 |
 |
By Robert Fishman
professor of architecture + urban planning
Franz Kafka once cryptically observed that the greatest sin is impatience. Theologians would probably not agree, but urban planners and designers should consider his message. For impatience—in the form of mega-projects and other large-scale instant panaceas—has been the source of many of Detroit’s planning disasters. And, as the city lags behind New York, Chicago, and other revitalizing metropolitan areas, the temptation rises to embrace still other showy but superficial projects and thus add to the list of disappointments that stretches back from the casinos and the stadiums to the mother of them all—the so-called Renaissance Center.
The basic problem with all the projects is that they are at once too small and too large. Compared to the scale of intervention required to address Detroit’s underlying economic and social problems, all the built and proposed mega-projects combined are absurdly limited in their capacity to effect significant social change. But, at ground level, these expensive projects almost invariably take the form of massive "big boxes" whose scale and intention exclude many of the real sources of urban vitality. The reasons for this seemingly irrational disparity between expenditure and result were first and best analyzed forty years ago in Jane Jacobs’s classic Death and Life of Great American Cities. She argues that urban vitality rests ultimately on what she calls "close-grained diversity," the dense proximity of many different urban functions, ideally along pedestrian-oriented streets. The $500 million Ford Field might spring to life during the ten home Lions games and special events like the Superbowl, but even on game days the stadium was intentionally designed to limit most activity to the confines of the box.
By contrast, the many modest interventions proposed at the 2005 Detroit Charrette for the Eastern Market district—the produce market and specialty food and restaurant center located east of downtown across a wilderness of highway interchanges from Ford Field—might well have a more lasting and positive impact than the mega-stadium. For Eastern Market already attracts that most precious of urban resources in a city like Detroit: a crowd. And the Market, which now flourishes only in a limited area and mostly on Saturdays, is an expandable resource. Its renovation could attract more vendors, more restaurants, more customers at varied hours, and even become the basis for new residential development and rehab in its neighborhood. But this requires patience and a willingness to build on small, almost imperceptible successes.
Patience is admittedly a tough strategy, especially for elected officials who seek highly visible signs of progress and who are understandably wary of spending political capital to address fundamental issues that require a long timeline.
One such fundamental issue for Detroit was starkly underlined in a recent study by Professor Edward L. Glaeser, director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard University (another recipient of A. Alfred Taubman’s largesse) called "The Skilled City*" Glaeser ranked cities with populations of 250,000 or more on the percentage of their population 25 years or older who hold college degrees. Detroit ranked dead last—74th out of 74. Not only was Detroit’s 10.5 percent anemic compared to the leader—Seattle with 51.6 percent-—but Detroit had less than half the percentage of college graduates as such comparable Midwest cities as St. Louis and Toledo. Glaeser was able to show (not surprisingly) that a higher percentage of college graduates correlates very well with economic growth and high wages for a favored city. More surprisingly, he showed that these high percentages benefited everyone: "a one percent increase in the college-educated population of a metropolitan area raises everybody else’s average wage by 0.6 to 1.2 percent."
Unfortunately, even a one percent increase in college graduates cannot be bought in any simple way; it requires a whole range of long-term expensive changes from elementary through graduate schools to produce and (more importantly) to retain college graduates. But here is one point where large and small scales begin to interact. College graduates are attracted to "cool cities," places that are defined precisely by a vital street life that can only be attained by attention to the "close-grained diversity" of urban life.
Although a lively Eastern Market or a successful West Detroit Riverfront (the subject of the 2004 Charrette) can never substitute for the sustained expenditure on education and other social needs, a lively and attractive built environment can become a crucial part of the larger transformation of Detroit.
One recent example of a "right-scaled" planning and design project that seems to me to address both large-scale social issues and the fine grain of its neighborhood is the ongoing transformation of Orchestra Hall (C. Howard Crane, 1919), home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, into the Max M. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The story of "the Max" is richly emblematic of the patient, long-term initiatives that can turn a city around. The story begins in the 1970s with a "musician’s revolt" against the seemingly-inevitable demolition of this semi-abandoned acoustical treasure that saved Orchestra Hall and restored it in 1989 as the Detroit Symphony’s home. Detroit philanthropist Max Fisher (1908-2005) then stepped forward to lead the effort to renovate the 2,000-seat hall but also to open it up to a wider segment of the city through the addition of a 450-seat Music Box for jazz and other musical forms and the Pincus Music Educational Center. The renovations and additions, brilliantly accomplished by Toronto architect Donald Schmitt, were then augmented urbanistically by the addition of a neighboring magnificent new public high school, the Detroit School for the Arts, where music students will be mentored by Orchestra members.
The Max M. Fisher Music Center.
Photograph provided courtesy the Detroit Symphony Orchestra,
http://www.detroitsymphony.com.
The Max has already succeeded in no small part because it stands near the center of the most hopeful area of the city—the Midtown stretch of Woodward Avenue that runs from Comerica Park and the Fox Theatre to the New Center. In addition to the Max itself, the area contains one of the strongest concentrations of urban cultural, educational, and medical facilities anywhere in the nation: the Detroit Institute of the Arts; the main branch of the public library; the Detroit Science Center; the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History; the Detroit Historical Museum; the massive Detroit Medical Center and Henry Ford Hospital; and Wayne State University.
So remarkable an urban area would almost necessarily be a magnet for young people, especially when it also contains a rich stock of older buildings that can be adapted for loft-style living. But during the long years of Detroit’s decline, the institutions retreated from their increasingly-threatening environment; Woodward Avenue, once one of the nation’s premier residential boulevards, became an increasingly-tattered and tawdry auto express route; and the great potential of the area was lost in a dispiriting wasteland.
The genius of the Max is its potential to reconnect to the street, to the neighborhood, to the city, and to the region. As such, it provides an inspiring example to the other institutions of Midtown.
The Max, I might add, has a special relevance to Taubman College. Not only did Max and Majorie Fisher provide ten years of funding for a visiting professorship that each year brings a distinguished practitioner of urban design to the College; but this fall the University of Michigan will open a “Detroit Center” in Orchestra Place, a mixed-use development designed by Rossetti Architects just south of the Max on Woodward. Taubman College expects to make particularly good use of the Center as a base for our Detroit architectural and urban design studios, urban planning courses, internships, and community service projects.
The University of Michigan’s Detroit Center will put the Taubman College at the heart of Detroit’s most promising area, and our students and their projects and imagination will become one more element in the “close-grained diversity” that is finally emerging along Woodward Avenue. With patient attention to the large scale and the small, this diversity might transform Detroit.
* Edward L. Glaeser, "The Skilled City" The Taubman Center Report (2005): 11–14.
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
"So remarkable an urban area would almost necessarily be a magnet for young people, especially when it also contains
a rich stock of older buildings
that can be adapted for
loft-style living."
This article appeared in
Portico
2005/2 |
|
