Our old friend, Bruce Katz, has an interesting article written with Jennifer Bradley in the New Republic about my favorite city that I've never been to: Detroit. It imagines (naturally) the future Detroit, and gives some broad examples of what can be done to keep the city moving forward; interestingly, it compares it to other cities that have suffered over the last 30 years form the decline of the auto industry- Turin, Italy; Akron, and Toldeo, Ohio- that have rebuilt themselves and their employment base to some extent. It also mentions Bilbao, Spain, which revitalized itself in ways that are go beyond the building of the Guggenheim Museum there. The economy os only one part of the problem with a city like Detroit (and, I suspect, many other cities still reeling from industrial decline):
Even if Detroit were to rebuild its economy, it would still face a fundamental obstacle to recovery. It is just too big for itself, with a landscape that even locals compare to postwar Dresden. Nearly one-third of the land in the city is empty or unused, and some 80,000 city homes are vacant. European cities faced a similar challenge. After decades of population and job loss, they were saddled with an excess of housing and too much unproductive, polluted, or vacant land. This derelict land was as much an economic problem as a physical one, depressing property values and repelling new investments. So these cities reconfigured themselves into denser communities, recycling polluted industrial lands, laying down new rail and transit infrastructure, and investing in projects that created demand not only for particular parcels, but also for the wider urban area.
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