Bringing It All Back Home

Urban decay and revitalization, suburban renewal, rural development: all spell change, some good, some bad, and some just plain old ugly. It's been happening everywhere I've lived for as long as I can remember. What amazes me is how we keep struggling to survive, to improve our quality of life, despite entropy and economic forces largely beyond our control. We live together, yet we often live at cross-purposes, with the only physical common ground being shared public spaces. How do we do it? Maybe more importantly, why do we do it?

Marshall Berman takes a long, broad view in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, originally published in 1982 but since re-issued. He integrates literature with urban landscaping, architecture, and city planning and social psychology in a thoughtful series of linked essays. He examines the first European cities of the industrial age and moves seamlessly into existentialism via Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Karl Marx, Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, French boulevard innovator Georges Eugene Haussmann, and New York highway developer Robert Moses.

Much of Berman's content can be brought to bear on Metro Detroit. It would seem that the keys to Detroit's "renaissance" must include improved transportation infrastructure, a secure environment for economic and personal well-being, lots more people living downtown, and thriving public spaces where people of all classes and backgrounds can mix together without spitting on each other. In Philadelphia, its highly evolved mass transit system promotes commerce and cultural interaction in Center City; for a major city, Detroit's lack of a sophisticated mass transit system is glaring. Realistically, though, it's hard to imagine this being changed, so other approaches must be emphasized. I don't think we would like to abandon Detroit as the Inca did their small city states for unknown reasons ages ago; so, how to keep it alive?




New Orleans and other flood-prone areas in the Deep South are another matter the USA as a whole will have to grapple with. Rationally, shouldn't people pull back to higher ground before the next major hurricanes strike? Is there any sense in putting trailer parks back in the bayou, or rebuilding flood-ruined areas like Ward Nine of New Orleans? Would it make more sense to protect the French Quarter and other places on higher ground rather than try to slap together a levee system that will crumble as the lower parts of Metro New Orleans slowly sink?



Whatever happens, people keep trying. Since moving to Detroit, I've seen many changes: new sports facilties, casinos, condos, and improvements to the Renaissance Center's base. Also, the demise of Hudson's; Jacobsen's; all those record chains; area drug chains like Perry's; K-Mart; the Daimler-Chrysler deal, and so forth. What next for Detroit and the rest of the country? And the rest of the world, for that matter? Good luck to us!

Ciao!