It’s impossible to talk about Detroit without talking about poverty. What relevance does elegant design have in neighborhoods lined by miles of abandoned single-family bungalows? What does urban planning mean for families just trying to navigate the patchy streetlighting and bus services so they can get their kids to school?
In the November issue of Architect Magazine, I write about the unprecedented Detroit Works Project, an unprecedented effort to redesign, reimagine, and recalibrate every part of an entire city -- a city with no less than 139 square miles, and living memory of morally bankrupt "urban renewal" that decimated the thriving neighborhoods where the Detroit's twentieth-century black community lived.
Detroit Works could be a gamechanger. Or it could sit prettily on a shelf. With the final results soon to be released, we’re about to find out which. The project’s effectiveness depends on the quality of conversations about Detroit -- its poverty, its possibility -- 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.
Howdy! I noticed that the Rss of this blog is functioning correctly, did you fulfill all the properties all by yourself or you just left the default settings of the widget?
Posted by: Miss Julie | December 13, 2012 at 07:40 AM