Status Updates From Reimagining Detroit: Opport...

"You've got to have a culture of entrepreneurship," Charlton told me. "Our challenge is not to disperse people with great entrepreneurial skills. It's to keep them close together because we've got to build this culture and knowledge of managed risk-taking. And that's key to it. I can't emphasize that enough."

“The basic unit of urban recovery is the vacant lot.”

“The city’s main arterial surface streets, such as Jefferson, Gratiot, and Woodward, became nine-lane highways linking downtown to the rapidly growing suburbs. And everyone thought it was a great idea. As it turned out, if you were designing a city to be easily abandoned, you couldn’t have come up with a better plan than Detroit’s.”

“A posh suburb like Bloomfield Hills presents a very pleasant prospect indeed, but if we could transfer the same amount of open space to Detroit - take those same deep setbacks and the same wide spacing between occupied buildings, and overlay it in a Google Earth image of the city - we would find the suburban land use more or less matches what’s left in Detroit today.

the arguments for "daylighting" creeks is interesting

I really loved the chapter on urban gardening.