Great Lakes Cities

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

That's really the only pocket of Wayne County with farmland.

and that pocket of farmand in SW Wayne is what i find so interesting, as it is literally JUST beyond the airport.

i'm used to major aiports attracting and growing economic development toward and all around them, not having the airport lie at the very extreme edge of the UA.

and meanwhile, up in oakland and macomb, the sprawl edge of the UA goes much further out.

as crawford said, this is probably all just due to the downriver communities being seen as less desriable.

the imbalance was still interesting to me.

[ChiSoxRox]

Speaking of Wayne County farmland, I like the little oddities of the last farmland patches in urban counties.

Cuyahoga has a few fields left in North Royalton and larger concentrations in Olmsted Township.

Marion County, Indiana still has a largely rural southeast corner despite Unigov bringing that into Indianapolis city limits.

Milwaukee County has its southern row of cities like Franklin, WI still being half farmland

Most interesting is Cook County: setting aside the horse country in Barrington Hills, the southern suburbs are very patchy development, meaning you get scenes like this around Chicago Heights. I know those southern suburbs have issues with decay and poverty, but still surprising that they never "filled in" with cul-de-sacs like other Chicagoland directions.

Ramsey County, Minnesota (St. Paul) is the only completely filled-in Midwestern county, which is largely due to it being tiny (a sixth of Cook County's size!)

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

and that pocket of farmand in SW Wayne is what i find so interesting, as it is literally JUST beyond the airport.

i'm used to major aiports attracting and growing economic development toward and all around them, not having the airport lie at the very extreme edge of the UA.

I think this is a bit misleading. DTW is right on the edge of the Ann Arbor UA. It isn't near the edge of the wilderness lol.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I think this is a bit misleading. DTW is right on the edge of the Ann Arbor UA. It isn't near the edge of the wilderness lol.

and i never used the word "wilderness"

rural farmland is obvously not wilderness.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

and that pocket of farmand in SW Wayne is what i find so interesting, as it is literally JUST beyond the airport.

That corner of Wayne has bad schools and is very industrial/polluted. There's no obvious reason why it would attract sprawl, when the Detroit Metro is stagnant and can sprawl in all directions. It's like wondering why there's farmland pretty close to Chicago due south, while it takes forever to hit farmland to the north or west.

[edale]

Originally Posted by Crawford

That corner of Wayne has bad schools and is very industrial/polluted. There's no obvious reason why it would attract sprawl, when the Detroit Metro is stagnant and can sprawl in all directions. It's like wondering why there's farmland pretty close to Chicago due south, while it takes forever to hit farmland to the north or west.

Right, it would be more strange to see a metro area with equal amounts of sprawl in all directions from the core. There is almost always a favored direction for sprawl to flow toward. Cincinnati sprawls north all the way up to Dayton, but peters out to the west very quickly. That's mostly due to challenging topography to the west and freeway proximity (or lack thereof), but almost all cities have this to some extent. Even pancake flat Columbus sprawls much more to the north/northeast than it does to the south/southwest.

[iheartthed]

It makes a lot of sense (to me at least) why Detroit sprawls the way that it does when you look at the map without knowing anything else. It can't go south because of Toledo. Ann Arbor keeps it from easily sprawling to the west. But there is/was plenty of cheap land to eat up to the north of the city. Add in a very overdeveloped road network, plus almost no mass transit infrastructure to organize development patterns around, and it was fairly predictable that it would develop the way that it did. People had been loudly warning Michigan leaders about it since at least the 1960s.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by edale

There is almost always a favored direction for sprawl to flow toward.

Of course.

Detroit's sprawl pattern is only a bit surprising to me because it seems divorced from the location of the region's major airport.

In Chicagoland, proximity to ORD has been a boon for economic development, and hundreds of thousands of jobs, in and around the airport area.

This situation has been used by south suburban officials in Chicagoland to call for a new major airport to be built down on that side of the metro to bring economic development and jobs down that way, but as metro Detroit demonstrates, the location of a major airport is not necessarily determinant of the favored direction of sprawl development.

And for the record, I am very much AGAINST a new 3rd major Chicagoland airport down in will county.

Originally Posted by iheartthed

It can't go south because of Toledo.

Huh?

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Huh?

The space would run out much faster going south than going north. Development would get more expensive the closer it got to Toledo than going out into the open spaces north of Detroit.

