It’s impossible to talk about Detroit without talking about poverty. What relevance does design have in neighborhoods lined by miles of abandoned bungalows, where families navigate patchy streetlighting and unreliable bus service? In April, the city government’s ongoing fiscal crisis led to a brokered consent agreement with the state, a last stop before emergency management and bankruptcy.
With the usual systems of power cracked at the core, numerous artists, entrepreneurs, and urban thinkers are experimenting in Detroit, infusing the streets with a slow-burn creativity. But it’s naive—and offensive—to pretend that Detroit is a “blank canvas,” as many newcomers and reporters have suggested. It’s not. More than 700,000 residents live in the city’s 139 square miles. But most haven’t yet benefited from the revival of investment in downtown and Midtown—where companies such as Chrysler, Quicken Loans, and Twitter are relocating thousands of jobs.
A host of neighborhood groups, nonprofits, and other organizations are trying to alleviate the city’s ills, but without the benefit of a strategic framework. Enter Detroit Works, an exceptionally comprehensive—and controversial—planning effort unveiled in 2010 by Mayor Dave Bing and supported by funding from the Kresge Foundation, a $3.1 billion philanthropic organization headquartered in Troy, Mich. The project’s initial launch was inept and acrimonious, with Mayor Bing telling a reporter, “We will depopulate some neighborhoods.” The comment confirmed residents’ fears that the real plan was to force them out of their homes. (Portions of the raucous town halls are captured in the documentary Detropia.)
The city backed off its explicit message of relocation, but the outcry threatened to collapse Detroit Works. So, after some behind-the-scenes restructuring orchestrated by Kresge and the city, the project split into halves. A city-led team is focusing on short-term planning, pursuing immediate resident needs. In August, for example, Mayor Bing announced a multi-year plan to fix the city’s street lights, prioritizing major thoroughfares and stable neighborhoods. The final phase calls for the removal of obsolete fixtures, as a new lighting authority decides the needs of each neighborhood.
“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer, told a Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter in May. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.” In other words, with the declining tax base, the city simply cannot afford to provide the same level of services to every block, requiring decisions that will have a clear effect on residents in “distressed” areas.
Meanwhile, a team of planners is focusing not on the city’s day-to-day, but on its future. The long-term planning arm of Detroit Works is crafting a strategic framework for decision making—not a master plan—that assumes the need to “raise the quality of life for all,” as the program’s leaders defined its primary goal.
Detroit Works could be a game-changer. It could help residents chart a course for their own neighborhoods, become a guide for businesses looking to expand in the city, and help city officials (members of the planning commission and development departments are on the long-term arm’s steering committee) come up with strategic approaches for the investment of scant resources.
Or Detroit Works could sit prettily on a shelf, largely unused. With the final results soon to be released, we’re about to find out whether City Hall will buy in to the long-term vision. The project’s effectiveness depends on the quality of conversations that its champions have with city officials, as well as with business owners, nonprofit leaders, investors, activists, and, of course, the hundreds of thousands of residents who, as one east-sider put it, have “the brilliance of lived experience.” How calibrated Detroit Works is to that brilliance will define its future as rhetoric, or reality.
We Are You, You Are Us
Dan Kinkead makes a point of mentioning that he lives in Detroit when he meets with city residents. He’s raising a daughter here. His stake in the city’s future as a member of the Detroit Works planning team is not just professional, it’s also personal. This is an important point. As a young white planner in a city dominated by working class black people, he’s viewed as an outsider telling locals what to do. His personal asides are meant to communicate an alliance with residents as he presents data that emerged from nearly three years of planning work.
Kinkead is an architect with Hamilton Anderson Associates (HAA), a firm founded in Detroit in 1994 with a holistic approach to architecture, landscape, and planning. HAA was chosen to help lead the technical team of Detroit Works’ long-term arm by Kresge, which is bankrolling the effort with $2.7 million. (The Ford and W.K. Kellogg foundations added $3 million to aid the technical team and community outreach.) Kresge officials have already pledged support for initiatives that arise from the project’s research.
HAA’s office is in Detroit’s Harmonie Park, a part of town with a charged history of urban planning failure. Locals are cultivating the revival of the area’s legendary Paradise Valley arts district, adjacent to the Black Bottom neighborhood (named for its rich soil) where much of Detroit’s black community lived prior to World War II. In Black Bottom, boxer Joe Louis grew up, trained, and, as reigning world champion, sponsored the Brown Bombers softball team. Jazz and blues clubs thrived, as did theaters and speakeasies.
