Detroit, Mi: (Truly) Urban Design

Harmonie (sic) Park was recently completely redesigned and rebuilt in the center of Detroit's growing arts and entertainment district, with a uniquely modern and context-appropriate element: sound. The park has people eating, playing cards, chatting etc in it throughout the day, and frequently people playing music and reading poetry. What makes this little urban plaza really interesting is that it is wired with a nice PA system with 15 speakers stashed in the plants around the park (see detail, below), that when not in use by local musicians, is playing jazz - surprisingly unique and very appropriate amenity for an urban park at the center of an entertainment district!

Detroit, Mi: Hope in Downtown

In a City where the population has declined from 2+ million to (+/-)750,000, there are still a lot of people in the City - roughly as many as San Francisco or Boston - and over 3 million in the metro area who might work in the City. Though dispersed, that population offers an amazing opportunity to support a thriving city. The City, business community, philanthropy and non-profits are working on a wide ranging and long-term strategic framework for what happens next, but the last decade or two seem to have focused on downtown development. The downtown has a wealth of impressive historic buildings, an accessible waterfront, little traffic, and a lot of publicly-owned space. The Campus Martius, above, is a plaza at the literal heart of the City with cafe's, regular entertainment events, that was developed in tandem with new office buildings in the early 2000's, that turned a wide expanse of concrete in the middle of a massive intersection into a usable space for office workers and downtown residents.

Detroit, Mi: City Service Delivery (or not) and Collaborative Solutions

The human flight from Detroit exemplifies a collective action problem for those who remain: the (+/-)750,000 remaining residents in a City with scale and infrastructure for 2+ million can't sufficiently be served by police, fire, public lighting, trash collection and other such standard services because the scale of the infrastructure can't be sustained by the tax base. As a result neighborhood groups have to organize their own snow-plowing in winter, and, as shown in the image above, the residents on one side of the street have set up their own street lighting.

Detroit, Mi: Flight of capital - economic, human and otherwise

Detroit's hard times started more than half a century ago, when the City's population began to decline in the early 1950's. Not due to school segregation and race riots of the 1960's, as many believe, though those issues certainly sped the flight, but due to a variety of factors ranging from housing to industrial to national security policy that prioritized the regional dispersal of housing and industry. From its peak of over 2.2 million people, the City now has less than 800,000, not to mention an unemployment rate somewhere near 50%, in an area the size of San Francisco, Manhattan and Boston combined.

(the above image was created by Dan Pitera, University of Detroit Mercy/Detroit Collaborative Design Center)

It's hard, faced with such dire images and statistics, to remember that the City still has a significant population, wealth of buildings, land and resources, and as a result a lot of opportunities for creative solutions to find incredible resources. Examples will follow in subsequent posts.