Author's Forum on Urbanism: Dream City

welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the authors form is a series within on the park bench discussing recently published books by urbanists for urbanists and the producer is dura tadani architect and urbanist uh today we've got gr dream city creation destruction and reinvention in downtown detroit with author conrad kicker in a discussion with interviewers mark nikita and dorian moore next share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback next next slide [Music] so remember go back remember cnu 30 oklahoma city is coming up march 23rd through 26 2022 and it's going to be cnu's first in-person congress since 2019 this is going to be an amazing opportunity to reconnect with your colleagues to learn from some of the best planners in the business who are going to be in oklahoma city and walk the city they've done some tremendous things to bring back their downtown bring them back their neighborhoods and it's really worth a visit and due to special circumstances we have extended our early bird registration to february 15th so uh don't delay go to cnu.org cnu30 next and join renew your membership uh become a current member and save 200 off of your cnu 30 registration check your membership status today at members.cnu.org memberships next and today we've got a great show uh conrad kicker is author of the dream city uh creation destruction and reinvention in downtown detroit he holds a phd in architecture from the university of michigan he's now assistant professor of architecture at the university of buffalo new york and he has two upcoming books street life urban retail dynamics and prospects and street level architecture the past present and future of interactive frontages so he's a prolific author of interest to uh urbanus the interviewers today are leaders of the design firm archive ds in detroit mark nikita is an architect urban planner retail entrepreneur developer and the mayor of birmingham michigan true renaissance man in the detroit area and dorian moore is an architect and urban designer who has been involved in many major projects uh including uh he was a member of the core support staff for the mayor's detroit land use master plan task force in detroit michigan which developed the framework for the long-term evolution of the city and i picked this photo they didn't send it to me i picked it off facebook because it's evidence of what they have done in and what kind of work they have done in detroit this was a evening celebration at the preservation of the majestic theater in detroit the landmark theater which they were involved in i'm rob studeville editor of cnu's public square now you can go on to the last slide um and dream city we're going to be hearing all about this book which is a very interesting analysis of how detroit has come back and the whole history really of the downtown uh um evolution and we're going to have a discussion on that and conrad is going to give a brief presentation on that followed by a discussion with mark and dorian followed by q a from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you and with that i'm going to uh we're going to stop sharing uh our screen and conrad can take over okay i can figure out how to [Music] okay perfect all right all right well welcome everyone as as rob uh nicely introduced i'll be talking about downtown detroit i think a lot of you probably have been to downtown detroit but for those of you that haven't when i say downtown detroit this is often an image that comes to mind right vacancy uh you know vacant buildings vacant land it's not exactly true downtown detroit is very different from what you might think this is also downtown detroit this is the downtown that is going on right now uh a very contrasting and odd place right it contains the city's oldest buildings his newest buildings it's the largest buildings the smallest buildings it's gaudiest it's most destitute buildings and really of course it's part of detroit's creation as the first part of detroit suffered from its destruction and now really epitomizes its reinvention two things i want to do in this presentation over the next 20 minutes or so first i want to give you a brief history very brief if you want to hear the whole story buy my book make me rich you know go for that but i just want to give you a short preamble the second part i think is more important is what can we learn from downtown detroit but let's start with the story of downtown which is what the book covers about 200 years of history and 200 years of real tension and contrast in downtown detroit contrast between the past the future dreams versus reality cars the motor city versus the city and government versus business like so many other cities downtown started as a settlement centuries ago french settlement as french settlements do they burnt down in 1805 recording okay but as uh maybe some people should uh um you wanna mark dory and you wanna you wanna mute yeah we're doing it cool all right so um you know a judge comes along woodward has a grand plan learned from washington d.c learned from paris and said i'm going to build a new baroque city uh but as grand plans do they don't get fully built so some of this radial plan you can still see in the urban form of downtown detroit today these are maps that i self-created using historical records are really the core urbanistic core of the book so now we're here in the early 20th century this is when detroit's