detroit posts, articles, and infographics | Sustainable Cities Collective

Private bus company tests service, plans June 1 launch

May 9, 2012 by Jessica Soulliere
with 81 views

Has Detroit's public infrastructure and government failed so massively that a private bus company has to step in? Will it be successful? [read more]

Right-sizing the city of Detroit: Good or bad?

May 1, 2012 by Jessica Soulliere
with 155 views

The city of Detroit and its residents are stuck in a deadlocked battle about the concept of "right-sizing." While not a new concept, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing remains steadfast on relocating residents living in sparsely populated neighborhoods into more concentrated areas to provide more efficient core services, but many residents are... [read more]

Creative Construction: The New Phase of American Municipal Finance

March 2, 2012 by This Big City
with 218 views

By Theodore BrownSeventy-five years ago, Walker Evans and James Agee published their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, giving the Depression a composite face: rugged and, while not defeated, profoundly resigned. A portrait of the The Fields, one of the three families that Evans photographed, shows Bud, the father, shirtless and... [read more]

Has Detroit's narrative changed in twenty years?

February 8, 2012 by Jason King
with 68 views

A clip that spawned a lot of conversation within our reading group, from 1990, Diane Sawyer reporting on ABCs Primetime Live, in a series called 'Detroit's Agony' - which looks at Mayor Coleman Young's legacy, and plays on Detroit as 'the first urban domino to fall...'. The report starts at minute three.The shock of 'Devils Night', guns... [read more]

How Design Activists Hope to Turn Around Detroit

January 20, 2012 by polis blog
with 213 views

The Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) is not content with the status quo when it comes to built environment professionals — especially architects. Based at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture since 1994, it sees the production of architecture as a political act, one that supports or disrupts the actions... [read more]

Shrinking Cities: The Forgetting Machine

January 18, 2012 by Jason King
with 213 views

One of our supplementary readings for the Shrinking Cities group is the recent essay by Jerry Herron on The Design Observer entitled 'The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit.' The author is from Wayne State and has been a resident of Detroit since the early eighties, so it avoids some of the outsider rhetoric, but... [read more]

Why Ruin Photography Won’t Revive Cities

January 17, 2012 by Kat Friedrich
with 75 views

Grist republished a feature article claiming that “ruin porn,” a genre of photography which focuses on decaying cities, can help reignite our appreciation for the Rust Belt and aid in urban revitalization. Here are a few of the problems I see with this attitude toward photographing damaged cities: Photographing poverty doesn’t end... [read more]

Hillbilly Urbanism

December 16, 2011 by Jim Russell
with 494 views

Despite Brian O'Neill's best efforts, Pittsburgh isn't part of Appalachia. However, Pittsburgh is located in Appalachia. Confused? Don't be:Hardly any part of the U.S. typifies the concept of rural like Appalachia. Even the most outdated historical stereotypes persist: hillside shacks, impoverished children with no shoes, moonshine.... [read more]

Photolog: Harvesting the Positive Potential of Detroit

November 8, 2011 by Project for Public Spaces
with 153 views

And it worked. On October 29, PPS was thrilled to be part of a very successful harvest festival outside the wonderful neighborhood produce market Peaches & Greens, which is celebrating its third anniversary. Although flanked by vacant lots, Peaches & Greens proved to be the right spot for the festival — and the event showed how this could evolve into an even better place for the neighborhood to come together. [read more]

Signs Of Life In Downtown Detroit

September 21, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 175 views

Don’t count the Motor City out just yet. Companies are now fleeing its suburban office parks for downtown, writes Louis Aguilar in The Detroit News: “When MyInsuranceExpert.com announced last week it is moving its headquarters and 85 workers from Troy to one of the downtown Detroit office buildings bought by... [read more]

Art and Transformation in Detroit

September 1, 2011 by polis blog
with 237 views

Previous posts on Detroit by fellow Polis bloggers Alex Schafran and Anna Fogel largely highlight the abandonment and heaviness of this complex Motor City. Unfortunately, this is quite easy to do, as the potential for a positive future for the city is sometimes hard to uncover. A shrinking city, Detroit’s population fell by more than... [read more]

Vertical Farms Need a Residential Piggyback

August 19, 2011 by Tyler Caine
with 332 views

Urban farming continues to ride the wave of sustainability with efforts sprouting up across the country that find very real and fruitful results. The rush of interest has maintained conversations of massive towers buried in the center of urban cores to produce local, sustainable crops for city dwellers. However, the conceptual mecca of farming in the city, vertical farms, still remains mired in the theoretical world due largely to the unwillingness of any funding sources to make the first cut on a bleeding edge development pattern. On their own, large vertical farms in the cityscape bring costs that may be insurmountable for a largely unproven model, but if the system was paired with high-end residential and positioned as an amenity then new crops could get the prime exposure they need to test their strength where it its needed most. [read more]