Posted by Kevin Matthews on March 14, 2002 at 15:59:01:In Reply to: Re: ArchWeek - New Hub, No Hubcaps-also in Detriot- RenCen posted by JWmHarmon on March 14, 2002 at 11:20:31:
"GM's plans ... follow similar moves across the nation... to reclaim old downtown real estate..."
Well, the trouble is, talk is cheap. _Every_ redevelopment plan is presented by its supporters as a good thing!
Detroit is a poster-child for succesive waves of "redevelopment", including the Renaissance Center, each of which has left less of the livable city in its wake. And it is very rare that you can tell anything about the quality of redevelopment plans from reading the business press. That channel is naturally focused on the real estate dimension, which tends to scale with the amount of turnover -- whereas successful urban-upgrade projects are usually small and incremental.
Some background on development in Detroit is available in "Cities Back from the Edge : New Life for Downtown" by Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz (Wiley, 1998/2000), p80 (etc.):
"Detroit is the most symbolically important of our urban tragedies. Few people recognize the underappreciated, but sizble, downtown left to regenerate. The absence of the fundamental understanding of the economic and social intricacies of a working city cripples that city...
"The biggest Project Plan of the wrong kind, Renaissance Center, built in 1976 at a cost of $357 million (estimated at $750 in [1998] dollars by the Wall Street Journal), this glittering five-tower sprawling complex vacuumed out the shaky but active life of the downtown business district and encapsulated it in this hostile concrete-and-glass bunker, killing any possibility of the organic regeneration happening in many other places."
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