Detroit's Second Life: An Urban Planner's View

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Robin Boyle in discussion with FLYP's James R. Gaines. Photo by Clarence Tabb.

What will post-meltdown, post-industrial America look like? A terrific story in the latest Atlantic addresses the subject of FLYP’s current-issue cover story on Detroit. “Perhaps no major city in the U.S. today looks more beleaguered,” writes the Atlantic’s Richard Florida:

[I]n October the average home price was $18,513, and some 45,000 properties were in some form of foreclosure. A recent listing of tax foreclosures in Wayne County, which encompasses Detroit, ran to 137 pages in the Detroit Free Press. The city’s public school system, facing a budget deficit of $408 million, was taken over by the state in December; dozens of schools have been closed since 2005 because of declining enrollment. Just 10 percent of Detroit’s adult residents are college graduates, and in December the city’s jobless rate was 21 percent.

To explain how it is that Detroit remains the 11th largest U.S. city despite decades of contraction, the writer quotes Robin Boyle, head of the department of urban planning and geography at Detroit’s Wayne State University: “If you no longer can sell your property, how can you move elsewhere?”

Boyle himself answered the question: “Some people just switch out the lights and leave—property values have gone so low, walking away is no longer such a difficult option.”

But like the others interviewed for FLYP’s cover story, Boyle offers more than a lament for the fall of Detroit: he has a vision for the new one. Please watch a selection from our interview with Boyle, and see this new vision for yourself.