation in the Detroit area.

Barrow argues that the economic geography that Ford helped to create, with production and related commerce located in the suburbs and many workers remaining in the city, may have worsened the impact of the Great Depression on the region. Detroit was forced to try to deal with the tremendous needs of its unemployed population but had reduced access to business taxes to pay for those programs due to the relocation of production to the suburbs. Of course the sharp contraction in the auto industry would have reduced those tax revenues in any event. At the same time, in Dearborn, the Ford workers who had been encouraged to become home owners now saw themselves facing foreclosure and the loss of their property. This hardship helped to increase organizing for relief, culminating in the hunger march at the Rouge plant in the spring of 1932 that left four protestors dead. While the United Auto Workers grew greatly in strength in the late 1930s, the Ford Motor Company was able to forestall formal organizing until the spring of 1941. At that point, according to Barrow, the “Fordist” project of mass production supported by mass consumption through high wages became a joint project of the government, capital, and labor.

The “treaty of Detroit” coincided with a return of prosperity to the region in the immediate postwar era. The further spread of car ownership, investment in highways, and the ongoing relocation of production led to decentralization of economic activity well beyond Ford's project in Dearborn. Ultimately, the diffusion of auto production beyond the borders of the United States helped to end this era of prosperity. Barrow suggests that the failure of government, business, and labor to develop viable models of regional planning linking the city and the suburbs worsened the impact of the resulting deindustrialization.

Barrow provides a compelling account of these events and Ford's role in them. She skillfully weaves together the historical, economic, and geographic literature with archival sources, including workers' oral histories. Some of her discussion of more narrowly economic topics is imprecise or at times confusing: for instance, her rough equating of vertical integration with monopoly (p. 19), or her claim that increasingly bureaucratic, “welfare capitalist” labor policies transformed “an impersonal business interaction…into a relationship like that of an extended family” (p. 94). But Barrow is particularly adept at illustrating the contradictions and unintended consequences arising from Ford's efforts, including the way in which “the pursuit of the American dream promoted by Henry Ford prompted African American workers to challenge the hierarchy he intended for them” (p. 119), and the fact that, though Ford viewed the suburb as providing a connection to the rural past, it became the locus of many modern conflicts, including battles over racial integration and women's roles. Barrow's book will be of use to historians and economists, both students and professionals, interested in the history of Ford, Detroit, and Dearborn, and the interplay of economics and geography in that history.