A writer from the
Rustwire, a Rust Belt news blog, points out reasons why Detroit hasn't yet and won't parish under the headlines.
Excerpt:
A lot of media attention has focused on Detroit in hopes of
documenting its funeral. I have bad news for these journalistic
vultures, it's not dead yet. The lesson that Detroit is learning (in
the hardest possible way), is that its future should not be intimately
tied to a single industry. I am no political cheerleader, but the newly
elected administration has brought in some talented staff who are
willing to push cultural changes inside their bureaucracies to achieve
city-wide goals. The barriers they are facing are well established. But
the momentum for change is real and strong enough to be effective.
What will a non-dead Detroit look like? It's hard to say. There are
lots of possibilities in the approximately forty square miles of vacant
land that exist within the city's boundaries. Dan Pitera raised the
examples found in Duisberg of industrial heritage landscaping. I got a
chance to ask him why these innovative adaptive use concepts have not
migrated to Michigan. He believes that the expectation that Detroit
should be a "world class city" clashes too strongly with these
concepts. However, as a visitor to the Ruhr region of Germany, I can
testify that these spaces are breathtaking and in no way a
contradiction to what it takes to be a globally desirable urban area.
Read the entire article
here.
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