really known as the motor city 250 million dollars worth in 1911 uh worth of exports every year and the downtown story is very typical right a story very rapid growth and replacement of historic buildings here we go from an 1836 hotel in the top left to national first national building in the bottom right and some of these buildings lasted less than a decade including the building to your bottom left torn down in less than a decade theaters just like every other downtown growth of almost 20 000 seats of theaters in downtown detroit the second largest department store in the country hudson's department store um 17 stories almost 2 million square feet of retail space it's insane and of course skyscrapers yes you know we in the 1920s see the growth of skyscrapers but the downtown story of detroit always was a double-edged sword it was that technology that brought the downtown to life the car that also really hurt here you see an aerial photograph of downtown and the peak of what would some some would consider the peak in 1929 and you see all those real red spots those are parking lots and those were starting to become a real issue for downtown even as the downtown was growing almost 10 percent of the lost in the late 1920s were already covered by cars not planned they just grew the other thing that downtown really was struggling with was segregation the african-american population had tripled during the 1920s from 40 000 to 120 000 but they were all confined in black bottom an area named after the soil color to the east of downtown and yes that included and created early jazz and blues here you see john lee hooker on the street from the 1930s they had their own main street hastings street they even had their own mayor quote unquote and the name paradise valley but certainly not a condition they should be very happy with so by 1929 we see that growth of downtown you see central blocks that hold skyscrapers if you look closely at this map you also see that ring of parking all around and then the planners come in first of all we have uh perhaps the infamous redlining homeowner's loan corporation here's a map of redlining downtown is through your bottom right corner here with all red areas around it which essentially halted all lending and investment so while neighborhoods are deteriorating we have the car coming back and downtown panicking saying how do we stay relevant how do we stay connected here's a highway plan in 1945 and surprising amount of these highways were actually constructed and they're still here today at the mayor of detroit at the time confessed at a federal hearing this is a total gamble we're not sure if this will save detroit these highways or completely kill not completely kill it of course but i think his latter prediction came true planners came in in full force wanting to completely re-envision downtown is a dream city here in the front you have charles blessing sort of detroit's version of robert moses planning a whole new city downtown connected by highways with new new buildings here in white existing buildings and gray if you look closely you'll see not a lot of grey buildings left in this plan gleaming mayor in the background as well this was a public plan mostly hinging on the private sector to fund that was a problem this plan created parts of that dream city here you see lafayette park the so-called upgrading of slums to provide downtown with its middle-class clientele that was increasingly moving to the suburbs the slum in this case was african-american black bottom and this new neighborhood famously designed by mies van der rohe uh of course is a far less integrated place than it used to be the complete demolition of the main street hastings street of black bottom in detroit and replacement by interstate freeways and perhaps one of the biggest issues is the dream city detroit's dreams were not in the city detroit's dreams were in the suburbs increasingly especially the middle class streams this was the dream city the northland mall the first regional mall in the united states created by victor gruen opened in 1954 and while the dream suburbanized nightmares came to town and partially for very good reason increasing confinement increasing displacement of african-americans we have the infamous civil disorders of 1967 that brought the era of grand modern plans to an end so here we look at downtown in 1977 completely ringed by a highway lots of vacancy lots of vacant land lots of parking lots what do you do part of that is grand project a new mayor coleman young coming in with grand projects to save downtown this is partially funded by henry ford ii the renaissance center this completely integrated living working space uh except it didn't really have a front door you had to go in through the parking garage very introverted very uh protected from the rest of the city of detroit there are other projects upgrading public space constructing a mall constructing an upstairs people mover all fair enough all great ideas perhaps on paper but they didn't help bring a pulse to a downtown where all functions were leaving residents were leaving offices were leaving if you can't work and you can't shop in downtown by the 1970s most of these places had closed perhaps living downtown bringing rooftops to the city to help bolster some of this remaining ground floor retail that was on on you know on the streets except these places were stacked on top of huge parking garages connected to the people movers the entryway