Industrial Europe offer redevelopment tips at Detroit seminar

Leaders from post-industrial Europe offer redevelopment ideas for Detroit at seminar in TechTown.

Excerpt:

The keynote speaker at the seminar will be Valentino Castellani, a former physics professor who helped lead a regional turnaround as mayor of Turin from 1993 to 2001, Pope said.

The city forged cooperative agreements with 35 surrounding municipalities in the Piedmont region, and now, the Turin area has become a high-tech hub with emerging filmmaking and tourism sectors. It received a big boost in 2006, when Turin hosted the Winter Olympic Games.

Though there are strong parallels between Detroit and Turin, Detroit will need to find its own solutions, Pope said.

She said economic redevelopment efforts in Turin have been successful because the city has focused on finding its unique comparative advantage.

"We're not saying that they have the exact answer -- and that it's directly importable to Detroit, or Cleveland, or any older industrial city in the U.S -- but the way they've approached their economic development strategy, digging themselves out of the holes they were in, provides some food for thought," Pope said.

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