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.