Photo of the Spirit of Detroit by Detroit Wayne Joint Building Authorityby Craig Ruff
December 16, 2008
To New Yorkers and tourists, the 843 acres (2.6 x 0.5 miles) of Central Park are a respite from density and intensity.
Detroiters are not oppressed by density. Theirs is a city using at most 50 percent of its space. A city built for two million people now hosts 900,000 and is on trajectory to fall to 700,000 in the next couple of decades. Detroit hosts roughly 9,000 people per square mile; Manhattan hosts more than 70,000.
Larger than Central Park, Detroit’s Belle Isle has provided recreation, education and entertainment for millions of Detroit area residents.
Photo by Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau
Detroiters often reside in ample 1,200-square-foot homes on 1/8-acre (or larger) plots. New Yorkers often live in 400-square-foot studios in high-rise apartment buildings. In addition to housing, Detroit’s acreage used to host envious retail stores, like Hudson’s, and hordes of commercial office hubs. Many are gone. Sad testimony to that is the Detroit newspaper front-page headline a few years ago about the planned opening of a book store in downtown.
Nor are Detroiters oppressed by intensity. It’s a laid-back, uncongested city compared to peers and its own hey-day in the 1950s. While about 80,000 people still work in downtown Detroit, it’s a far cry from the past. In downtown and neighborhoods, you never see a frenzied crush of people, stressed to the max by high-pressure jobs and tortuously time-consuming daily chores.
Keeping in mind first and foremost the quality of life of 900,000 people, I suggest that Detroit evolves, with much state and federal support, into a unique 21st-century American city. That it caters to those athletically and culturally inclined who wish to escape density and intensity of other large cities and have easy access to amenities and daily staples.
Detroit, in short, becomes a myriad of Central Parks: the greenest large city in America, indeed the world.
Michigan’s policy, philanthropic, business, media, and civic leaders have been trying valiantly since the 1960s and 1970s to revitalize Detroit. Leaders have been honest about challenges (e.g., racial segregation, industrial decay, retail and capital flight, depopulation, housing decay, high costs of public services, high taxation, and a woeful quality of schools). Continuing decay largely offsets improvements.
Developers and other investors, too, have given urban revitalization their best. But Detroit is not a “hip and cool” destination. The keen sense of place trumps most every other factor in where people want to locate. Aside from seeing a modest condominium, apartment building, and robust neighborhood here and there, driving the neighborhoods of Detroit is excruciatingly depressing.
The million people who evacuated Detroit are not alone. Paris has lost one-third of its population since 1921. Milan, Italy, has lost 600,000. Barcelona, which is a signature for superb urban design, has lost more people in the last 25 years than any other European city. What all have in common is the exodus from urban density to suburban spaciousness.
We need a radically new vision of Detroit: the city becomes the world’s greatest bio-urban hub.
Central Park
Nearly 150 years ago, designer Frederick Law Olmsted (who also designed Belle Isle and the Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, as well as Michigan State University’s campus) and architect Calvert Vaux set out on a vision of creating a New York City public place. It was a place to which the rich and poor and everyone in between could flee for solace. The place looked rural, plopped down into a frenzied, urban life. It held lakes, ponds, walk paths, woods and sanctuaries for birds and critters. The place looked urban, freshly and democratically open to those who also sought the arts and people watching.Roughly the size of Vancouver’s wondrous Stanley Park, Central Park became Manhattanites’ refuge. In a packed-in city, Central Park gave perfect outlets to walkers, runners, inline and ice skaters, cyclists, parents strolling kids, and teetering old folks. It evolved into a signature of NYC’s cultural strengths (sculpture, artistic displays, theater and music).
Virtually all tourists to NYC visit Central Park. For carriage rides, a drink or eats at Tavern on the Green, a stroll through greenery, dropping by the zoo and conservatory, watching the end of the NYC Marathon and appreciation for summertime festivals (thank you, Joseph Papp and the Public Theater), Central Park is a must-see.
Portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent.Why do I go on about Central Park? We will not reinvent that which was Detroit. Rather, we should radically reinvent its land use. It should become America’s most unique city of green space, recreation and culture. It should distinguish itself not through emulating other dense and intense cities, but rather through offering a rural, open feel.
Workers need jobs — and urban parks cannot provide those that are needed. Yet, we must reverse all our assumptions:
• People locate where jobs are. No, they locate in nice places.
• People only want density. Some do; some do not; and some hate it.
• People need to work in cities and commute to suburbs for housing. What if people lived in a lush, green city and commuted to the suburbs for jobs?Detroit does not currently cut the mustard for workers, families, or retirees. Unparalleled in all of the United States, Detroit has more underused land, more economic distress, fewer job opportunities, more woeful housing and ugly and vacant store fronts, and poorer schooling than any other sizable American city, and its racial homogeneity certainly does not help. We must reinvent Detroit, and on a model utterly different than comparably sized cities.
My out-of-box proposal is that Michigan converts much of Detroit’s land to state and city-owned and operated parks.
Michigan needs to hire modern-day Olmsteds and Vauxes to “bottom up” redesign Detroit. We charge and give them nearly autocratic license to strafe the city’s land.
We bulldozed thousands of properties to build I 75, the Lodge, and the Jeffries. Surely, the public need for quality of life exceeds that of the need for concrete thoroughfares. Let the design team create a 10-year plan to green Detroit and convert huge swaths of housing and commerce to “up north plus retail and commercial” use.
There is nothing frivolous about the required investment. Yet, only a wealthy society can afford natural, open space. Detroit’s city government must be compensated for lost property taxes and property owners for condemnation and relocation. Many city schools will have to be bulldozed to be relocated closer to new residential hubs. In a positive financial tradeoff, city and school government can provide its public services more efficiently to residents who are more concentrated, and the value of private-owned land will skyrocket.
