Detroit Tries to Get on a Road to Renewal

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Decades ago, Detroit was the U.S.'s manufacturing hub and fourth largest city. Today about one-third of it lies vacant.

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In other ways, Detroit is moving on. In place of assembly lines, hundreds of urban farms and gardens have taken root. Nonprofit organizations are helping residents transform barren neighborhoods into fertile plots that feed impoverished families, beautify blighted blocks and raise home values. Others are taking the initiative on their own. Last April, after losing his job, Mark Covington hauled away the garbage piled on his street and began planting squash, tomatoes, collard greens and kale to give away. His Georgia Street Community Collective devised a mentoring program for kids, held a holiday fundraiser for an evicted family and purchased a vacant building for $1 to convert into a community center and store--a useful commodity in a city vexed by food deserts. "We have to step up and do things for ourselves," Covington explains. "My idea is to have some type of garden on every block." (See pictures of the remains of Detroit.)

At the Heidelberg Project, an outdoor art installation that has become one of the city's top tourist attractions, founder Tyree Guyton says Detroit's struggles could help unlock creative solutions. Standing amid houses awash in Technicolor polka dots and trees festooned with stuffed animals, Guyton poses the billion-dollar question: "What might the future look like?" Plenty of people are trying to envision it. Among the ideas are the reforestation of the city's dead zones, the planting of large-scale networks of parks and commercial farms, and schemes to repurpose unused space--such as in the Brightmoor neighborhood, where Justin Hollander, an urban-planning professor at Tufts University, suggests converting vacant housing into parking lots that would accommodate the local trucker population. But progress has been fitful. "I don't see a lot of action on the city's part," says University of Michigan urban-planning professor June Thomas, who cites the absence of a master blueprint. John Mogk, a professor at Detroit's Wayne State University Law School, issued a different indictment to the Detroit Free Press: "The plan is not focused on building a first-class city with a smaller population but, unrealistically and wastefully, on rebuilding the city to its former size."

For those who have already written the city's obituary, plans to shrink or green Detroit are merely cosmetic solutions to terminal decline. Detroit faces a unique tableau of challenges, from the moribund car industry to its tattered public-school system and the income gulf separating its slums from the McMansions of Oakland County next door. But it's hardly the first town to rust when its economic engines sputtered. As an example, experts cite Youngstown, Ohio--a dying steel city attempting to revive its fortunes by curbing population sprawl, embracing green industries and slashing residential land use 30%. Jackson says Detroit is also looking for tips from abroad, where cities across Europe--from England to the former East Germany--have grappled for decades with the scourges of population loss.

As America's 11th largest city tries to mount a comeback, locals battling lean times are far from the only stakeholders. "The problems facing Detroit are definitely going to be cropping up in cities all over the country," says Hollander. "The kind of devastated postindustrial landscape we associate with the Rust Belt is starting to creep into the Sun Belt and may start to become a universal problem." Says Covington: "The rest of the world is just catching up to the hard times we've been experiencing." Which is why the world is now watching Detroit with interest--and waiting to see if it finds a way to rise from the ashes.

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