I’m borrowing the 10 things concept to build an agenda of thinking for the next couple of months – my New Year’s resolutions, of sorts. Over the next few days, we’ll roll out one or two of these ideas in the hope that you’ll find something of common interest and choose to join the conversation…or even commission a study!
Okay, where were we? Oh, yeah…
Urban agriculture
I think I am irritating others by being irritated by this subject. It’s a matter I am addressing without, frankly, knowing much about it. I am trying to get into the conversation, nonetheless, because I fear it is moving too fast, without challenge, in places where a broader and deeper discussion ought to be taking place.
How is this a redesign problem? I think it enters our agenda because the prominence of the term in the press seems to potentially have the power of beginning to influence land use policies and therefore the design of our cities. From what I am seeing, urban agriculture is embraced to put a pretty label on a failure of leadership.
In my backyard, “urban agriculture” is
- An obscuring cover for the urban impacts of a failure to provide a sustainable jobs and a decent environment for people – it clothes individual acts of survival (a hen house) with an impression of intentional innovation and institutional sanction (urban agriculture) and has a very limited definition of sustainability (what about supply chain integration and stability, for example)
- It provides the opportunity for wealthy to acquire property lost by those who lost jobs in the collapse of American industry and the manipulations of financial instruments
- It is a trendy label for the failure to accept responsibility for the infrastructure you steward as municipal governors, and failure to spend the creative energy to generate a vision and a plan to repopulate, and instead accept the concept of “shrinking city” as a “trend” itself
Weeknotes, January 16, 2010
We’re testing the “weeknotes” concept, basically a report on what we were up to in the last week.
“Sitting there waiting for the economy to get better”
A bit out of context, this is a quote from Anna Wintour in reference, obliquely, to the sisters behind the Rodarte fashion label. We’re using it as a theme, of sorts, for the development of some thoughts about the state of “sitting there.”
Wintour was referring to some fashion houses who, currently sitting things out, needed a talented designer to get things going. Our interest is the implication that even great brands are losing ground. Some assume that it is the financial market holding them back, when it may be other, internal conditions that affect their perceptions and confidence, and therefore slow momentum and affect their position.
So we’re reexamining some of the issues associated with projects that have been put on hold over the past year or two. Then later this month, we’ll join others to explore combining creative financing with creative consulting, and develop concepts to help our clients grab leadership and move things forward.
Activation strategies
We finished the year with some very interesting projects. The subjects were right in our “sweet spot” and were made even more fulfilling by clients who understood that the world of work is changing quickly. In each case, their interest was in new kinds of work settings to engage people more effectively and innovate more quickly. In each case, the workspace became a place for others outside of the organization to participate actively and deeply in projects.
We’ve begun to outline a presentation on what we’ve found as common concepts and principles we’ve developed in this work.
Agile organizations
We’ve been connecting with an increasing number people we’ve worked with in the past and developing ideas together about our next moves. It’s impressive how much the organizational model, for both clients and colleagues, is changing toward a more flexible platform with more dynamically scalable resources.
Directions in innovation
We were pleased to get an invitation to write a paper on new directions in innovation from the leader of a group who was the editor of an earlier compilation on the subject.
Boilerplate
In every life there comes a time for the necessary introductory presentation. We’ve bitten the bullet and are outlining and preparing a visual statement of qualifications, interests, curiosities, accomplishment
Archizoo
We updated the blog with some speculation on some subjects of interest. We’re keeping the list a bit light, perhaps superficial, yet, as we warm up to a deeper exploration of some of these subjects.
Matthew Barney
We went to a presentation and conversation with Matthew Barney at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Barney is an artist, perhaps best known for some extraordinarily interesting and beautiful films composing a work called the Cremaster Cycle.
Barney found an interest in Detroit and is now working here to develop some pubic and private performance pieces, and record them as part of his next major work, a years-long effort to develop an epic “opera” based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings.
Barney showed some “rough cuts” of the work that were extraordinary as images and surprising as Detroit contexts. A portion of the piece takes place in and around a more than 100-year old Catholic church in Detroit’s Delray neighborhood, the former St. John Cantius, now surrounded by a waste treatment plant.
Some other interests
Walking through walls We had a short exchange over on BLDGBLOG about the concept of “walking through walls.” Although the tone for us there was political, we nonetheless are considering further the concept of open, fluid space and how walls in some contexts defend and in others limit.
