Detroit's measuring stick.

[casscorridor]

Shrink the suburbs!

The suburbs are simply not sustainability enough to survive long-term. How long can they go on living like this? Driving 40 or 50 miles every single day. Some people even as many as a 100 miles a day. It can't go on like this much longer. Some areas of the suburbs will need to be dismantled and returned to nature/farming/parkland. The residents will move to denser areas in areas of the suburbs or the city.

The eventual goal will be the complete elimination of the suburbs, meaning the the distinction between urban and suburban will blur so that it no longer exists. There will only be rural and urban. This won't mean that all of the current suburbs will have to be destroyed, quite the contrary. It means some of them will be densifty and become urban, and part of "Detroit," while others will turn back to what they were prior to development-- farmland and nature.

If we want pockets of urbanism surrounded by pockets of parks, nature and farmland, it can't be restricted to the city. We have to think as an entire region. That requires suburban communities participate in "shrinking" in order to make our entire region more sustainable and viable for the future. What we will see is real urban areas expanded [[from the existing areas expanding and suburbs adapting) and low-density suburban areas will fade out. The urban areas will all be connected by transit, forming a network with the the core of Detroit forming the hub.

[exmotowner]

i really think people in the detroit region don't understand the relationship between a city and its suburbs. There's been a civil war through out detroit for some 50 years now which honestly hasn't done anyone in the region any good.

amen to that!