Rebirth of an American City

Recently, there was a small to-do regarding Detroit and its miserable condition. The city has lost over 60% of its population in 30 years. Large swaths of it are almost uninhabited, some uninhabitable. Now that the housing finance boom is over--or to be more precise, now that the housing finance SCAM boom is over and shady mortgage lenders are reaping massive windfalls or else foreclosing--Detroit, in particular, appears in its last throes as a metropolis.

But what would it take to bring it back? Detroit is not New Orleans; it isn't a city built on excess and doesn't market itself on tits and alcohol and French architecture. Detroit is where cars used to get made. Now that cars get made in central Ohio and darkest, pastoral South Carolina, Detroit's reason to exist has vanished.

How does one rebuild a crumbling city? It seems that a key element is to attract affluent, energetic people who will actively build up in new and creative ways--warehouse/factory district Pittsburgh and Cincinnati being examples.

The most motivated people I can think of, and who fit within the categories of "affluent," "creative," and "energetic" are conservationists and environmentalists. What if Detroit became America's first large-scale, metropolitan test case for a green city? And what a turnaround, from the Motor City to the Clean City! I admit I have only the sketchiest idea what this would entail...

The infrastructure, at least in basic terms, is there already. Housing is cheap and not many restrictions exist as to what you could do to modify it. Make a green roof on every house. Mandate solar panels on every structure. All vehicles go biodiesel or else solar-charged battery. How great could such a city be? The only limit is imagination.