Red Cliff We’re assessing whether we have the stamina to get out and see Red Cliff this weekend. It’s a five-hour commitment, but the movie is one of the greatest – and the most expensive of all time – to come out of Asia.
October Sky In the meantime, we enjoyed watching October Sky, a good movie to inspire the entrepreneurial, start-up, competitive spirit.
and, over at one of our tumblrs…
The primary measure of the efficiency of the car, and a significant factor in its design and engineering, is miles per gallon. In the physical world, however, there are many other costs associated with the design of the automobile – widths of streets, breadths of intersections, sizes of parking lots and parking spaces, miles of highways, acres of interchanges, rights of way, sizes of storm sewers, etc.
If we consider the costs of maintaining and operating all of this, including its environmental costs, how would the cost/mile of driving a car – more complete Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)metrics – be perceived?
We now legislate fuel efficiency, and the growing awareness of that measure in pocketbook and environmental costs causes a response in buying patterns from consumers and a response from car manufacturers in the engineering and design of their product. Similarly, food labeling, including not just ingredients but also nutritional information and, in some places, distance from origin information, is affecting consumer decisions and moving back up the supply chain to influence even how farms are managed.
How much else might change in the design of the car if all of these other infrastructural and environmental costs were a matter of commonly understood and shared information? For example, what would the infrastructure look like and what would it cost if cars had collision-avoidance/self-guidance systems, for example? Which is more expensive in TCO – technology or land?
What if the labeling on a car had all of its other cost “ingredients” listed? What if I understood that, on this car, the turning radius, parking requirements, and other physical impacts had a 20% higher infrastructural cost than another model?
I’m borrowing the 10 things concept to build an agenda of thinking for the next couple of months – my New Year’s resolutions, of sorts. Over the next few days, we’ll roll out one or two of these ideas in the hope that you’ll find something of common interest and choose to join the conversation…or even commission a study! Yesterday was the strip mall, today is workplace space.
This is the primary measure of corporate real estate cost, occupancy and utilization. It feels as if it does all the wrong things, however.
Work is mobile, agile, social, temporary, project-based, collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and more. Square feet per person implies a fixed condition, reinforces an entitlement, is predictive rather than responsive, reinforces rather than tempers demand, and measures consumption rather than production (that is, the products of the activities of the people in the space).
Most critically, this metric, as the primary subject of conversation in real estate, perpetuates a plan model that is increasingly obstructive to economic growth, and suppresses the achievement of the types of place and space that would most effectively serve the purposes and mission of companies and corporations.
There is a long distance between those who voice the purposes of organization and those who deliver its space. And the language of space makes that conversation even more abstract and obscure.
Now, in a time of significant excess space and declining rents, the language of real estate and the workspace loses even more meaning the longer it is based on area. Changing the lexicon of space, especially for its primary occupants, is a matter not only of economics, but of cities, innovation, productivity, engagement, and satisfaction that ought, it seems, point to an influence on GDP rather than local cost.
How can the language of real estate and workspace planning move from consumption to production and innovation? Which is the greater catalyst for innovation – the concept of what the workplace looks like and how it performs (illustrating and illuminating its metrics), or the measure of what takes place in the workplace (driving the brief that defines the design)?
I’m borrowing the 10 things concept to build an agenda of thinking for the next couple of months – my New Year’s resolutions, of sorts. Over the next few days, we’ll roll out one or two of these ideas in the hope that you’ll find something of common interest and choose to join the conversation…or even commission a study!
Yes, we all shar
e contempt for this one, yet it seems, because of the unstoppability of this universal scourge, that the subject is trite and unaddressable.
However, the collapse of funny money financial instruments, the resulting recession, and now the predicted change in spending habits, all seem to contribute to what may be a fundamental change in the domain of retail real estate, and especially non-urban, non-mall retail.
Others have recently generated interesting redevelopment concepts, and more recently I’ve seen proposals to use rooftops of strip malls for wind farms. It feels, in other words, as if we’re all warming up to address the issue once again, and not as concept, but real necessity.
Throughout my region, the landscape is full of strip malls totally shuttered, or with one or two stores on their way to shuttering. What do we do with this legacy of overbuilding?
It was about a year ago that Jessica Helfand in the Design Observer, offered a list of ten things she’d like to see redesigned. Others posted follow-on lists and, I expect, almost all of us have a list of things, places or experiences that leave us unsatisfied – what a friend recently called our Andy Rooney items. How do these things, we wonder, come into existence with intention and become such a large part of our lives, yet seem to have so little thought behind them?
