A vision for Detroit

John Gallagher of the Sunday Free Press gives us a peek at the Detroit Future City report. It was released last week with great fanfare. The document looks at how the city might repurpose its land (all those tens of thousands of vacant houses and lots) to make Detroit viable as a city. Some of the land should be turned into parks, more into greenways, wetlands, urban farms, and other kinds of things that are ecologically friendlier than pavement.

Gallagher's report is interesting (and the maps fascinating), but alas, only a summary. It looks like the report is a framework in which the city planners, council, and mayor will have to fill in the details. And come up with any necessary funding. And sell it to the residents.

I've just started reading Gallagher's book Reimagining Detroit which appears to explore the same ground as the Future City report. I've only gotten as far as the discussion about population. Gallagher refutes the idea that the population of a city determines its greatness so a Detroit of 600K residents is not automatically inferior to a Detroit of 1800K residents.

Brian Dickerson of the Free Press editorial page was at the report's release. He says that the report contain elements similar to medical triage. The report identifies which neighborhoods can't be revived no matter how much money is sent their way and which are in decent shape and need a bit of money to keep going. The city needs to save its slim resources for neighborhoods that can be revived.

There is some momentum to turn the report into action. That momentum is funded with $150 million from the Kresge Foundation.

The truly geeky out there can find the whole report (PDF, 45MB) here.

There is a lot of interest in Detroit by my readers. That should generate lots of hits for this post. The post with the most hits, over 1000, is about Detroit, written in July 2009. That page got over 80 hits in the last month. I have no idea what is driving such a high hit rate. The post with the next highest count has reached only 433. I'm purposefully not linking to it now because I don't consider it the most important thing I've written. Though if you really want to, it's under Popular Recent Posts (though I suppose that should be Recently Popular Posts).