Downtown Detroit

Crain’s looks at what could reinvent Detroit in the next decade

What's next for Detroit in the next ten years? What ideas, projects and places will help create the Detroit of the future? Crain's Detroit Business sifts through it all and finds what could possibly reinvent the city.Read the entire piece here.A few other noteworthy pieces to check out:Read about how midtown's Green Garage owners are looking to build incubator for sustainable technology here.Could Detroit be the friendliest city in the nation? Here's a piece on how that might happen here.Crain's touches base with GLUE and their campaign "I will stay if..." Read about their efforts and what people are saying about staying here.

Walbridge’s rehab of its One Kennedy Square office space earns LEED silver certification

Financier Hantz wants to plant $30M into vacant lots

Detroit and businessman John Hantz wants to commit $30 million to his urban farm idea in Detroit, which would be the largest of its kind.Excerpt:By this time next year, he says, some of that land could be transformed, becoming the first phase of Hantz Farms L.L.C., an ambitious commercial farming operation that Hantz says can turn a profit.“We have to move as a city from knowing why everything won't work to knowing why it will work,” he said. “At some point, we have to step into the fire.” Hantz has been buying property on Detroit's east side, and plans to open shop with a 77-acre, noncontiguous farm growing food, trees and energy products — provided a few key pieces fall into place. “We're down from a couple of hundred things that have to happen to a few things,” he said. Hantz says he plans to commit $30 million over the next 10 years to bring the farm to fruition, with the end goal of 5,000 acres, said Hantz Farms Senior Vice President Matt Allen. Costs have averaged roughly $3,000 an acre, Allen said.Read the entire article here.

Baltimore blog loves Detroit

Baltimore urban planning blogger writes about how America shouldn't turn its back on the city that helped build it.Excerpt: Detroit was a great American industrial jewel that we are allowing to crumble like the ruins in Rome. The only catch is that Detroit has not been deserted. Among these industrial ruins is the nation's 11th largest city where over 900,000 people reside. Our nation's forgotten major city is still larger then the cosmopolitan cities of San Fransisco, Boston, Seattle and Washington D.C. While we can never bring Detroit back to what it was 50 years ago, we can still transform the city from a once great industrial city into a great historical city and not watch city turn into a ruin from a far.Read the entire post here.

Detroit: The next agrarian paradise?

Another media source looks at Detroit and its agrarian potential.Excerpt:One sustainable solution is for Detroit to grow their own food. There is plentiful open land, fertile soil, ample water and a willing workforce. A recent study by a student at Michigan State University indicates that Detroit has enough vacant land to grow 76 percent of the vegetables and 42 percent of the fruits consumed by city residents. The acres of abandoned buildings and property lots make Detroit a hotbed for community gardens and large-scale urban agriculture....Detroit may be in the best position to become the world’s first 100 percent food self-sufficient city…talk about sustainability! Imagine America’s once prosperous, industrial Detroit as the first modern American city where agriculture, not automobiles, is the most vital industry. Mark Dowie, an investigative historian, eloquently portrayed a vision of Detroit in his article, Food Among the Ruins, as one where growing in the city are “chard and tomatoes on vacant lots, orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high rise farms in old hotels and waving wheat where cars were once test-driven.”Read the entire article here.

German business journal finds Detroit business owners, artists fighting city’s negative cliches

German business journal finds business owners and artists in Detroit that are fighting the negative cliches of the city. (Danke for including Model D co-founder/publisher Brian Boyle.)Excerpt (their translation from German to English is a bit shaky): What can be done for a city like Detroit that was designed for cars and now is half empty? City planners envision converting entire districts into artificial lakes or farmland. The part left over would be a compact structure of vibrant, interlocking neighbourhoods convenient for pedestrians. “We are behind the curve somewhat, but it’s a first step," says designer Claire Nelson, founder of Open City Detroit, an association for young entrepreneurs. Already the first of these vibrant areas is emerging. In the downtown area, stately buildings like the historic Book Cadillac Hotel are awakening to new life. Renovated at a cost of approximately 200 million dollars, since the end of 2008 the hotel has again been an attraction. “That was the start, and now we are making this part of downtown liveable and passable again, building by building,” vows property developer John Ferchill. Read the English version here. If you're up for it, read the German version here.

Bing writes to the Freep: ‘We must change in order to survive’

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing writes into the Freep defending his potential cuts and that Detroit needs to change in order for the city to survive.Excerpt:The reality is we must change in order to survive. The City of Detroit can no longer operate as we have in the past. We must identify core services, doing what we must as a city for our citizens, redefining how we do business and eliminating waste. I look forward to reviewing the recommendations from the Crisis Turnaround Team and merging them with plans already on the table.More important, we must all be willing to work together. This is not an "us vs. them" situation. We must all compromise and endure short-term pain for long-term gain. Together, we can be a leaner, stronger and more efficient Detroit.Read the entire article here.

Detroit may be down but not out, Canadian site says

Canadian news site The Globe and Mail contends that though Detroit is down, it is not out.Excerpt: Must Detroit fail? Has it declined too far to ever return to prosperity? The answer, perhaps, can be found across campus, at a new engineering research centre, filled with robotics labs and clean rooms, where researchers are conducting experiments in alternative energy, nano-science and biotechnology. This despite savage cuts to university budgets from a straightened state government. “We have a brilliant faculty who are out there in the market … raising money for the College of Engineering,” said Ralph Kummler, Dean of Wayne State's College of Engineering. It can be found at Tech One, housed in a formerly vacant building where the Chevrolet Corvette was designed, but which today incubates 98 entrepreneurial startups, including Asterand, which harvests waste tissues from hospitals and then makes them available for medical and pharmaceutical research. It can be found at NextEnergy, a non-profit industry accelerator that works with businesses to develop commercially viable alternative-energy products. Read the entire article here.

Tweet of the Week: Cyborgs and techno

Fedde le Grand's techno favorite "Put Your Hands Up 4 Detroit" seemed to summarize the mindset of tweeters this week, as many seemed to be putting their hands up (literally or figuratively) for Detroit in some way. It seemed to start with Panic at the Disco's member Brendon Urie, @brendonuriesays, who tweeted lyrics from the song: "put your hands up for Detroit... I love this city."And by the time @DJSnakes showed up to say: I'm deep in Detroit techno right now, it was very likely that he was also putting his hands up for Detroit at that time.Not to be outdone, @Citizen_Pags was willing to risk a limb for the city: If my knee is injured badly enough I hope the Drs. insist on me being turned into a crime-fighting cyborg to clean up DetroitNot very likely, but a wonderful thought just the same. Sounds like it'd be a great movie idea... oh, wait... well, at least maybe another sequel.We'll keep you updated on the policing cyborgs... but, until then, be sure to follow Model D for all our updates and news about the city.