I, of course, have my own list, and it’s growing. Here are a few things, though, that I’ll try to actually contribute some thinking to this year. Perhaps they are my New Year’s resolutions.
Over the next few days, we’ll roll out one or two of these ideas each day in the hope that you’ll find something of common interest and choose to join the conversation…or even commission a study!
Coming from the once “Motor City,” it feels as if it may be appropriate to begin to think of other modes of transportation now that the “Big 3″ are no longer big, no longer here, or no longer even American. It was a delight, therefore to catch some recent articles on beautiful subway stations, and this review of the broad planning, ownership, design and mapping infrastructure of underground transit in Fast Company.
I am getting more than a little upset about the fascination with the concept of “urban agriculture” as (not a feature of, but) the future of Detroit. While Fortune gives attention to the concept in the continuing Detroit story headlined by Time magazine, I think the leadership of the city ought to be beyond squirming about the abandonment of the city and instead aggressively developing plans and programs for repopulation. To make Detroit a sustainable city does not mean turning its lots “green” with crops, but instead fully exploiting the infrastructure everybody says there is too much of.
While “rationing” health care resounds with negative consequences, the concept of rationing cities and infrastructure seems quite okay for discussion. Beyond last year’s conversations generated around bulldozing Flint, Michigan, there is now an emerging Richard Florida manifesto proposing that the rich should get richer and the poor poorer. The threat of “regional fatalism” is discussed in “The Ruse of the Creative Class” in American Prospect.
The decade of excess in financial and real estate manipulations that became the decade of economic doom was given a not very fond kiss-off in a number of places. The world’s tallest and very empty building was opened with fireworks and fanfare in the midst of all this, quickly becoming the defining symbol of what most expect is now over. I liked the LA Times’ reference to “architecture’s vacant stare.”
The opening of CityCenter in Las Vegas this week had some of the same tone. Something somewhere got me linked back to this 2004 Design Observer piece “Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Heart Away.” Drenttel is writing about the book, itself, in this piece, but I wonder if a sense of exuberance with the Venturi/Brown ideas now, at the end of an exuberant decade, still appeals?
The concepts of “networked urbanism” and “augmented reality” seems to be gaining some significant traction. Related at a very specific infrastructure level, and a sign of the potential in these developments, is the “Intellistreets” concept reported here. I am never a fan of the intrusion of of sound and message where I don’t want it, but the idea of security and energy savings is great. I liked the image of a streetlight system that would sense my presence and increase its illumination as I walked down the street.
Back at Design Observer, James Wegener had an interesting trajectory of thought in “Metabolic Dark City” from Kowloon slums to the Japanese Metabolists and on to MVRDV’s proposed development of Rodovre. Bjarke Ingels popped into mind, since I had just watched the video of his celebrated talk at TED for projects including “mountain dwellings” here. Check out those plans.
Among so many decade lookbacks, I laughed with Mark Lamster’s review of the “The Aughts in Architecture and Design.” His critique of the “scourge of twee” was crisp, and I am grabbing “the infantalization of the public realm” – “Surely the most aggravating design trend of the last decade has been the increasing infantilization—Brooklyn-ization? Seattle-ization?—of the public realm…Who has not grown tired of the post-Starbucks coffee-house aesthetic of irritatingly clever t-shirt graphics, mouldering taxidermy, and mewling songsmiths? An espresso costs more than a martini, and comes with a lecture on soil composition in Honduras. Paging Roger Sterling…”
And there was that economy-driven concept of “delayed gratification” and this article in the New York Times that offered the basis to make a New Year resolution to avoid falling into the condition of “Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process…”
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Three characteristics of leading performers
McKinsey recently reported on a survey of product development companies. The survey uncovered three characteristics of businesses with the best track records –
- They had a clear sense of project goals
- They nurtured a strong workplace-based project culture
- They maintained close contact with the client throughout the project
Each of these factors have an important underlying component of information communication. In our own work, we’ve found that the design of the physical workspace is a significant partner to the operational best practices for success. The McKinsey study reminds us, for example, that visually open and resource-rich environments can be significant contributors to the communications and cultures that lead to product development speed and innovation success.