But, in the name of “urban renewal,” the city began demolishing swaths of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom in the 1940s and ’50s. In their stead came the I-75 and I-375 freeways and the 78-acre Lafayette Park complex, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a model neighborhood (and is home to, more recently, Comerica Park and Ford Field). With no relocation plan, many displaced residents moved into housing projects. The community’s decimation is a charged memory that fuels suspicion about Detroit Works. Hence the need for Kinkead to send the message to residents: We are you, you are us.
Kinkead reports to Toni Griffin, who heads long-term planning and, like HAA, was handpicked by Kresge. Griffin also directs the City University of New York’s Bond Center on Design for the Just City, so she comes and goes from Detroit. As the on-the-ground lead, Kinkead fields questions and explains the project’s tentative findings at community meetings, where he starts conversations with a 50-minute presentation. At a recent meeting, the piles of information proved overwhelming to some residents, who, poised to take notes, slowly put down their pens.
One attendee said that Kinkead made an impressive effort to be transparent by “putting all the cards on the table,” a crucial counter to obfuscating tactics of past planning projects and residents’ suspicions that Detroit Works was only looking to sell a plan it had already made. But, the attendee added, “You don’t need to show all the cards at once.”
This is one of the project’s biggest challenges: sharing a large amount of data in a way that engages residents instead of overwhelming them. “We’re trying to take this massive thing and land it so precisely on the ground,” Kinkead says.
The project’s long-term effort considers 14 quality-of-life factors, such as safety, health, and mobility. It introduces a goal for each (for example, crime-free neighborhoods) and suggests metrics (a reduction in crime relative to total population) and strategies to achieve those goals (forming effective community watch groups, say). The framework emphasizes that residents can define their own priorities and their own ways to measure progress. The analysis moves from hyperlocal to citywide, encompassing land use, sustainable neighborhood revitalization, and infrastructure; it details ways that government, private, and other Detroit-focused initiatives can be better aligned with each other.
Nothing will improve quality of life more than the reinvention of the economy, the plan stipulates. Detroit needs job growth within city limits and a strengthened tax base. While most U.S. cities have between 35 and 75 jobs per 100 residents, Detroit has 26, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the nonprofit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. Twenty percent of Detroiters don’t have a high school degree. And even though the volume and usage of Detroit’s industrial land surpasses that of peer cities, 22 percent is underutilized.
As effective models for aggressive job creation, the framework cites organizations such as TechTown, a local nonprofit that incubates more than 250 research and technology businesses. Since 2007, TechTown has created 1,085 jobs and has partnered with a community organization in Brightmoor, a struggling neighborhood, to provide business support to area entrepreneurs.
The framework advises targeting industry for growth, as well as the creative economy, eds-and-meds, and entrepreneurship in a variety of sectors. Ubiquitous images of vacant factories notwithstanding, Detroit Works documents how city businesses that process, manufacture, repair, and distribute physical goods employ 27,000 people. The framework suggests more investment—particularly in the Eastern Market, Mt. Elliott, and Southwest neighborhoods, where industry will be supported by access to an airport, freight lines, highways, waterways, and the international border with Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
The framework details 11 other imperatives in addition to economic growth, including promoting a range of sustainable residential densities and attracting new residents to the city. It maps community assets (such as historic districts and libraries) and identifies strategies to bolster already-strong neighborhoods and make productive use of vacant land in low-occupancy neighborhoods (an effort that would be aided by better coordinating the city agencies responsible for land use). Prioritize stabilization of neighborhoods within a half-mile of schools, the framework advises. Target absentee landlords and owners with code enforcement programs. Incentivize multifamily housing.
One unexpected detail from the Detroit Works research: Only 88,911 residents live in high-vacancy neighborhoods, compared to the nearly 619,000 in more stable areas. But high-vacancy areas make up 21 percent of the city’s footprint. It’s a cruel triptych: a glut of single-family homes, low market demand, and buildings that become more dangerous the longer they’re vacant. For immediate support of high-vacancy areas, the framework suggests boosting resources for existing community patrols, revising zoning to allow a wider spectrum of land uses, and constructing a citywide network of greenways and bike lanes.
But the larger goal is to turn land and properties over to productive uses. Detroit Works spotlights reimagined spaces such as urban farms (large and small, commercial and community) and the Power House project led by Design 99, a local design firm that turned a foreclosed house into an off-the-grid power production facility fueling a new artist colony.