I read a paper back in college by some urban planner back in the 60s or 70s pressing Michigan to create satellite cities around Detroit to keep the sprawl from running away. Toledo and Ann Arbor effectively did that to the south and west, but Flint was too far away to the northwest, and there's virtually nothing stopping it directly north until Saginaw.

[Steely Dan]

Downtown Detroit to Toledo: 53 miles

Downtown Detroit to Flint: 57 miles


Doesn't seem terribly different.



Crawford's theory of the relative undesirability of the downriver communities being the reason seems more plausible to me than the location of Toledo, a city over 50 miles away and in a different state.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Downtown Detroit to Toledo: 53 miles

Downtown Detroit to Flint: 57 miles


Doesn't seem terribly different.



Crawford's theory of the relative undesirability of the downriver communities being the reason seems more plausible to me than the location of Toledo, a city over 50 miles away and in a different state.

There are more impediments going south than north, which you can see here: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3572....89z?entry=ttu

The sprawl is evenly spreading north, but there isn't that same broad boundary to the city going south. The urban footprint going south is also much closer to Toledo than the one going north towards Flint.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The urban footprint going south is also much closer to Toledo than the one going north towards Flint.

This 2020 UA map indicates otherwise:

[iheartthed]

I think this is the paper I read. They correctly predicted, the land consumption, but completely missed the population projection for the year 2000 (predicted roughly 15 million). The author suggested that Port Huron be developed into a densely populated satellite of Detroit: https://www.doxiadis.org/Downloads/D...ST%20FINAL.pdf

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

This 2020 UA map indicates otherwise:

Well maybe it's finally close to running out of gas.

[Wigs]

highly recommend checking out benp's newest photo thread of Buffalo
https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=254902

[subterranean]

The only real reason sprawl moved northwest in Metro Detroit is because of the historic road infrastructure, namely Woodward Ave (M1), the first state road. It was the old Saginaw Trail, a Native American trading route. Don't underestimate the influence of those first routes on the patterns of our current settlements. Roadways were built along these routes that soon developed for commercial reasons and early settlements.

Later, this route became a state trunkline. There were no greater manufacturing jobs in such a dense area anywhere else on the planet as there were from Detroit up to Saginaw during the first part of the last century.

Most people in this forum know that some very nice early 20th Century homes are built along M1 in the inner ring suburbs, and as you get out toward Bloomfield, there are some pretty incredible Midcentury homes and institutions. Cranbrook School is a great example. I'm sure the wooded areas and pretty lakes played a big role in this becoming Detroit's favored quarter, which must've seemed like quite the escape during the early industrial era.

Downriver just didn't make much sense beyond Gibraltar because there was never anything down there, just a lot of farm fields. Cheap land, but far from the historic centers of activity. If Lake Erie had a prettier shoreline in this area, I'm sure it would've been a far different story.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by subterranean

There were no greater manufacturing jobs in such a dense area anywhere else on the planet as there were from Detroit up to Saginaw during the first part of the last century.

This seems to be one of those “superlative” claims which have very tenuous support.

Detroit to Saginaw is probably what, 100 miles away? You mean to suggest that this stretch is considered “dense” and that there were more manufacturing jobs in this somewhat sparse stretch of territory than anywhere else on planet Earth in the early 1900s?

I can’t imagine that this is true.

[Crawford]

It probably isn't true. Germany's Ruhr and England's Midlands had greater population and were probably at least as industrialized. NY + Philly didn't have much heavy industry but had a lot of manufacturing and were vastly more populated. Chicago, too, had to have more manufacturing.

But it's almost certainly true for auto manufacturing.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by subterranean

Downriver just didn't make much sense beyond Gibraltar because there was never anything down there, just a lot of farm fields. Cheap land, but far from the historic centers of activity. If Lake Erie had a prettier shoreline in this area, I'm sure it would've been a far different story.

Yeah, there's no way that a county like Monroe right next door to the most populous county in Michigan and with like 25 miles of Lake Erie shoreline stays as relatively undeveloped as it is if that shoreline was highly desirable.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Yeah, there's no way that a county like Monroe right next door to the most populous county in Michigan and with like 25 miles of Lake Erie shoreline stays as relatively undeveloped as it is if that shoreline was highly desirable.

I believe much of the Erie lakefront in Monroe County is protected land and owned by the state. Also, Grosse Ile is one of the most expensive communities in Wayne County. It's located at the mouth of the Detroit River in southern Wayne County.