Clear sense of project goals
A clear sense of project goals is essential to avoiding false starts and movement along unrewarding paths. Without a clear plan forward, the increasingly spare resources that rightly belong to an efficient and effective pursuit of solutions for the client are consumed in course correction. A design strategy, that is, is essential to achieving the objectives of the business strategy design.
McKinsey points to the importance of understanding goals and thinking through scope early in the project. The right start is certainly important, but we think that a sustained conversation about the project and its scope is also important, especially in the development of complex systems.
Companies seeking effectiveness in establishing team awareness of goals and maintaining team attention to scope should look at the places and spaces where the project work is done. A leading energy company seeking a rapid development of product ideas for their emerging entrepreneurial non-regulated businesses found that dedicated project rooms meant more effective team communications. As a result, the teams in these contexts more quickly contributed to market-leading innovations. These spaces provided the visual memory – posted images and documents – that streamlined operations and made orientation simpler, meetings more efficient, and scope correction unnecessary.
The McKinsey study confirms the importance of information access like this. Only 19% of team members in poor performing companies felt that they had the information they needed to dynamically and efficiently manage performance, cost, time and risk in their projects.
Workplace-based project culture
Interdisciplinary team work becomes much more successful when team members have a sense of shared purpose and values, and trust each other to perform excellently in the development of the project. We have found that the most successful companies understand that innovation is inherently social. They design a workspace as a key vehicle to developing a workplace culture that is itself highly social in nature.
For example, a now leading integrated communications company, making its way from formerly separate disciplines of advertising, planning, communications and media, declared that “work looks different, now.” This mantra was their declaration that market-leading innovation and creativity necessitated new operational and organizational models, and new ways of approaching clients and projects.
In order to achieve the cultural integration they needed, they developed a workplace with a counter-intuitive two-seats-for-every-employee concept. The primary “home-base” seats were in new-generation workstations in team clusters. The second seats were unassigned, and consisted of highly varied settings supportive of planned or spontaneous get-togethers for socialization, project work, idea development, progress reviews, etc. These open “social” environments gave the company a very rapid achievement of their new organizational model because people got to know each other easily, learning each others’ interests and coming to trust in each others’ skills and commitments.
Why does this matter? One of the key success factors uncovered in the McKinsey survey was that leading performers had knowledge of the skills and competencies of team members before they were selected to join a project. None of the project teams in the lower performing companies in their survey had knowledge of their fellow team members’ skill sets before their projects kicked off.
The workplace in our example also did away with the “entitlement” model of space assignment. The McKinsey study found that leading companies in product development minimized the distractions from the project that otherwise come from a focus on “job function.” We consistently find that “footprint status” metrics associated with title and function are among the great distractors in lagging companies.
Talking to the customer
We’ve periodically consulted over an extended period of time with both the winners and the losers in the realignment of the automotive industry that has been taking place. One of the factors we’ve tried to overcome with the underperformers is the sense that design is an ivory tower discipline. In these cases, studios have been closed environments where even exposure to other brands under the same roof is disallowed. Information about the customer and the state of the art in innovations that were attracting them was hard to find, and gained only through individual designer’s outside activities.
Proprietary knowledge, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time creations, and vendor integration all present challenges to more open environments for product design companies. Places and spaces, however, that assure the security of developments and the openness of teams yet allow the easy integration of the client in the process are relatively easy to achieve and are important components of leadership companies.
McKinsey’s study reflects other approaches to customer engagement, as well. The study showed that periodic contact to verify and validate customer preferences was a key and differentiating practice of leadership companies.
Where to go from here?
Conventional, functional descriptors of the spaces and places where creative work is done cannot lead to the kind of workplace that will support the culture and practices characterizing market-leading companies. Planning and design processes that shed corporate paradigms and develop a new spatial lexicon will yield a better understanding how people work and what works for these businesses. Workspace concepts generated in this way will deliver early and sustained success in the transformations that generate leadership.
The McKinsey survey confirms some general design principles and approaches –
- Always consider designing information-rich dedicated team spaces, but especially when speed is essential and resources are spare. Access to knowledge, speed of communications, self-correcting conditions and project focus delivers differential performance results.
- Innovation is achieved through an inherently social culture characterized by the open exchange of information and the integration of diverse disciplines. Assure that your workspace has a diversity of settings to support and sustain casual interactions among individuals. Accept that work looks different, now.
- Invite your clients and customers into your workspace. Make places where they can be comfortable and want to linger, and where you can be comfortable that they and other outsiders who need to be part of the process are not inappropriately intruding.
