What killed Detroit?

[E hemingway]

This is coming from David Frum of all people. He pulls no punches and lands just about all of them. Can anyone argue with his assessment of the city's leadership and its lack of vision? He sums it up here:

Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.

It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be — leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them.

Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominiums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston — and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague.

The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.

You can read the whole story here.

What killed Detroit?
http://www.freep.com/article/2009080...0806027/?imw=Y

[buildingsofdetroit]

Note he says, "Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new."


Too bad nobody in power here seems to agree; it's yet another thing distinguishing us from other Rust Belt cities like Buffalo and Cleveland.

[ndavies]

There's already a thread on this. Look it's even got the same name.
http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?t=2015

[E hemingway]

Damn it. I looked for one, too. Can the moderators please delete this duplicate thread?