The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“Future Scenarios: What’s likely to happen to Detroit over the next 50 years?”
Read the expert responses below:
Brian Roemmele, Ph.D. in Economics:
Detroit is a “company town” without a purpose and perhaps without a company. I can dive into the 1000s of reasons why, like the collapse of the manufacturing industries in the United States for example. But there is no doubt nothing short of a embargo of all the world’s trade would revive Detroit to the manufacturing hub it once was. So one must accept a new mission and a new purpose.
The simple issue is the city is far too large for the current population and there is little left of a cohesive employment base to bind the city back together in reasonably strong way. So today we have an urban planner’s dream to recreate the city to a far smaller core that may spur a renaissance. There have been a number of ideas offered up but some are completely unrealistic. This is a huge area with already mostly empty space:
I think the best ideas are to create large strips of urban Produce farms, Tree farms and Wind Energy farms. This would require quite a bit of demolition and the use of “Eminent domain” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi...) to gain control of the property. One could then move different forms of residential and light industrial/manufacturing to hubs and of course focus the downtown area to a tight and defined city center.
The farming concept is not as wacky as it may sound, one estimate shows this could produce almost $500,000,000 in products per year with a very available workforce.
This can be a suitable model for a number of “Rust Belt” cities in the US. Clearly there is something to these ideas. Here is a great report that has crystilzed the problems and offered a number of solutions:
So how would Detroit look in 50 years?
I hope there are more farms than empty buildings. This is not a utopian dream, just a great possibility if there is a decisive will to act and a Silicon Valley streak of wild creativity and capital formation.
There was a Roman general - was it Scipio Africanus or one of his proteges? help me if you know - who published an essay listing seven elements that, if they were present, would guarantee that a new city would grow a thriving population. I wish I had that list to see how it applied to modern cities, but let’s experiment with a few that might apply to modern times and to Detroit specifically:
- Access to transportation. This city is ideally situated for this consideration. That one is covered.
- Incentive to create production centers. Mayor Bloomberg in New York had this terrific idea a few weeks ago. On Meet the Press one Sunday he tossed off the notion that an approach to immigration reform might be to grant resident status and a path to citizenship to any immigrant who agrees to settle in a place like Detroit for five years; to build businesses there; to take a job there; to let his or her kids begin to grow their lives there. David Gregory was too clueless and concerned with his peculiar agenda to notice or follow up, but I hope someone notices. This is social engineering of the most productive, creative sort. In addition, such a program is bound to attract the most productive and creative people among us - people like our immigrant ancestors. Merge a program like this with ...
- Creation of industrial greenhouses. Generally it takes about 30 years for an idea to evolve from the discovery or theoretical phase to actual application in the marketplace. The transistor is an extreme illustrative example. Lilienfeld patented the transistor in 1925 and teenagers started showing up with little radios pressed to their ears around 1960 or so. The first microprocessors - essentially a collection of transistors mashed together and interacting on a plate - didn’t show up until the 1970’s and the first personal computer showed up around the end of that decade. That’s over 50 years. If instead, theoreticians had a forum where they could share information with engineers and industrialists in a formal periodic setting - an intellectual greenhouse centered, say, at a university or a teaching hospital - such an institution would slice a generation off the concept-to-marketplace process.
- A particular mythology. Romulus and Remus. The eagle clutching the snake at the site of Mexico City. That loon Mulholland swiping the water supply for Los Angeles. Detroit has a hell of a history. Chrysler is already exploiting it with the ad campaign that they introduced at the Super-Bowl. A founding myth gives a community an identity, a pivot point, a place to stand while it figures out what it is becoming.
I expect this response is less about what Detroit will look like in 50 years than about what it could look like. Basically, it needs to be a place where new stuff that has yet to be invented gets turned out into the marketplace by a productive population that has incentive to settle there - and that’s exactly what Detroit has historically been. Cities fall and are lost all the time, but they are rebuilt and prompted to thrive as often, and in the American experience the latter has tended to be the rule.
Dave Hogg, Detroit resident:
It is going to collapse in on itself, much like a star in its death throes.
At the moment, Detroit has approximately 750,000 people in a city that could easily hold three times that amount. There are already large areas that have been abandoned and returned to nature. It has gotten so bad in some area that the best place to see natural American prairie land is within Detroit’s city limits.
The city has clearly failed.
In the last 10 years, the only American city that lost a larger percentage of its population was New Orleans, which was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
It struggles to provide basic services to its residents - spend an evening listening to the Fire Department or Police Department on a scanner, and you will hear brave men and women trying to save lives and protect the public without enough people, without quality equipment and without a working EMS system.
The public school system is even worse. It is currently being run by an administrator given unprecedented powers by Michigan’s new governor. His solution is to try turning as many school as possible into privately run charter schools, allowing him to break the teacher’s union.
That, there, is where Detroit is in 2011.
The question, though, is where Detroit will be in 2061.
There are many, many groups hoping to fix Detroit, and every group has a plan. The idea (described very well in a previous answer by Brian Roemmele) of using much of the city for urban farming is one of my favorites, and was explored by authors Tobias Buckell and Elizabeth Bear in the anthologyMetatropolis.
There are two problems with such a plan:
- It will take large amounts of money and resources to repurpose Detroit’s decaying neighborhoods into something more useful. The city can not keep itself running, much less rebuild itself, and the affluent suburbs are not going to commit tax money to what they see as a failed city.
- There are no parts of Detroit that have been completely abandoned. It is much easier to produce plans to repurpose large areas of the city than it is to actually get the remaining residents of those areas to leave their homes. A consolidation plan was floated last year, and got very little support by the residents of the outlying areas that would be affected. That plan was nowhere near as massive as what would be needed to recreate Detroit as a 21st-century version of 10th-century England.
The second problem could be solved with the use of “eminent domain”, and the first could be fixed with private funding. I would love to see that happen, and at some point in the next 50 years, it may become a possibility, but we are nowhere near that point in the year 2011.
Therefore, let me present you with my cynical answer, which comes from the world of modern political gridlock instead of a world of meaningful reform.
I do not think Detroit will vanish from the map like some kind of modern Troy, but I do believe it will cease to exist as a meaningful political entity. There will be an entertainment area consisting of stadiums and casinos and there will be some development along the riverfront. I suspect that the only government will be provided by the state, and most services will be provided by the corporations running the entertainment.
The rest? The outer edges will probably be absorbed by surrounding suburbs, but there will also be a large ring of abandoned wasteland containing little beyond decaying ruins and roads from the inner city to the suburban population.
I greatly hope this answer is wrong. I’ve volunteered time and money to groups that hope for a future more along the lines of Mr. Roemmele’s ideas.
I just don’t have much confidence in the people that would have to make that happen.