In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Road Diets and Roundabouts 4 A lot of dates have proved pivotal in Detroit’s history. Cadillac arrived in 1701, and the city burned to ashes in 1805. Henry Ford offered five dollars a day to workers in 1914. The racial explosions of 1967 devastated the city and shredded its self-image as a peaceful haven where blacks and whites lived in harmony. But to explain where Detroit is today, no date looms as more important than 1939. That year, the General Motors Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair presented the vision known as Futurama. A designer named Norman Bel Geddes created a huge model of a futuristic city circa 1960 notable for its many “magic motorways”—what we now know as freeways. Visitors lined up by the thousands to sit in elevated chairs that carried them around and above this great urban network of automobile traffic. In that future, General Motors told visitors, everyone would drive everywhere and be happy about it. Like most futuristic visions, Futurama proved wide of the mark on some things. It imagined that vehicles and pedestrians would be kept on separate levels in our cities, instead of sharing the streets as we do. But in imagining the role the automobile would play in our future and the rise of the expressway as a dominant urban form, the GM exhibit of 1939 got it spot on. Ian Lockwood, a Florida-based urban planner for Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, Inc., has been working with the nonprofit Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan to undo the damage auto-based planning has done. Detroit in 1939, he told me, was poised on the cutting edge of just about everything, and it embraced Futurama more than any other place in North America. He said, “During this time, the United States was becoming a superpower and kind of defined itself around the car.”1 It didn’t happen immediately. World War II broke out, and the United States devoted its energies to defeating fascism for the next several years. But when 01 Ch 1_5.indd 73 7/16/10 1:50 PM Chapter 4 | 74 things settled down after the war and American cities began expanding again, the freeway became the dominant expansion strategy. And, as Lockwood said, nobody did it with more gusto than Detroiters. The city killed off its light-rail streetcar lines (only now is Detroit struggling to rebuild even a single new light-rail line), and it rammed expressways through many still-vibrant city neighborhoods. The city’s main arterial surface streets, such as Jefferson, Gratiot, and Woodward, became nine-lane highways linking downtown to the rapidly growing suburbs. And everyone thought it was a great idea. As it turned out, if you were designing a city to be easily abandoned, you couldn’t have come up with a better plan than Detroit’s. “Unfortunately for Detroit, that was an ill-conceived vision,” Lockwood told me. “It never succeeded anywhere it was tried. It tended to chop up the city, and the highways exported value from the city to the suburbs. And you can see that same pattern in Atlanta, Houston, everywhere this was done. Value left the city and went to the suburbs. And of course Detroit did it the most because it was the city of mosts, and did itself a great deal of harm.” Undoing the Damage From the perspective of 2010, as I write this book, I see that we can’t do much about the expressways for now, other than patching the potholes. It’s interesting to note, though, that other cities have begun to remove some of their freeways. Portland, Oregon, has removed one expressway from along its waterfront, and Seattle is talking about ripping out one of its freeways. Farther south, San Francisco has removed parts of two freeways. After that city removed its Embarcadero Freeway in 1991, real estate values in adjacent neighborhoods shot up. A new neighborhood began to thrive in the absence of the freeway that had cut that district off from the waterfront. Could Detroit do without some of its expressways? The little spur known as I-375 adds almost nothing to the city’s attractiveness or efficiency, running just a short distance along downtown’s eastern edge, and it could go. So, perhaps, could the Lodge south of I-75. Remember, an expressway is supposed to carry motorists to the downtown, not slash its way through it. But if, as I suspect, Detroit...

Share