Detroit, Mi: Rightsizing

(image courtesy of Dan Pitera, Detroit Collaborative Design Center)

Detroit covers an immense area, but now at about 40% of its population of 60 years ago, some areas are still fairly full of people, while others are fairly empty. The concept of "right-sizing" the City - ending service delivery and investment in some areas to focus on those that are salvageable - permeates almost every conversation and is a key element of many people's solutions to various problems. But how can a city cut out huge areas of land, and what happens to those areas? Like ghost towns left behind a mining bust, will Detroit be left with ghost neighborhoods? Will these areas revert to open space or be turned over to big agriculture for corn and soy farming? What about the people and businesses in the areas left out of the right size? And most importantly, what new opportunities could this mean for both the areas in and outside the boundaries of the right size?

Detroit, Mi: Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink

(aka, the problem of capital versus operational funding)

The two buildings on the block are both Cass Technical High School - in the foreground the newly built school building, in the background the abandoned one with windows shattered and blinds and blackboards slowly falling from the walls where they were left. At the same time Detroit is shutting down schools and struggling to pay for critical programs because of major funding shortages, they are building many (roughly 20?) new schools. Similarly, they are laying out billions of dollars for a new light rail line while they are cutting bus service all over the City and only a year ago almost cut weekend bus service entirely, a lifeline service for many who work on the weekends. We too easily will outlay huge amounts for new things (capital funding) when we can barely afford (or can't) to keep up those we already have (operational funding). Interesting institutional/governmental parallel to our consumer spending habits?

Detroit, Mi: Entrepreneurship - Low Barriers to Entry

(the above image is of salvaged sinks turned into a fountain on the patio of a small restaurant in the quickly growing mid-town area, where many young people are starting businesses)

· We had a really inspiring panel on entrepreneurship in Detroit and came away with a sense of why young people were attracted to this City – there is so much opportunity to easily start a business or test an idea within the limits of a huge City but with few barriers to entry. A store or restaurant can be started with little start-up capital, a new business idea can have an office for almost nothing and immense institutional support, and social ideas can find armies of volunteers yet all the while the cost of rent, living and services are low, employees are plentiful, and opportunities for impact are immense.

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.