Spirit of Detroit, from Maia C

…and I’m not just talking about salt, even though the Eastern Seaboard could use a lot of extra road salt right about now.

There are a couple of very interesting bits up on the net recently about Detroit and the lessons it has for the rest of America, for our infrastructure, and for our industry and our economy.

The New York Times has a review of the PBS ‘Blueprint America’ series.

There’s much more to the 90-minute program than simply cataloging Detroit’s woes. It offers a history of national transportation planning in the United States — yes, it ends with the Interstate System — and presents the counterexample of the Spanish AVE system, which in less than 20 years has linked the country from north to south and fostered economic development in the cities it serves (at a cost of increased national debt and higher taxes).

The Times criticizes the PBS piece for veering too far afield from Detroit itself to the larger issues of infrastructure and development, but I think this deviation is both necessary and well-timed.  These are systemic issues across all of the United States – Detroit’s economic malaise only exacerbates the same symptoms that have affected just about every American city.

“Beginning in the 1980s, in the United States it was perceptible that things were beginning to deteriorate, that the maintenance of those infrastructures was getting worse and that the network didn’t evolve in any way to keep pace with the country,” a former Spanish economy secretary says by way of a coda. “And in the 1990s, in terms of infrastructure, it was a country that had fallen behind the standards of any European country.” O.K., maybe not Albania. But we get the point.

The Blueprint America video itself is well worth watching.  Unfortunately, their website does not have html embedding code, but please take a look (particularly if you’ve got 90 minutes to kill during today’s snowpocalypse III).  On a personal note, it’s always a pleasure to see Robert Fishman talk about urban history, and that of Detroit in particular.  Fishman was a professor of mine in grad school.

As the Times review notes, the piece tackles just about every conceivable issue for urban transportation and infrastructure – industry, highways, high-speed rail, urban farming, planning, sprawl, density, transit, divestment, reinvestment, policy (local and national) and anything else you might be able to think of.

The Transport Politic looks specifically at the proposed light rail project along Woodward Ave in Detroit, filling the gap of local focus the Times points out. Yonah notes that the ability for light rail and transit investments to focus grow, of course, requires economic growth to begin with – and the macro factors for Detroit’s economy might just be too far gone for any one light rail line to really have an impact.

Additionally, there’s a very real concern that Detroit’s serious mobility issues won’t be solved by such an intervention at all, given the depopulation of the city and the huge pockets of emptiness, even if aggregate residential densities in parts of the city remain fairly high.

The real issue, then, is both obvious and daunting – for such a proposal to work, you need some big, audacious ideas – and you need to implement them:

On the other hand, Detroit could pursue a radical change of direction in which it closes off sections of the city to housing and compels to move into newly built housing along transit corridors and in the downtown core — basically, artificially altering the city limits to the exclusion of most of the city’s residents. This approach, which would require making it illegal to build or even live in many areas of the metropolis, would increase land prices substantially near transit stations. It would only be possible, however, with enormous subsidies from the state and federal governments to pay for the construction of tens of thousands of affordable housing units. People would have to be implored to stay in the city despite being kicked from their homes.

Because of the cost of such a strategy and the political infeasibility of shuttering whole neighborhoods, such focused growth seems unlikely to occur. But without a well-planned reconfiguration of the city’s built form, Detroit may have difficulty surviving.

Detroit represents the extreme case, but these concepts can translate to any city in the US.  It might be dealing with suburban redevelopment and transit-orientation, but the idea remains the same – big change is necessary.  It’s going to happen one way or another, and the question is now about form and function.