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Dream City - Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit (Hardcover)
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Dream City - Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit (Hardcover)
Series: The MIT Press
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of
downtown Detroit. Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an
astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an
aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and
restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking
balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in
any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a
nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris.
In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes
of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current
reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of
Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the
materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original
morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth.
Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from
other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city,
and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and
again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own
offspring-the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled-and
modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation.
Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players,
from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and
mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the
most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to
those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert
thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony.
Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many
other American cities have seen a similar decline-and many others
may see a similar revitalization.
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