Disinvestment, Devastation, and Dreams in Downtown Detroit

As the extent of Detroit's disinvestment became clear to this visiting architect, the lessons in AIA's Rebuilding Downtown conference, April 18-19, began to unfold, and the importance of "Motor City"/"Mo Town" as a learning laboratory was vividly revealed. The images conjured by those two monikers are as different as day and night. All American cities have experienced the phenomenon of urban disinvestment in favor of suburban sprawl, but when the moguls of Motor City picked up their marbles, their escape was early and complete. It created four or five edge cities over the past 60 or 70 years, reduced the city of Detroit from 1.9 million to 1.1 million, and left an 80 percent minority population to pick up the pieces and make the best of MoTown.

Now, with the leadership of a dynamic and sophisticated mayor, Dennis Archer, Detroit is on the brink of an exciting future. Taking advantage of the depressed real estate values downtown, and looking for a place to consolidate its long-independent division, General Motors will renovate and improve the Renaissance Center, Henry Ford's ill-fated riverfront office/hotel complex that never achieved its aspirations and is said to have gone for 10 cents on the dollar. (GM beat Ford on that one!) General Motor's suppliers and subcontractors can be expected to follow suit, suggesting another downtown windfall potentially as large as the GM move.

Additionally, Compuware has just announced its relocation to downtown Detroit, promising 6,000 jobs now, with a growth potential to 10,000. The Michigan Opera recently opened in a renovated facility, and the Detroit Symphony has returned to its former home. The Detroit Tigers baseball club is under construction with a new Tiger Stadium in the downtown center, and the Lions are planning a new football stadium next door. Three casinos are planning to line the new Detroit Riverfront Park with their investments, offsetting the recent opening of Windsor's casino right across the water in Ontario. And Zachary & Associates' feasibility study claims there is a market for some 15,000 dwelling units in the downtown area, while less conservative participants suggest a number as high as five or six times that.

What could go wrong?
Amid the flurry of such success, one wonders what could possibly go wrong. My assessment is: Plenty.

The decision of the Tigers and the Lions to build only 5,000 parking spaces is strong, given in that parking for 50,000 fans would require either huge garages, and demolition of yet more historic buildings, or consumption of huge land holdings. However, their contention to rely on the Detroit People Mover (an aerial tram circling the downtown) to gather people from the myriad existing parking lots is not apparently backed by any hard data concerning that system's capacity.

While the dense urban center of old Detroit was served by a streetcar system, in planning for these workers and condo owners nobody but the mayor and a 14-year-old 9th grader from Grosse Pointe Park seems to take seriously the need for massive new investment in public transportation. The casino debate continues to rage in many cities, but when they are properly integrated into the community, there can be good payoffs. It remains to be seen how the city will deal with the "temporary" casinos after the permanent venues are up and running. They can be three big boxes existing apart from the city, or they can contribute to the vitality the city hopes to create with its park investment along the Detroit River.

In the words of Carl Roehling, FAIA, the Detroit turnaround has been led by "heroic entrepreneurs" like Chuck Forbes, developer of the Gem Theater relocation/restoration, and David Di Chiera, general manager of the Michigan Opera Theater. But Di Chiera expressed concern that "we are not working together."

How do we deal?
How Detroit begins to deal with these wonderful, spontaneous explosions of market and philanthropic zeal will either encourage or throttle the turnaround that is currently under way. After only four days, a visitor brings a fresh reaction yet lacks the seasoning of years of dealing with the realities. Recognizing this two-edged sword (and with apologies for naiveté and inevitably stepping on toes), I offer some suggestions that grew out of the experiences attending the AIA's Rebuilding Downtown conference.

Engage citizen-led planning: Douglas Kelbaugh, FAIA, dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, has recently led a neighborhood charrette in which urban Detroiters joined with local institutional representatives, professionals, students, and academics to discuss their turf and to postulate how their part of the urban center could most advantageously improve itself. This kind of citizen-let planning needs to include the big money powerbrokers to ensure sustainable neighborhood improvement to follow up the excitement at headline announcements with hard choices made face-to-face in the trenches of community interaction.

This approach is gaining momentum across the nation. The American Planning Association recently conferred its highest honor on Kansas City, Mo., for that city's FOCUS Comprehensive Plan, a five-year, citizen-led process involving some 3,000 citizens in evaluating options and setting Kansas City on a path toward a shared vision of its future. This is the kind of coalescing of the various initiatives and proposals by individuals, institutions, and companies that Detroit must undertake to create a comprehensive plan and optimize its opportunities for growth and regrowth.

Develop public transit: Equally important, without a serious new initiative in public transit, these urban experiments will fall short of their aspirations. Stephen Hands, the 9th grader from Grosse Pointe Park, called for light rail on the St. Aubin right-of-way; Mayor Archer indicated his preference for improvements in the bus system, and idea supported by conference presenter, Martha Welborne, FAIA, in her discussion of the exclusive-lane, rubber-tired system in Brazil.

One of the most creative ideas of the conference recalled a recent Urban Land Institute/Chris Leinberger presentation to General Motors suggesting a new "Futurama" in which GM would recreate its 1939 World's Fair dramatization of the automobile, focusing 60 years later on its emerging transit vehicle market and the role of public transit in restoring neighborhood and urban center vitality. Now that GM has committed its restructured management to the Renaissance Center, what better, more appropriate endeavor could GM make?

Require eyes on the street: The temporary riverfront casinos should be required to line their fronts with retail and other shops for rent to local entrepreneurs to provide continuous activity along the new riverfront park. Casino developers should be required to promote, finance, and otherwise assure the community that new users will take over their buildings when they leave.

Encourage closer ties to Canada: Taking a more proactive stance in building a stronger relationship with Canada may be a powerful way to promote added investment in downtown Detroit. Because of closer development land on the Windsor side of the river, a new airport on the Canadian side could make downtown Detroit tens of miles closer for visitors and downtown businesses, given the right kind of limited access via pedestrian, bicycle, transit, and a local auto traffic bridge. This is despite the, perhaps, negative impact on Michigan and U.S. interests.

Rich learning lab
The AIA has joined with Vice President Gore in promoting a "Livable Communities" initiative, and organized the Detroit conference as a learning experience for its members and as a service to a nation searching for solid answers to the problems facing many urban centers. As a learning lab it is rich, both due to its devastation and to recent, disparate determinations made by a variety of entities, all attracted by the market forces at work and apparently by the conviction that they can use these forces to their own benefit and, by extension, the benefit of the Detroit.

With these lessons, working together in short- and long-term thinking, Detroit and the cities of those who attended this conference can make strides in the search for healthier, more fulfilling work and life environments for all their citizens.