Category Archives: Detroit

Things we can take from Detroit

Spirit of Detroit, from Maia C

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.

Salt and infrastructure beneath the city

Ever wonder where all that road salt comes from?  A question that’s quite topical today.  Mammoth has a post up on an operating salt mine beneath the city of Detroit.

Detroit Salt Mine

Detroit Salt Mine

John Nystuen has a discussion of the legal implications, acquiring mineral rights for salt 1,000 feet below the surface of an active city.  His map of the area shows the approximate extent of the mine in Southwest Detroit.

Approximate extent of the Detroit Salt Mine.  Image from John Nystuen

Approximate extent of the Detroit Salt Mine. Image from John Nystuen

Nystuen notes that the shape of the mine lends itself to the economies of scale in negotiating mineral rights contracts with the larger, industrial landowners.  The main east-west axis that connects these areas lies beneath a rail yard.  Much of this area of Detroit is extremely industrial.  The middle branch of the mine above extends right up to the edge of Ford’s massive Rouge complex. This above-ground landscape has some fascinating visuals, particularly as it ages but remains in use.

The layers of underground infrastructure are fascinating – everything from storm and sanitary sewers, subways, aqueducts, and other utilities – to active industry such as this.  DC doesn’t have the same kind of active resource extraction, but it does have some massive water supply infrastructure that feeds the city’s reservoirs.  Not all of it is active, either – but the vestiges of these underground operations on the surface of the city is quite interesting.

McMillan Sand Filtration site.  Image from M.V. Jantzen on flickr.

McMillan Sand Filtration site. Image from M.V. Jantzen on flickr.

This isn’t new ground for Mammoth.  Mammoth’s interest in the forms of infrastructure and the design of spaces “looking for an architect” is fascinating, I always look forward to reading their thoughts on the matter.  Of particular interest is the disconnect between designed, architectural spaces and networked, infrastructural ones.  For some reason, there’s enough of a disconnect where the infrastructural frameworks lack the design gravitas – not everything can be a Calatrava-designed bridge, nor does that bridge alone show the true nature of the network’s design.

In a musty old hall in Detroit…

Wednesday of this week marked the 34th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, lost with all hands in a Lake Superior storm in 1975.  The iron ore freighter has always held a special place in my thoughts (and those of many Midwesterners) due to many summers spent along the shores of the Great Lakes, in Minnesota’s Iron Range, watching the ore boats travel underneath Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge – after grabbing lunch at Grandma’s.

Watching the big boats slide out of Duluth’s harbor, bound for the industrial ports of Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, or Toledo was quite a sight.  The notion that one could sink simply boggles the mind.

Adding to the legend, this regional Titanic tale, was Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad – forever immortalizing the lives of the 29th who perished.

Between summer weeks up along Minnesota’s North Shore and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as well as two years of living in the heart of Michigan’s industrial core, you begin to gain a great appreciation of the full industrial process.  From the iron ore strip mines in northern Minnesota, the ore travels by train to the Lake Superior ports – Duluth, Superior, Two Harbors, Taconite Harbor – where it’s loaded onto ore boats, who take it through the Soo, bound for the industrial cities of the Midwest.  The boats would bring the raw materials to a foundry, where the taconite would be turned to steel.

Images of Zug Island and Ford’s Rouge Plant from Hilarywho on Flickr

Seeing the process, even if only in bits and pieces, of raw materials harvested from the land, then turned into machinery for our use and consumption is a powerful story.  So too is the decline of that process, whether through the closure of a steel mill or a taconite mine – and the costs of the process, ranging from environmental damage to the human losses of a sunken ship.

It’s interesting to contrast the different legs of the journey – from the mines and the woods to Detroit (no stranger to hard times).  Gordon Lightfoot’s song specifically mentions a spiritual center of the journey from raw material to finished product – the Mariners’ Church (referred to with poetic license as the “Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral”).

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral
The church bell chimed, ’til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Mariners Church - Wikipedia

Mariners' Church - Wikipedia

The structure itself is nestled between signs of Detroit’s promise and decay – the historic structure now stripped of any surrounding urban fabric, sitting in the shadow of the RenCen and wrapped up by the entrance ramps to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

I don’t really have anything in particular to say – just sharing a bit of my connection to the ship, the song, the church, the lakes, and the city – woven together by industry, transport, and culture.  Having spent time on those lakes and in those cities, it’s always a fascinating story for me.

It seemed fitting to talk of a November storm as we’re stuck in our current deluge.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call “Gitche Gumee.”
“Superior,” they said, “never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early.”

This is an American city.

Detroit is a fascinating place.  I’m not sure what I can specifically add to the dialogue on the city – except to say that the images of the city, as powerful as they are, don’t do justice to the impact of seeing it with your own eyes.

I feel a connection to the place, having spent a fair amount of time in city while I was in grad school.  When JD Hammond posts a picture from the  old Michigan Theater, I feel a certain bond to the place.

I had seen pictures of the theater before.  It was featured in a scene from 8 mile, where the theater-turned-parking-garage serves as a backdrop for a rap battle – I thought the director had gone over the top with the post-apocalyptic set design.  The theater closed in the 70s, and the owners of the attached office building wanted more parking, but couldn’t demolish just the theater portion of the building without jeopardizing the structural integrity of the whole structure – so they gutted the seats and walls, and put in a parking deck.

Spending nights in downtown Detroit gives you a different perspective on the city.  I remember walking past the theater, seeing the interior through old doors and emergency exits (now blown out for ventilation) as the interior glowed in an orange hue from sodium vapor lamps, with the rest of the street wrapped in darkness.

There’s something extremely compelling about the place.  Twin Cities Streets for People recently posted this video from florent tillon on Vimeo.   It does an amazing job of capturing the images of the city, how desolate it is, yet it’s still home to 900,000 people.

Detroit Wildlife from florent tillon on Vimeo.

It’s well worth a watch – beautifully shot (and in full HD!), it captures the experience of the place, as well as featuring some of the city’s gems.