Tackling this enormous project, we might as well ponder and solve these problems: Oppressive taxes. A public transit system that would not have been acceptable in the 19th, let alone 21st, Century. Self-perpetuating poverty. Lack of pride in place. Crime, particularly committed by teenagers’ having too much time on their hands and little respect for property and place.
For those knowledgeable of Detroit, please picture a new Woodward corridor. Woodward becomes the world’s largest boulevard, even wider than Buenos Aires’ Avenida 9 de Julio with its 12 lanes and central island. Low-rise condominiums and apartments and retailers and cafes line the road. A block east and west off the boulevard from the Detroit Institute of Arts to 8 Mile are public parks. The parks are at least 10 blocks wide, and in many cases wider yet. The parks host playgrounds, walking/jogging paths, fountains, skating rinks, sculptures, golf courses, tennis courts, farmland for residents, and performance venues. Streetcars or light-rail totes residents to downtown entertainment and suburban jobs.
With similar grand redesign, add the Gratiot corridor to the northeast and Jefferson/Fort streets to the southwest. Either side of three great spokes of Detroit become Central Parks writ grand. The spokes themselves could resemble the tree-lined Los Ramblas of Barcelona, Spain. Like Los Ramblas, wide pedestrian pathways dominate, with just a single lane on either side for cars.
All Detroiters will be within short walks of public transit to reach shopping, entertainment and jobs. They can walk to pristine, beautiful parks and public places. They live amidst bucolic landscapes. Teenagers work as caretakers in the parks. They learn, as did kids in the 1930s who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, the inherent values of nature and get paid decently to protect and expand it.
Michigan’s disinvestment in its cities is shameful. As my late mentor James Brickley decried: “We trade in cities like we trade in used cars.” Think just about architecture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, philanthropists, religious congregations, and taxpayers commissioned exquisite opera houses, libraries, museums, stately mansions, city halls and courthouses. About the only public complex of significant merit constructed in the last half-century is Grand Valley State University’s downtown campus in Grand Rapids.
Architecture should be timeless and contemporary, says Witold Rybczynski, professor of Urbanism at Wharton and arguably the most perceptive student of the qualities that should guide private and public places. If you have not read his book Home, do yourself a favor: read it and never again will you see your home in the same light.
Some Detroit architecture, like the Detroit Institute for the Arts, fits the test. While the newly envisioned parks of Detroit cannot financially support such grand investments, surely the parks should house timeless and contemporary recreational buildings (e.g., indoor skating rinks) and cultural settings (e.g., performing arts centers). I would love for Detroit to land something akin to the Getty Museum in Bilbao, Sydney Opera House, or Eiffel Tower—and the redesign team certainly should evaluate how and if Detroit could attract such a landmark.
The people take back at least half the 140 square miles of Detroit and convert roughly 70-80 square miles of that space to an utter overhaul. Form follows function. The new functions in a new century in a new city are proximity to beauty, recreation and culture and a less stressful and higher quality of life.
Precedent
Achieving the vision not only should, but can, be done. There is precedent.
Paris, remade to provide “social medicine” for its unhealthy inhabitants, combines urbanity with parks and iconic attractions.Visiting Paris, you notice the broad boulevards surrounded by parks and open spaces, concentrated residences, boutiques, cafes, bars, restaurants, art galleries, public sculpture, and hotels.
About the same time that Olmsted and Vaux created Central Park, Georges Herrmann designed modern-day Paris. Paris in the 1850s required social medicine. Density was insane (250,000 per square mile!). Traffic congestion caused numerous deaths and sluggish movement of people and goods. Disease, like cholera, swept the city. The air was foul and a grave threat to health.
The redesign of Paris followed the three overriding rules of social change: power, vision, and values. Napoleon III wielded an autocratic club to expropriate property. The vision of Herrmann greatly enhanced human conditions. The people held values of cleanliness, efficiency and comfort.
Herrmann, Olmsted and Vaux envisioned and, with policymakers’ assent and investment, created the greatest, healthiest and most democratic spaces since the Roman Empire. With all the crowded and intense lifestyles of fellow men, they invigorated urban life, blending the sublimely green, cultural, recreational, convenient, and comfortable.
What Detroiters need — and only a bold state and federal government can help provide — is a thorough spatial renovation. Detroit will never reconstruct itself in a 1950s’ image. Its refugees made homes elsewhere, lusting for Caucasian homogeneity, half-acre plots and green lawns, better schools, and/or safety. They voted with their feet, with no little help from 1950s planners who placed the priority of cars (freeways) over that of people.
Detroit is left with a dizzying array of social woes. We must undertake social medicine, 21st-century style.
For Detroit to achieve greatness, we need: (a) a huge investment of state and federal money; (b) willing and involved Detroiters; (c) city policymakers willing to cede control over half their land; (d) extremely bold thinkers in Lansing; and (e) a visionary team of designers and architects who are given wide, even dictatorial, berth. Power. Vision. Values.
Tinkering with Detroit is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Michiganians and Detroiters must push the envelope and reverse all assumptions about Detroit. Sid Caesar quipped: The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three—he was a genius. Motown becomes Wow!town.
A new Detroit distinguishes itself as something absolutely unique: a largely bucolic, forested, and green place that happens to be a city. Its 700,000-900,000 residents lay claim to the grandest open city in the world. People will scramble to move there.
In anxiety, some societies and their leaders concentrate thoughts on just getting by, just hanging in there. Others use distress to reinvent. Fifty years from now, which type would you have wanted guiding today’s thinking?
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