Two urban scholars at the Brookings Institution have a piece in The New Republic this week about research there and at the London School of Economics for a joint project on older industrial cities.
As Dave Bing works on a "crisis turnaround plan," they suggest how changes pushed by a reformist mayor in Turin, Italy, could be applied in Detroit -- with support from Washington.Link again.The federal government could support the physical regeneration of Detroit by footing the bill for the development of a new city plan focused on reconfiguring land uses and economic activity around the reality of population loss. More radically, the feds could overhaul that tired cliché of urban policy: the community-development block grant. They should require Detroit and other cities to use these grants [[and other federal, state, and local resources) for reclaiming, reconfiguring, and reusing vacant and abandoned land and housing.
The federal government could make Detroit a pilot city for land recycling and demolition projects. Scores of other industrial cities have too much land and outdated infrastructure. The foreclosure-smacked boomtowns of the sunbelt are also grappling with their own version of this legacy of excess.
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