Maurice Cox's Detroit-How an ambitious planner and new development are shaping a city

[skyfan]

A great look at some of the work being done by the city's planning director.

The first time I visited Detroit, five years ago, I got a grand tour one evening from one of the city’s most tireless boosters, advertising exec and author Toby Barlow. He took me to an avant-garde piano concert in the hip neighborhood of Corktown, an artisanal pizza joint near Eastern Market, and, oddly, a wrap party for a Hollywood movie held at a soul food restaurant downtown.

During my trip I realized that if I tagged along with someone like Barlow, I could find a city that felt vital and urbane, a connect-the-dots puzzle of imagination and ambition, in which small-scale and entrepreneurial efforts were leading the way. There was an awakening here, but you had to know where to find it.


When I returned to Detroit this past September, I discovered a very different city. For one thing, for the first time in decades, Detroit is enjoying an influx of major new construction. Orleans Landing, for example, a 278-unit market-rate apartment development designed by the local firm Hamilton Anderson Associates, is nearing completion on a site near the edge of downtown, at the intersection of two popular bike and pedestrian trails, the city’s River Walk and the Dequindre Cut. Just to the north, a pair of major developments are underway: City Modern at Brush Park, an architecturally ambitious 405-unit, 8.4-acre residential enclave and, practically next door, District Detroit, a massive 45-acre agglomeration of uses with a new hockey arena at its center. Both projects will boast easy access to the QLine, a 3.3-mile streetcar system along Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s central spine, scheduled to open next year. The QLine is the city’s first new transit since the downtown People Mover opened in 1987.

For another thing, Mayor Mike Duggan has hired the city’s highest-profile planning director since Charles Blessing, who in the 1960s dreamed up a modernist remake of the city that was never implemented (although he did manage to lure Luwig Mies van der Rohe to town to design the beloved apartment and townhouses complex known as Lafayette Park)

http://www.architectmagazine.com/des...coxs-detroit_o

The mayor highlighted some of this work this summer(development stuff starts around 11:30)

• Video Link

[Austinlee]

Cool stuff. I skimmed through the video.