was your parking garage what would this do to a city very anti-urban architecture with urban goals so here we are in 77 11 years later nothing had really changed by the late 1980s and 1990 downtown was mostly vacant entire towers vacant over seven million square feet of space in downtown vacant photographer camila vergara uh kind of smugly speculated about creating a ruins preserve in downtown detroit that's how empty it was new york times said by 4 p.m the streets of downtown are about as empty as the streets in chicago's loop are by 4 am but this was a turning point a turning point where mark nikita and dorian moore are very much part of a new administration came to town dennis archer more business friendly and really started soul-searching for downtown detroit what could this downtown be creating new partnerships with designers new partnerships with local businesses starting with revitalizing central blocks bit of a rough start because initially that passed that vacancy was still too often seen as an embarrassment that hudson's department store lovely huge but it couldn't be used for anything but a department store so it was demolished in 1998 for a very large plan devised by a business coalition the block itself mostly remained vacant and is only being reconstructed today you'll see that story soon fortunately we also saw this new movement that passes an opportunity following a lot of success in midtown you know a mile north of downtown um you could see an increasing number of somewhat smaller downtown buildings for downtown uh you know means of uh the merchant's row lofts being devised by people like mark nikita and dorian moore is reconstructing these as residential this was really the start of a new wave of investment somebody by very well-meaning entrepreneurs but not many of those very large towers for instance the book tower you see in the back they were really too large to chew on and remain vacant what we're starting to see by the 1990s 2000 is essentially two paths we have this entertainment-led revival if we can't work live or shop why not just have a good time so for instance here we see comerica park baseball park open in 2000 by michael iledge uh owner the late owner of uh little caesar's pizza benefiting from very large land consolidation aided by the city didn't really help street level architecture though the greatest step perhaps in downtown's urban forum was the approval of three mega casinos in the 1990s which now by the way provide 16 of city income that's a large amount of money very inward focused office campuses were constructed so what you see is that slowly the fringe of downtown was turning into its own parasite the suburb but the second wave is very very interesting is an investment in the downtown core campus marshes what you see over here was constructed in the early 2000s and this really helped spur office development including the first wave what i would call detroit's hr urbanism urbanism meant to attract the right human resources this was compuware who constructed an office building in downtown to attract young people what we now call the creative class and the park campus marshes was a precondition for that this positive but very bifurcated trajectory continued on the fringe the heirs of village really continued that suburbanization in the core soho investor tony goldman visits to see the positive momentum happening in downtown detroit his model control about 18 properties and you control the fate of a neighborhood and along for the ride on his walk through mortgage billionaire dan gilbert tony goldman praises downtown detroit says i'm ready to invest i'm going to make this the next soho and passes away gilbert picks up the idea ultimately buying over a hundred downtown buildings and what he describes as a skyscraper sale and in those cases the city gladly steps aside and letting these private interests construct downtown so here we are in 2018 you see that fringe of very large megastructures casino sports stadiums and a core of remaining fine-grained urbanism so on the fringe casinos parking garages office campuses the ongoing suburbanization of the city hostile streets lead to controlled environments for consumption and production in the center dan gilbert and many other developers are creating a true creative class paradise with local art coffee shops local music and even now one of michigan's tallest towers rising on the site of the former hudson's department store this is what dan gilbert calls detroit 2.0 from empty space we find new meaning from broken dreams of the past we create new life but the question i always have and i certainly ask in the book is downtown the place where all of us can dream so what can we learn from downtown detroit a couple of things i want to bring up and i really look forward to discussing with you first of all the role of the past the past has been generally seen as a hinder to progress until about the 1970s old buildings were destroyed because a newer better taller building would come up older streets were widened because a newer better wider busier street would come up progress was always something better until about the 1970s then you know as buildings were getting abandoned the past was seen as an embarrassment something that better be demolished for something better now the past is seen as an experiential selling point really starting to see the past as something unique in the southeast michigan area which really started in the 1980s under