Update on Growing a Shrinking City

Not to beat a twice dead horse, but I found a great follow up to my blog posting last week about the plans for Detroit and the vacant space. There’s an initiative going on to encourage the citizens to be proactive in the rebuilding of the city called the Detroit Works Project. The first of five community forums was held last night and from what blogger Desiree Cooper described, it may not be as easy to incorporate some of these ideas into the population.

At the helm were the City’s Deputy Director of the Planning and Development Department Marja Winters and nationally renowned urban planner Toni L. Griffin. They greeted the crowd, then urged the massive gathering  to divide into break-out sessions to discuss one of four topics: Innovating our Neighborhoods for the 21^st Century, Creating a City that Works, Connecting Detroit & the Great Lakes Region, or Growing a Thriving Economy for the 21^st Century.

An angry tide washed over the crowd. “You mean the mayor isn’t going to speak?” people balked. “We need to know what the Mayor’s vision is first, then we can help!” objected Wanda Hill. “It’s disrespectful that he’s not here.”

The staff tried to quell the dissention, assuring everyone that the mayor would be visiting each of the breakout groups to listen to citizen feedback. But people didn’t believe them. “He’s not coming here,” the man next to me mumbled.

I have been in Detroit for more than a quarter century, but I hadn’t realized how deeply the learned helplessness had soaked to the bone.  There was a time when top-down planning would have caused an uproar in Detroit. Not anymore. It’s time for us to decide what our city should look like and how we can get there, and all we can do is fling ourselves against the walls of a very small box. Maybe Detroiters have lived so long with so little hope, that blue-sky thinking has become impossible.

While I think this is a more of a hyperbolized view (I'm sure that a good portion of people there were interested in getting information as well as giving suggestions), I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. The post goes on to say that the mayor did show up and that the sessions did began to have some progressive dialogue. However, they were cut short again by the mayor. Hopefully, the next forums are more organized and give more of a system of how the citizens can guide the vision of Detroit.

With the Detroit Metro area still being one of the largest in the nation, I'm positive that many of the progressive thinkers will step up to the plate.

Growing A Shrinking City

With dwindling commercial & retail businesses being paired with a lack of population, there are now huge vacant pockets in the city of Detroit. Being a leader means making unpopular decisions some times. Mayor Dave Bing had to do just that when he made the choice to tear down vacant residential and commercial structures. Turning what were once bountiful urban communities into flatland. This would effectively stop the urban sprawl and make better and more efficient use of the current infrastructure. By not having to service these areas, it will allow for some relief of the stressed city budget. While this could actually be a great idea for the city, what is the plan for this land? Will they simply be replacing horrible eyesores for more tolerable ones? Let’s take a look at a few ideas that are being tossed around.

Urban farming seems to be the front runner among the ideas being considered. Ground has already broken on a downtown farm plot sponsored by MGM Grand and Greening. John Hantz has created a farming company that wants to do business in the city on a huge scale also. With promises of “green” jobs and a new industry to the area, this definitely could be promising. Critics like Patrick Crouch of Earthworks Urban Farm believe that smaller plots are a better idea to fit the immediate surrounding community as oppose to the large scale plans that people like Hantz has. Crouch believes that the commercial plans are "a substitute for community redevelopment instead of being a catalyst for community redevelopment."

City parks are another idea for the currently unused land. Using the land for recreational space would be an ideal use as well. The city has about 9 square miles of park space already. Letting many of the open plots of land return to nature would be much more cost effective then redeveloping it for residential use.

In the fall of 2008, the American Institute of Architects held a session to brainstorm solutions to the spacing/planning issues plaguing Detroit. Alan Mallach, research director of the National Housing Institute in Maplewood, NJ, led the session. He stated:

To re-invent Detroit, a new way is needed. It would involve visualizing Detroit still as a core, but with distinct urban villages, or hubs, with green spaces. This would involve de-urbanizing parts of Detroit that were once part of the urban fabric but are now vacant. These areas would be redeveloped into areas for farming and lakes. These green spaces would replace land and property not utilized. It would involve visualizing Detroit still as a core, but with distinct urban villages, or hubs, with green spaces.”

Creating new or rejuvenating current “urban villages” with the combination of the aforementioned ideas of farm and parkland, has become popular as well. The idea is for the communities to have everything that’s needed for everyday life within a 20 minute walking distance; moreover, these neighborhoods would have smaller farm plots along with natural forests growing around the village as well. Blogger John Cruz has some really great insights on how this can become a reality. Cruz explains that some key benefits for this idea is that will be easier to identify electric power station & water line problems and service them more efficiently, the population would not be as scattered with denser communities being created, and the denser areas would be prime for retail growth.

With Detroit’s back against the wall, the city leaders are forced to make some tough decisions to bring the city out of stagnation. As long as they remain open minded, the city can become a prototype for other shrinking cities so that they will once again rise into the urban centers that they once were. Stay tuned.