Comments on: Don't demolish Detroit

By: Serrano

Serrano — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:54:04 +0000

The idea of saving cities like Detroit is a mistake. It has old infrastructure which will also need replacement. It was built on a business model that is obsolete, in a location that is obsolete, in a brutally cold region with high energy costs. The old people who remember its heyday will be dead very soon. Let it die too, plow it under and be done with it.

By: The rules for changing rules « Emergent Urbanism

The rules for changing rules « Emergent Urbanism — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:13:21 +0000

[...] criticize me for proposing changes that they believe to be impossible and unrealistic. This may be true if we consider preserving the [...]

By: Mathieu Helie

Mathieu Helie — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:26:48 +0000

Very cool, thanks Lori.

By: Lori

Lori — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:32:46 +0000

Perhaps the following would interest you:

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.html

By: Martin Laplante

Martin Laplante — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:17:11 +0000

North America has a terrible record with urban renewal through demolition, but its record for “letting slums happen” is even worse.

In Canada you only have to look at Africville in Halifax, Lower Town East in Ottawa, or Cabbagetown/Regent Park in Toronto and what you see is vital but poor communities being destroyed. In those cases you have to suspect that their location on desirable real estate was the sin that made governments want to demolish all their homes and relocate the residents often to highrise projects. In most cases, the community never recovered its social structure.

On the other hand, letting slums happen is not much better. Concentrated poverty alone is bad enough, and the non-linear negative impacts of concentration of poverty are well documented, but what the residents have to fear from a laisser-faire approach to concentrated pockets of blight is crime. Sacrificing a community to the criminal gangs in the hopes that it may some day rise from its ashes is not a good tradeoff. There are few modern examples of spontaneous rebuilding in urban North America. Will individuals build their own homes there? Will businesses move in? More likely, slum landlords and developers will eventually do land consolidation. I agree that ideally, slums where people know each other and where they build rather then renting would be a good solution, but it how do you keep the absentee landlords and land speculators out?

Flint is not the first to do selective demolitions while attempting to preserve communities, in response to declining population. In the US, Youngstown has been doing it and before then former East Germany has been doing it for over a decade. See here for instance http://www.goethe.de/kue/arc/dos/dos/sls/en4269927.htm

Germany has the advantage of much older city centres that can be preserved almost completely. Demolishing selectively to create large irregularly shaped wooded parks and paths is a German solution.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:12:09 +0000

I agree; in any other city, the neighborhood would present an opportunity for new construction pursued by individuals – it’s close to downtown and presumably is no worse than other Detroit neighborhoods in its fundamentals. The highway in the corner is what doomed it by flattening the demand curve for land, leaving the relatively small homes here increasingly undesirable. However, a recapitulation of the stages of urban growth is feasible here. If the City needs to shut off utilities, it should sponsor decentralized waste management, authorize a newly created village government to handle policing and basic street maintenance, and agree to continue providing fire protection, water, and sewage (relatively cheap items). Starting with market gardening, the remaining residents (if enough remain) could cultivate the vacant lots, selling in the city’s farmer’s markets . As the farmers generate capital, they will move into more value-added businesses such as cheese production, prepared foods, and even wines. Restaurants serving this produce would be a natural result, and soon there are visitors from other neighborhoods and even tourists coming to this once-abandoned area. The development of small retail, as in other urban neighborhoods, will eventually support a large portion of the residents, and over time the neighborhood will become a tax generator for Detroit (and a rather special place), not a burden.