people like mark and dora the role of technology the car is this really weird element in downtown detroit the car simultaneously built and bolstered downtown and killed it at the same time there's no detroit as we know it without the car for better or for worse but of course as i said by 1929 already what we think of the peak of downtown there's that ring of parking i hope you can see that map to the top right but even at the bottom point in the 1960s since downtown has grown you can see that in the graph in the bottom left here but that dark red that's parking most of the growth came from parking today 80 of new construction square footage is for cars not for people by the way a very fun kind of depressing exercise to act in your own downtown as well what percentage of nuclear square footage is actually for people to sit and talk to you on the screen instead of park the car but what kind of role do you give the car do you embrace the car you can't deny it by the way even with av and car sharing technology so for instance here on the left hand side is disease constructed by dan gilbert a parking garage but with local art shops on the ground floor on the right hand side are familiar though is the peripheral parking garage the street that is hostile but we're also starting to see repairing mistakes from the past very hopeful progress on the east side of town remember that is where hastings street african-american part was destroyed federal infrastructure investment and jobs act money is now being requested by the governor of michigan to remove part of that eastern interstate loop there's a very strong racial component to this as of course this was that highway that replaced hastings street very interesting to see the type of urban fabric that is being proposed again another thing that i wanted to talk to you about downtown versus the suburb that long period of symbiosis where the suburbs fed downtown as a commercial heart it quite quickly became parasitic in the 1920s when the suburb began to replicate downtown functions like office work general motors headquarters not in downtown on the top right shopping the question is how do you respond to it do you try to emulate the suburbs like charles blessing bottom left here who wanted to recreate northland mall and pedestrianize woodward avenue do you want to emulate the suburbs by creating mega casinos that draw you in straight from this freeway or do you want to differentiate yourself from the suburbs and how urban of course of an academic is this differentiation because who's your audience after all which brings me to one of my final points is the downtown versus the city of detroit downtown detroit never fully succeeded as the heart of all of detroit even in its heyday is the shopping and working center mostly for white detroiters with the city's growing african-american population confined to its own main street when integration came the hollow prize as planner june thomas calls it was a downtown that was mostly abandoned and downtown reinvention is one of very two speeds downtown is going very fast and it's too often though envisioned as its own live work played neighborhood independent from the neighborhoods around it it still struggles to be that common the heart for all of the trade but there is a hopeful future in for instance paradise valley the east side of downtown which hopes to reconstruct part of the eastern downtown to honor its african-american past run by a non-profit conservancy what is then the role of downtown i mean downtown like any city started as an integrated place living then commerce industry consumption culture that top left picture really shows that mixed very well living of course was the first to go away in a time of growth in lieu of commerce but in its time of decline so did all the other function that refocus on living from the 1970s to get that rooftops in to get shopping uh back to downtown that's the wrong direction it didn't help downtown at all then there was a focus on leisure from the 1990s to today but only recently we see that full return to live work play with an interesting bent i guess as i mentioned hr urbanism getting the right young employee to live work and play in downtown that was started by compuwer and followed by gilbert it skipped over the legacy of older retailers that were still hanging on older office buildings and in many ways this could represent the future of what a downtown can be although we really do need to think of how to make this an inclusive future last but not least what's our role in this as urbanist in downtown because usually urban designers in the history of downtown detroit were really out of stack with the larger forces that shaped downtown but downtown was growing sarenin's vision had a city beautiful waterfront but it was ignored as the city was too busy growing charles blessings dream city well he was ignored as this city was too busy moving out ken greenberg had a lovely vision for a series of villages in downtown in 1990 and the bottom left ignored as the city was too busy collapsing instead downtown's growth did what it always did which is accumulate land and capital from the towers of the 1920s to the rather shocking accumulation of land today most of downtown in the hands of only a few organizations like gilbert hillage dte the utility company we as urbanists need to understand and operate within these constraints as we do with the constraints and opportunities of the past technology the region