Detroit : open city

Abstract

Detroit is often regarded as America's largest city in decline, a metropolis that has failed to recover from an insidious cycle of deindustrialization, racism, suburban flight and laggard politics. This image of the city highlights the tragic aspects of Detroit's urban development and obscures the numerous initiatives and opportunities for social and spatial development that have emerged as a result of the city's particular evolution. This thesis examines the recent transformations in Detroit's urban environment to provide a more nuanced picture of the city and to develop new planning tools that address its ills. To do this, I explore the major forces that have affected the city over the last 100 years and survey the efforts of 10 ocal initiatives engaged in the process of urban reconstruction. This analysis informs the final component of the thesis, a collection of strategies for urban design, spatial management, and social-cultural development that illustrate ways in which Detroit could reprogram vacant and, bolster ailing public schools, reorganize its planning processes, improve communication and discover the opportunities lurking in its human and physical landscape.

(cont.) While Detroit remains a distressed urban environment, it is also a unique terrain that has the potential to evolve in innovative ways. Detroit: Open City reinterprets Detroit as a landscape of opportunity and offers a vision for development that hinges on the belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens.