Detroit's population over time: Identifying patterns

Patterns are distinctive arrangements of things or objects. Patterns often involve repetitions of designs or shapes. Geography studies spatial patterns: the arrangement of features on the earth's surface, and temporal patterns: how characteristics, trends and features change over time in recognisable ways.

Detroit's temporal pattern

The pattern being investigated in this study of Detroit is a temporal one: an investigation of how the number of people living in Detroit (the population total of the city) has changed over time. Over the past 300 years there has been a pattern of growth in the population of Detroit. There was continual growth between 1700 and 1950, with the growth especially rapid between 1850 and 1950. A variation in the pattern has taken place since 1950: population growth has reversed and a rapid and constant decline in the population total has become the new normal for Detroit.

Detroit has an usual feature in its pattern of population 'growth'.

Like most cities, Detroit has more people living in it today than it did in the past. Since the city was first founded just over 300 years ago, the population of the city has grown. In fact, more people live in the city than lived in the city 100 years ago.

A growing population from the past to the present is the basic and main pattern. This basic pattern can be divided into three phases (stages):

1. slow growth between 1701 and 1850.

2. a speed-up in growth between 1850 and 1900.

3. accelerating and very rapid growth between 1900 and 1950.

After 1950, things changed and a complete variation to the pattern has taken place.

• Detroit has gone through a period of population decline - not just decline but a rapid decline.
• Is it this decline that makes Detroit unusual, as most cities in the world have growing populations and in many cities the speed of growth is very fast.
• There are other cities that have lost population but few have lost as many people as Detroit.
• Detroit is the only city in the US to have exceeded a population of a million people only to reduce back again below that one-million number.

Detroit's population change

Detroit population ethnic make-up 1960-2010