the city and its social dynamics we balance this by bringing a vision to steer the ship in the right direction starting a thinking process that shapes downtown for better and for worse that is the true lesson that downtown detroit could bring to us in other american cities so with this i thank you i cannot thank you and without plugging my two upcoming books indeed so there's a book coming out with none other than emily talan an edited academic book on urban retail dynamics and prospects and then another book street level architecture which focuses on how buildings relate to a more interactive and open city um expect both of those roughly by this summer all right so i'll leave it at that thanks very much excellent all right well terrific that was a good overview conrad as as we know that we've read through the book and we get an early copy a long time because of our help in uh in filling in some gaps for you is along the way and we've been reading it uh bit by bit for for a while now and glad to see that it's in fruition you know it's come to fruition and now that you're out talking about it and uh on to the next ones as well so it's a great overview and i think a lot of people sort of question how we we found ourselves in the position that we are in given a long history and i think uh challenged circumstances of rising and falling over the the many many years uh and i think it's a good summary of of really where where we've gone and it's evolving quickly even beyond this now so uh as you would say uh your your book is is now needing a second uh a a second uh uh sort of part two just to fill in all the blanks that have happened since uh since then and of course post post covid we uh imagine all kinds of of interesting things so so great great overview and we're glad to hear the story told as something that dorian and i have lived for 30 30 plus years now so um so anyway uh i will um by the way i'm mark nikita dorian moore we have a few questions here and i guess we'll uh we'll start kicking them off thanks for the the presentation conrad the um the thing that jumps out at me is i'd like to know what your motivation was to do the book in the first place i mean it's very interesting it's very analytical from an academic standpoint so why why do you want to do it this brings me back to 2003. and i i may not have mentioned this i'm originally dutch so you know i come from an environment where even the most mediocre history is preserved you know with a fine-toothed comb i come to downtown detroit and i ride the people mover and i ride around and i'm thinking what on earth is this place there's these gorgeous gorgeous buildings and completely empty what is going on i remember a lady of the people movers said who are you and what are you doing i said i'm from hong kong dre i'm like i'm here to go see and you know i'm just of the mindset when i don't understand something i gotta figure it out so that was part of it like i just had to dig into this story i started a phd at michigan and in detroit was one of my case studies and you know when the phd was ongoing early 20 20 teens uh you know downtown was still a really bad spot a lot of vacancy so my story was really how did it come to fall and then as i started writing the book as i was writing the book all of a sudden buildings left and right were being snapped up reconstructed all of a sudden this very yeah how do you call a very similar aesthetic came up to a very specific audience right it's sort of me you you know creative people uh well-to-do people hopefully um so i thought man i am in the middle of history so how do i describe this terrible fall and then this wonderful rise as well but yeah i'm a designer i'm an urban designer so i didn't just want to tell a story i wanted to show what it looked like on the ground hence that mapping series right i really wanted to show you know by the 1920s there was already a ring of vacancy around downtown no one knew that people always said oh man the 1920s that was the place was hopping right yeah parts were parts weren't right so to show how some things grow some things decline and how that's actually in lockstep right that's really what i wanted to study and that really helped me get to that answer it's like man how did it grow how did it fall so deep you know because for a big abandoned building it first has to be constructed it first has to be there and then and then it has to be abandoned right so two things must have happened so it was real nice to find those two things happening indeed yeah one of the interesting things for people who get a chance to read your book are the maps that are in there and one of the things that um you know i noticed is that you go through and you document you know what was developed what was demolished and what replaced what was demolished throughout all the different eras of the development of downtown yep so that was part of this that's how for instance i came up with these statistics right he's like what's the square footage of downtown uh definitely a labor of love long evenings were spent on that right but the material is all there this could be done in any downtown you know there's a wealth of historic mapping out there from the 1850s to today and actually surprisingly downtown was very well mapped throughout its time well into the 1990s and then i started relying on different records but yeah what you essentially saw is that up until about the 1930s if something was demolished you got to