Detroit as a Test Site of the Green Future

Posted by David Holtzman on June 7, 2009

Recently a group of planners, including long-time NHI researcher Alan Mallach, visited Detroit to survey the city’s vast vacant spaces and make recommendations on how to re-organize the city for the future. The team proposed relocating many of the city’s far-flung residents, who live in small, highly distressed residential pockets amid a sea of weedy vacancy, into urban villages As these villages are developed, the rest of the city should be designated for agricultural or recreational purposes, they said. Corridors would connect the urban villages and give residents access to the open spaces.

The challenges facing shrinking cities like Detroit are fundamentally different from those of thriving cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco. When it comes to green space, Detroit has it in spades, while strong market cities struggle to find places for street trees and grass patches amid oodles of new condo and rental projects.

By defining the future built-up area of Detroit proper as a series of small urban villages, the planners are talking about a new definition of what a city is. In a place like Detroit, the urban form will exist in two types: the suburbs and the villages. Many people will continue to choose to move out to the suburbs to raise their families and seek their fortunes, while a smaller share will opt for cool city living. (“Cool cities” being the term Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm uses for cities that can attract creative people)

Of course, its hard to say whether the transit network the planners envision to connect the urban villages and the surrounding open spaces would be feasible. Even within the limited space of these villages, some minimum density would be critical. One has to assume as well that there would be equally good transit access to the suburbs, which would presumably still provide home and/or work for a large share of the people in the villages.

In any case, this is a quite different twist on the term urban village than I am used to. Herbert Gans, I believe, was the one who coined the term when he wrote his book on Bostons West End back in the late 1950s. More recently, the term has been popularized in Seattle and in Boston by mayors and CDC leaders to bolster the identity of neighborhoods within strongly interconnected citistates.

The notion of an urban village as a network of tightly bound urbanized enclaves, surrounded by nothing but greenery, sounds almost like what edge cities would look like if there weren’t endless residential sprawl all around them. In fact, if edge cities really were like that, they could be a pretty good thing.

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