Community Progress Media Highlights 

04/13/11

Several dozen of America's leading thinkers on urban revitalization will gather in Detroit this week for a four-day brainstorming session to help distressed cities reinvent themselves.

The meeting is sponsored by the American Assembly, an organization founded by former President Dwight Eisenhower and based at Columbia University in New York that tackles some of the nation's toughest problems.

The goal is to come up with new approaches that various cities can adapt to their own circumstances as they work toward revitalization, said David Mortimer, president of the American Assembly.

"The Assembly expects to develop a more informed and successful response to the challenge of population loss and contraction, drawing on a wide range of expertise and experience," he said. "This event will be one of the first major gatherings in the United States dedicated to these problems and to policy responses."

It's no accident the Assembly is holding this conference in Detroit, he added.

"Detroit may be the best illustration of these problems in the United States -- and also the leader in developing coordinated policy responses," he said.

Among the visitors will be several Europeans who have worked to help reinvent their own cities. They include Valentino Castellani, former mayor of Turin, Italy, who helped lead a resurgence in Turin after the city's automotive industry collapsed 20 years ago.

Like many older industrial cities, Detroit has been trying to develop a series of policies to reuse vacant land and to right-size the delivery of services to neighborhoods that house many fewer residents than they once did.

The conference hopes to take a fresh look at so-called downsizing efforts and see whether new policy directions can be identified, developed and promoted.

"My hope is that we will produce a set of well-defined policy approaches to revitalization of cities experiencing serious population loss -- policy that goes beyond the philosophical debate on the concept of shrinking," said Dan Kildee, former treasurer of Genesee County and founder of the Center for Community Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works with cities on vacant land issues.

He added, "This assembly is a deeper dive into the planning, development, social and economic approaches that will place these cities on a path to stability -- and ultimately on the path to prosperity."

The conference is not open to the public. The conference will be held from noon Thursday to noon Sunday at the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel. Much of the work will be done in private sessions.

The people attending represent a broad range of expertise, including urban planners, economists, demographers, social scientists, government workers and more.

"I know that sounds a bit wonky," Kildee said. "But the plan is to move past the conceptual and develop a new policy framework for cities."

Full article can be found at Detroit Free Press Online: http://www.freep.com/article/20110413/BUSINESS06/104130345/0/Opinion06/Urban-revitalization-forum-brainstorm-ideas-cities?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Article Written by: John Gallagher