Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City

Introduction

Introduction Of the countless books written about Detroit, many chronicle the city’s colorful rise: Cadillac and Chief Pontiac and Judge Woodward, Henry Ford and the Model T, Walter Reuther and the American labor movement, the Arsenal of Democracy and Motown music. Many other books dissect Detroit’s fall from grace—that half-century (and counting) of riots and redlining, white flight and suburban sprawl, shuttered factories, broken dreams, and wasted lives. In Reimagining Detroit I choose neither to question nor to quibble about how Detroit got where it is today. In these pages, I’ll seek to answer a more pressing question: Where do we go from here? This book, in other words, looks only to Detroit’s future, and, by extension, to the future of cities everywhere. For while Detroit may be the nation’s poster city for urban dystopia, it shares its predicament to a greater or lesser degree with dozens of other cities. Population loss and industrial collapse scar cities around the globe, not just a handful of towns surrounding the Great Lakes. During this search for solutions, we’ll be stopping in cities close to home, such as Flint and Cleveland and Youngstown, and others more distant, too, including Seoul and London and Dresden and Turin. All these cities offer lessons from which Detroit can learn, and Detroit can offer a few lessons to those cities, too. The most surprising conclusion in this book about Detroit’s future is that Detroit has a future, although not the one most people living fifty years ago expected. Even today, many politicos, like leaders around the world, tout a fantasy version of the city’s comeback—repopulating the city’s vast empty spaces, returning downtown to the shopping mecca it once was, and so forth. That ship sailed a long time ago. The more time and money we waste on such fantastic visions, the worse Detroit (and, again, other cities) will become. A 01 Ch 1_5.indd 1 7/16/10 1:50 PM Introduction | 2 better future awaits Detroit if those of us who call the city home make the right choices. Perhaps the odds are long that we’ll make those choices. If Detroit were more easily reformed, we might have short-circuited its slide to urban ruin earlier. Instead, the city suffers a level of dysfunction crippling in its intensity. When people say Detroit is dying, there’s no reason to deny it. By any reasonable measure, from the statistics on crime and poverty to the grim aspect that the city affords to residents and visitors alike, Detroit is dying. But it has a chance— slim, perhaps, yet within our grasp—to live. This book is about that chance. And where does that possibility lie? Mostly in an unqualified acceptance of Detroit as a smaller but potentially better city. This will be harder to achieve than we may think. Detroit most likely will continue to lose population for a time, and too many critics will see that loss as a death sentence. They believe that a shrinking city is a shameful place, a city getting worse. For these critics, population remains the all-important measure of victory: If it’s going up, we win. If it’s going down, we despair. This book challenges that misguided belief on every page. Let’s start by acknowledging that when we shun the idea of a smaller city, we hinder our ability to capitalize on the advantages of being smaller. Indeed, generations have fought against urban population loss in every way imaginable—with tax abatements, federal grants, renaissance zones, big showcase projects such as stadiums and casinos, alphabet agencies such as DDAs and TIFs, and a whole lot more. These efforts nudged the needle, but in terms of reversing the long-term population loss, they have failed unambiguously in city after city. One could argue that without such heroic efforts, things would be even worse. Or one could admit that it’s time to try something new. With acceptance comes the ability to see cities in entirely new ways. Many world-class cities are smaller than Detroit in terms of population—Seattle and San Francisco and Savannah in our own country, and Vancouver and Venice in other lands. To trade Detroit’s reputation as a Rust Belt failure for the allure of one of those other cities wouldn’t be such a bad trade. First, though, Detroit will have to embrace getting smaller as an opportunity, not a...