We’ll come back to this later, to reflect more on research we’ve done on places for innovation and some of our recent work on the start-up phases of innovators.
Aaron Renn does a great job at Urbanophile and in periodic articles at Newgeography addressing the conditions and issues that are unique to the Midwest. He is thoughtful and generous, and I’m always appreciative of his perspective.
Aaron is currently addressing “The Detroit Project,” a set of proposals for Detroit by the Brookings Institute and published in The New Republic as “a plan for solving America’s greatest urban disaster.” He offers a critique of the Brookings plan and suggests one of his own. Some of what he addresses provoked some questions and considerations of my own.
Aaron, I am not yet ready to offer an “M=Shaped Strategy” for the city, but I like that you cause reflection. If you don’t mind, I’ll borrow your framework as a way of structuring a conversation.
You open by outlining some of the city and region’s key issues like race and business culture, point to the need for courageous leadership, and adding Detroit innovation to best practices from solutions to similar problems n other places. You then offer eight key strategies.
1. Improve race relations
I don’t think I can address race here without being superficial. With that caveat, I’d offer a sense that the city-suburb divide is no longer simply “a matter of black and white.” When conditions are such that, for example, the students in the city’s schools rank at the absolute bottom in national testing, flight from the city to the suburbs is increasingly by anybody who has the resources to do it.
There is no question that we must repair race relations, and I think that this may be supported by making a different frame for the discussion. Could a broad and rich definition of “sustainability” as a core regional value can be part of this, engaging social considerations in balance with economic and environmental concerns?
2 Active shrinkage
Aaron, I can’t accept your notion that “a lot more people need to leave Detroit.”
I believe, instead, that whatever leadership is here or that may emerge here needs to see the necessity of right-sizing as an obligation to repopulate. This seems almost a moral imperative, a sense that the extraordinary resources that are here – both people and infrastructure – are “wasted” by further depopulation.
Imagination, vision, determination, grit, innovation and more have got to be invested to assure that what has been built will not be thrown away. Pardon me for this, but I imagine scenes from “The Road” when I read your words promoting relocation programs and what might be called migratory unsustainability.
3. Improve the business climate
I really like Umair Haque and his periodic “manifestos.” He sees a great future for business, industry and society, but not from the way they’ve performed in the past.
Today’s article was “The Builder’s Manifesto” in which he suggests that “20th century leadership is stopping 21st century prosperity.” The new talents and ethics that are required now are what he calls “buildership.” Builders, he says, “forge better building blocks to construct economies, polities, and societies.”
But closer to our context here, I like his “Smart Growth Manifesto.” Smart growth, he says, “isn’t powered by capital dully seeking the lowest-cost labour – but by giving labour the power to seek the capital with which they can create, invent, and innovate the most.”
I think what I am trying to get to here is a skepticism about the continued elimination of regulation (we’re living with that disaster) and passing the obligation of taxation to others. This is not an argument for bureaucracy or burden, but instead a search for what really matters and a desire that those businesses who may be here or who may locate here will see their obligation as “builders” and their roles as contributing to growth. Won’t this take shapers – a regulatory framework – and resources?
4. Change the culture
I agree that the business, management, labor, and social infrastructure of the city has to reconcile with its current size and condition. And I certainly agree that business in the 21st century is agile, virtual and collaborative.
But I do not want to agree with your concept that this cultural change has to be done from the inside, that “no one can just tell Detroit how to do it.” Detroit has generations of business, governing and social institutions with embedded cultures and ways of doing things.
I believe that Detroit needs intervention, perhaps with a spirit of mentorship, and certainly with the tough love of urgency, care, and straightforwardness. I like our currently active intervenors. Robert Bobb seems to be doing good things with the schools, and I might grow to like Whitacre and what he’s doing for GM. Neither, I expect, are just telling them how to do it, nor are they leaving them alone. Perhaps the “feed a man a fish/teach a man to fish” cliche is applicable here?
5. Renew Brand Detroit
I agree that the city needs an “aspirational narrative that is authentically Detroit.” A key issue for us right now, however, is that this narrative and this brand are being defined by others.
Much of the press both locally and nationally has Detroit on a death watch. People have a morbid fascination that attracts them to the story, but everybody also wants to keep their distance for fear of catching the disease. I have colleagues who have even begun to take their addresses off their business cards. This is ostensibly a recognition of the mobile and digitally connected world we are in where place doesn’t matter as much, but really is because they fear that their talents and their voice will be diminished once their place of origin is known.
