An urban sociologist befriends a visionary Detroit craftsman, artist, and inventor. Over the course of the next several years Paul Draus records how Carlos Nielbock’s life experiences act as a lens that refracts the key challenges facing the city of Detroit and presents the city’s redevelopment as an evolving high-stakes drama. Combining sociological context and theory, Draus chronicles Nielbock’s mixed-race upbringing in postwar Germany, his journey to find his Black father in 1980s Detroit, his struggles with racial and cultural adversity, and his ambitious artistic vision for Detroit’s future. Direct observations, interviews, and historical research on Detroit’s ascendance, decline, and resurgence underpin Nielbock’s story. The book explores race and identity, craftsmanship and capitalism, and criminal justice and incarceration.

Paul J. Draus is a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan–Dearborn and currently serves as faculty director of the University of Michigan Detroit Center. He earned his PhD from Loyola University Chicago in 2001. He has published a book on the social and public health context of the spread of tuberculosis and more than twenty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from substance abuse and street sex work to prison education and urban agriculture.

Carlos A. Nielbockis an architectural ornamental metal artist, designer, and craftsman. He was born in Germany in 1959 of a German mother and African American father who was serving in the US Air Force. He apprenticed in the rigorous monastery system in Europe, becoming a journeyman, then master. In 1984, at age twenty-five, he immigrated to the United States, searched for and found his father in Detroit, settled in the city, and began his own practice. His magnificent work is part of the celebrated Fox Theatre restoration, and his installations—massive, self-sustaining windmills and stunning ornamental metalworks—can be seen outside of his workhouse in Detroit’s Eastern Market district.,