No Single Answer to Detroit's Rebirth

DETROIT-Urban planners believe that a turnaround is significantly more possible now that Detroit is in bankruptcy.

There are a host of ideas being discussed to help reshape the city's future, including transforming vacant city blocks into urban farms and reinventing the city's manufacturing plants into high tech bioscience complexes or centers for international trade.

The city of Detroit has approximately 78,000 abandoned buildings and has lost more than 1 million residents in the past 60 years.

“Every once in a while you encounter a situation that gets so bad everybody has to put their weapons aside and say: 'You know what? It doesn't get any worse than this,' ” says Henry Cisneros, a former Housing and Urban Development Secretary. “It lets people start talking about things that we couldn't talk about before because we can't lose a great city.”

The city is expected to emerge from bankruptcy a year from now free of the $18 billion in debt that had precipitated its bankruptcy filing. The city's emergency manager says that at that time the city will be more capable of providing essential services, such as police and fire, according to the New York Times. From now until next year, the city must find consensus in developing a redevelopment plan for the city.

“After a tragedy is one of the few times you can be trying to reimagine a city rather than just trying to go back to what you were before,” says Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane University, who is penning a book on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. “What you really need is transformational change, not just incremental change to get back to where you were. That's been very important to resurgence of this city, and Detroit has to do the same thing.” See story in the New York Times.