I think the best brands, the “authentic” brands, are recognized for what they are, not for what advertising labels them. If there is to be a new or renewed Brand Detroit, it will achieve its authenticity when everybody in the region begins to hear, understand, accept and repeat the story themselves.
It seems that a leader’s voice is essential to begin to shape the new story of Detroit. That narrative has to be one that is new – a different way of seeing the city – but also authentic – something that people “get” as an insightful interpretation of an underlying but newly uncovered truth.
I like the hopeful sense of your “new American frontier” and the “blank canvas” of opportunity, here. But while there may be a lot of physical emptiness, I wonder if the reality isn’t that there is an awful lot of baggage here that cannot be overlooked. I wonder, in other words, if the new narrative of Detroit has to be transformational rather than original.
6. Pursue targeted industry clusters
I like very much the idea of clusters, especially in the context of their formation around talents and competencies. In that aspect, I liked the Brookings idea that “industry may fade, but expertise does not.”
It seems that effective wooing of new or different industries may be most effective if it follows a reprofiling of Detroit’s talents (and its environment, as I note elsewhere). I expect this is similar to the authenticity of brand.
We must expect that many from other places will look at this city now as the home of gross incompetency in management. There is also the historic perception of the city as home of “labor” with all of its connotations. Together they can be seen as the key factors that drove an industry born and globalized from there to its death.
Detroit is however (hopefully for a while longer) home of generations of people who know how to design, engineer, fabricate, customize, integrate and market stuff. Attracting other industries to “cluster” here may require disassociating capabilities from their connections to automobiles, and changing perceptions of just who the people of the city and region are and the talents, expertise and energies they have.
7. Rationalize regional governance and infrastructure investment
I am not sure I yet accept your argument against infrastructure. I certainly agree, in the sense of “expansion,” but isn’t renewal essential here? Whether we think of infrastructure as potential (awaiting repopulation) or as requiring an essential right-sizing to the smaller population that is and will be, it seems that a grand transformation plan is necessary.
In his annual review of the state of architecture today, Nicolai Ouroussoff made an observation about the direction of architectural talent in a time of little opportunity. He writes that “perhaps the greatest shift of all this year has been a renewed interest in infrastructure. Encouraged by the debates that surrounded the unveiling of President Obama’s stimulus package, American architects, curators and students have thrown themselves into the task of rethinking the networks — train lines, freeways, bridges, levees, ports and waterfronts — that bind our communities together.”
As Detroit shrinks, and fragments as a consequence, shouldn’t the stuff that binds our communities together be close to the top of the agenda?
8. Secure irreplaceable assets
Aaron, you make a very good plea for the preservation of Detroit’s remaining architectural heritage. Recognizing that there is present neither demand nor resource, your argument for a maintainable mothballing is a good one.
If I sustain a value stream around sustainability, I of course cannot argue against the notion of preserving the city’s historic assets. I am concerned, however, that the subject of historic preservation and rehabilitation is not well understood, appears to many to be superficial, is something that is abundant in times of abundance but is a luxury in times of spareness, and ultimately is about particles more than systems.
The city and the region must bravely assert that the sustainability of the region is dependent on attracting the best companies and the best talent and, for them, the quality and design of the urban environment is a key factor in making a location choice. Every time a company uses a practice that derives its facilities with price as a primary evaluator is practicing urbanicide (and, as we’ve seen, corporate suicide), and violating core principles of sustainability.
So, when thinking about the physical environment, we must consider what we do in a broader and interconnected context. Historic resources are part of this but are a weak driver of accomplishment. Every move to build, whether new or rehabilitation, should take place through an informed organization considering environmental, social, economic, cultural and physical systems, and with a goal not to restrict but to assure that the highest quality and benefit can be achieved with the available and integratable resources.
There is some great work being done in the area’s architecture schools, fostered by a faculty made more robust by the practitioners who have little else to do. Ouroussoff article today concludes, “As architectural work dries up and graduate students begin to contemplate what could be a much darker future, the question is: Who if anyone will tap into this wealth of talent and ideas?”
This is, in other words, a great time for this city to take advantage of an abundance of talent and ideas to help shape the city and the infrastructure that connects us and develop what Brookings suggested is “a different kind of city, one that challenges our idea of what a city is supposed to look like, and what happens within its borders.”
Plans for Detroit
