Dream City: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit

Abstract

We have many studies of urban revitalization, but I find them to be heavy on text and weak on visuals. This is unfortunate, given that urban decline and rebirth is often fundamentally a story about changes in the tangible urban context. Thus, I find Conrad Kickert’s Dream City a particularly welcome addition to the urban revitalization library. The book is visually strong and reliant on graphical analysis to narrate the story of downtown Detroit’s ups and downs. This methodological approach is well motivated—the morphological transformation of Detroit from small-scale walkable city to modernist superblock haven is exactly the kind of change where a picture—in this case, a map—speaks a thousand words. There is a lot to learn by looking at the growth of parking lots and vacant lots in Detroit between 1911 and 2018. This is not to say the book skimps on written analysis. Clocking in at 444 pages (140 pages devoted to footnotes), Kickert has left no stone unturned in his effort to understand Detroit’s trajectory. He traces the story using a seasonal metaphor—“Spring” recounts Detroit’s hopeful founding as an elaborate city of radial boulevards; “Summer” takes us through its early growth spurt quickly turning to growing pains by the late 1920s; “Fall” tells the story of erosion and blight leading to its “boiling point” in the 1960s; and finally Detroit’s “Winter” season, where the tragedy of urban renewal is viscerally exposed, igniting a “Renaissance among the Ruins” and a quest to reinvent Detroit once again, coming to a “Roaring End” by 2011. Postseason, Detroit finds itself entering a “New Beginning,” with “the past as future” (a final map showing square footage added and removed between 2011 and 2018 tells the story). But the aim of Kickert’s exploration is not simply to offer yet another critique of modernist urbanism, an urban design theory with few remaining converts. His intent is to show the possibilities of a new city emerging in spite of it all—a city of lively sidewalks now filled with shoppers and office workers—but with a strong dose of realism about the limits of good intentions. Although cranes have replaced wrecking balls in the downtown neighborhood, Detroit’s revival is more complicated than any straightforward upswing from decline to renewal. For one thing, it is a spatially constrained rebirth. A short distance from the revitalized blocks forming Detroit’s comeback narrative, there are blocks “in any direction” that still suffer from decay and squalor. Detroit remains a puzzle and a paradox. Kickert wants us to learn from the complexities of this history, and he succeeds. He does this by connecting past, present, and future through narrative, personal story, charts, and maps. He shows how Detroit’s current mix of success and struggle is a direct outgrowth of its past conflicts. Journal of Planning History