Forced relocation is off the table, though incentives may not be. When a woman at a community conversation asked how Detroit Works intended to get past what she portrayed as the stubborn stance of residents who “have this attitude of ‘I’m not moving,’ ” Kinkead replied, “We don’t need to move [people] … There are a series of options, from moving the house to land swapping to remaining [in the house], but disconnected from some systems—not with less services but with different services, like a rural environment. People can remain and still be part of the infrastructure.”
By providing multiple, simultaneous views of the city, Detroit Works will help leaders make decisions that don’t work at cross-purposes with others. For example, Detroit Public Schools administrators may need to close schools in areas with fewer children. But if they see momentum in Neighborhood A—perhaps it has amenities that appeal to families, and some commercial shops are finding success—the administrators might keep Neighborhood A’s school open and instead close Neighborhood B’s school, which, they see in the framework, is in an increasingly industrialized area.
Kinkead is especially interested in how more sensitively chosen infrastructure can interweave neighborhoods with landscape, in contrast to Detroit’s history of big infrastructure investment—namely, freeways—which he calls “devastating.”
“Now we have the opportunity to do soft infrastructure—seamless with the community,” he says. Detroit has 37 square miles of open space—more land than all of Manhattan. The framework suggests creating holistic blue and green landscape systems, adding trees and lakes with both recreational and infrastructural value. Dispersed ponds, for example, can aid stormwater management, easing the burden on city services while ensuring that residents don’t face flooded streets on rainy days.
But all of this is an idea, not an agenda. No planning trend will solve Detroit. No pet project translates into the transformation of an entire city.
The Man Behind the Civic Outreach
When you meet Dan Pitera, you can hear the hum of his live-wire energy. As the leader of the community-engagement arm of Detroit Works’ long-term planning team, he needs the charge. Pitera, who directs the Detroit Collaborative Design Center at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, is partnering on the engagement effort with two area nonprofits, Michigan Community Resources and the Community Development Advocates of Detroit.
Extraordinary civic engagement was essential for building the legitimacy of Detroit Works after its horror of a debut. So, from their cheery Detroit Works storefront in Eastern Market, Pitera and his team organized community conversations in multiple neighborhoods, as well as a traveling “road show” and telephone town halls. They posted presentations online before they were refined and made data visualizations of public feedback. They created “Detroit 24/7,” an online game where players envision the city’s future. And they launched an oral history project fashioned as an elegant online gallery. (“It’s a myth that to have community engagement, you have to have mediocre design,” Pitera says.)
“It’s really about building relationships, not just getting information,” Pitera says. When he started with Detroit Works, he was “as critical as anyone” about the clumsy way conversations about poverty and policy happened. Pitera says he understands the cynicism of many residents. “It’s very valid,” he says, based on the mixed messages that they’ve heard so far.
Pitera is intrigued by the project’s potential not to “re-create” Detroit, but to amplify existing resources—its people, most especially, and its land. “We have a chance to create a 21st-century ecological and equitable city,” he says.
One of the many things architects have learned over the last century is that there’s no way to plan equitable spaces if the process itself is not equitable, if it does not reflect a deep and broad interaction with citizens and an honest accounting of those conversations. The civic engagement of Detroit Works is groundbreaking in its scope, reaching tens of thousands of residents. How meaningful those conversations have been will be seen in whether or not the project helps guide decision making by residents on street corners, at dinner tables, and in block clubs, to say nothing of City Hall. Poverty is a distortion of power, after all, and it is difficult to have an equitable conversation across that line.
Charity Hicks, a local health activist, describes poverty as “people who have profound capacities, but no opportunity. Poverty truncates you.” Hicks has served on a Detroit Works advisory board, but she’s critical that more “local brain cells” are not in leadership positions at Detroit Works, aside from HAA. “Find those people who are visionary and innovative, and marry them with planners,” she said. “Take a group of citizens through Planning 101. Why not?” More than just a performance of representative leadership, she argues, such an approach would have added additional depth to the many discussions about the city’s future.
Will the city merge the recommendations from the long-term plan with its short-term vision? So many strategies that the framework describes will, at some point, necessitate city participation. But Kinkead sidesteps the idea of it requiring top-down implementation, saying success depends on a “mosaic implementation, from a design perspective.”
“This is fundamentally collaborative,” Kinkead said. “Everybody, from the state to the city to the citizen, is an important decision maker. The problems [here] are too deep, too systemic, for any participant to be missing in the solution. … We need everyone to rise up to the challenge. We have to make deliberate decisions. We have to move beyond ourselves and think of the city as a whole.”
Kinkead sighs, leans back in his chair, and adds: “There’s a bit of a leap of faith in that.”