MONEY

Once fringe greening ideas now key part of Detroit rebirth

John Gallagher
Detroit Free Press

It wasn't so long ago in Detroit that proposals for bicycle lanes, urban farms, mass tree plantings and other alternative uses for urban land were viewed as soft-headed or even harmful.

Downtown Runners and Walkers Detroit group members run through the Dequindre Cut on Wednesday, May 3, 2016, in Detroit.

But today these ideas and others  like them have gone mainstream. The latest example is Open Streets Detroit, which on two Sunday afternoons this fall will close a nearly four-mile stretch of Michigan Avenue and Vernor Highway to vehicle traffic. Neighbors will be able to stroll, bike, skateboard, practice yoga, listen to music, mingle and otherwise enjoy the streets without the traffic.

The event is part of an international Open Streets movement, which involves a dozen cities around the world hosting traffic-free days with tens of thousands participating.

Open Streets Detroit joins a roster of programs and practices increasingly redefining how we use our urban landscape.

Mayor Mike Duggan's administration has blessed the ever-expanding urban farming movement that grows in size and complexity. His planning chief, Maurice Cox, preaches the role of "20-minute neighborhoods" in which residents can walk or bike to shopping, church, parks and other venues. More mass tree-plantings on vacant urban land are in the planning stages.

And the city's growing network of greenways — pathways for biking,  inline skating and strolling — continue to lace their way throughout the city. The Detroit RiverWalk and the Dequindre Cut are just the best known examples.

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This "greening" of Detroit's land and streets represents a seismic shift in thinking about how we redevelop a city. No longer do we put most or all of our hopes on building massive structures like stadiums, casinos and highways. We still build those, of course, but we also pay greater attention to the finer points of pedestrian life, or what architects and urban planners call place-making.

Witness the menu of activities now available in the Campus Martius district, from beach volleyball to almost daily musical performances. Downtown sidewalks now feature a virtual furniture catalog of chairs and benches, a recognition of how downtown workers and residents want to use their streets.

The Detroit office of Gensler, an international architecture firm, recently produced Detroit Fifty, an imaginative roster of ideas to reimagine the cityscape. Their concepts ranged from illuminating iconic structures at night to planting 10 million trees. William Hartman, an architect involved with the project, said the ability to think in new ways about recreating Detroit has been a long time in coming.

“It hasn’t happened overnight," he said. "There’s been voices who have tossed out ideas, crazy ideas, and they might seem to bounce off and fall back to the ground but you look at them and say wait a minute, that’s not so crazy in hindsight.”

Tom Woiwode, who heads the greenways project for the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, echoed that. Part of the reason for the current prominence of such greening strategies is that the public finally has a couple of major examples — the RiverWalk and Dequindre Cut — to the ideas in practice.

This June 24, 2014 photo shows walkers and joggers along the Detroit RiverWalk in Detroit. Time was when the shores of the Motor City’s majestic Detroit River, which separates it from the Canadian city of Windsor, were mostly industrial and uninviting.

The list of people and organizations that have contributed to this new way of thinking about Detroit's landscape is long and varied. It includes philanthropic groups like the Kresge Foundation and Community Foundation that have bankrolled the creation of greenways. Neighborhood civic groups like Midtown Detroit Inc. have made place-making a cornerstone of their revitalization strategies.

And advocates for urban farming, protected bicycle lanes and other tactics have slowly chipped away at the skepticism over the years.

Doubters remain. Robin Boyle, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University, wonders aloud whether Detroit leaders have turned to greenways and pocket parks simply because the really big projects like highways and skyscrapers are just too hard to do now.

"In order to achieve some of their goals, in order to achieve what they want, they've moved toward this piecemeal, smaller scale, more immediate action," he said. "They don't require huge amounts of money, they don't require land acquisition."

And, Boyle adds, all these greening projects taken together don't change the trajectory of a city that still faces significant challenges of poverty, schools and crime.

"To some extent, the road closure idea or the pocket park are small-scale improvements, and I'm not trying to be critical of them, but in the big picture, they are modest," he said.

Those are fair points, of course.  At the same time, nobody is claiming that Open Streets Detroit or a new bicycle lane will "save" the city.

But neither should we dismiss all of these multiple greening efforts as soft-headed or of no consequence. Detroit's DNA continues to evolve to some new 21st-Century  identity, one in which the quality of place and our experience of place will matter a lot.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.