remember consensus was out with the old in with the new it was replaced by something 10 times as large right 10 times as flashy as around the 1930s when you know when something was demolished increasingly it wasn't replaced at all that was a parking lot now there's a holdover yeah something will come up come along any day now by the 40s and 50s when something was demolished it's like oh man that's gone that's that's a bit of a shame you know we're not sure if anything's going to come back um by the 1970s i said the past was an embarrassment if something was demolished well great that's an eyesore gone only really i mean you know this better than i do is by the 80s or so when something was demolished with people stand up saying hey stop doing that right this this is worth saving don't do that this is historic urban fabric and for anyone that knows southeast michigan it's unique you know this stuff isn't isn't readily available in most other places yeah i think that's a that's a very good point one one of the things that i think that's that's important in this discussion and this story is is how you know the story of detroit is in very many ways it's the story of american cities right i mean there's so many parallels to cities all across the country um specifically the midwest and the northeast cities particularly you know from buffalo to cleveland to indianapolis to even denver and them in the amount of demolition for cars for parking i mean i saw a picture not long ago of dallas you may have seen it i'm sorry denver um that is incredible it shows the amount of vacant land baseball i should say parking lots in the historical elements of of the old city and of course many of those lots are now with 80s and 90s buildings you know built in in more or less recent decades but there was a time where there was a significant amount of demolition in a place like denver which a lot of people think of as a newer city but yet its historical city was really erased largely other than a few area larimer square and lodo and such so this is the story of the american city for the most part although i think it's important to recognize that detroit as you have in this book and i think in a lot of people over the years you know that they talk to us about our experiences in detroit there's a distinction and there are definitely things about detroit that are different than all of these other cities that experience many of the same things and and it's it's about when we grew how much we grew how big we were how wealthy we were because of the auto industry the one industry town nature of of detroit um you know being very very focused on automobile and how much it how much it uh it gained uh a value and importance in the world but the other thing i think it's really key and it goes to the issue of this idea what you just mentioned is how much great sort of things they're still here is um is really about when we prospered as a city the times that we prospered were good periods not challenging periods so we prospered in the late 1800s with not with the auto industry because of other things and a lot of great architecture was built down brush park all of these places we prospered significantly as the auto industry grew so from the teens to the depression for that 15-year period unbelievable amounts of stuff that happened here including all the towers that we talked about happened in that period for the most part and then post war after world war ii the incredible amount of money that came into detroit because of the growth of the auto industry and such again built convention centers and towers again and all these things so these periods of of significant growth but gave us a foundation and sort of the bones to work with which i think are really really key which leads me to which is one of the differentiating factors i think that's really quite important that other cities may not have experienced quite in the way that detroit did um and and and the size that we were as well at one time fourth biggest city in the country and nearly 2 million people in the city proper um in the in the 50s but it leads me to one of the questions because the historical you mentioned the fire of the early 1800s and the woodward plan which is the foundation of much of what we live with um in at least in the downtown and because your book is kind of focused on the downtown core specifically the woodward plan was a grand plan in in 1805. you know based on radial streets and baroque planning and all this and london's plan and such so um what do you think the uh the foundation of that in the existence of that plan how do you think that affected in terms of the block the street the buildings the architecture of the public spaces that we have as a city based on that plan because it was quite foundational and it's still very much existing how do you think that factored into i guess the sort of the prominence and the and the decay and abandonment that we have if if if at all because it covers a lot of those fundamental points of black street park you know buildings what have you that's a very good question i'm i'm a fan of that plan but not many people were i mean augustus b woodward was a weirdo that doesn't help so you know people didn't like him personally but and he had this massive plan imagine it's 1805 your town's burnt down some dude shows up from dc and says no no no don't rebuild yet i got a plan i gotta play just give me some time took him over a year to devise this plan and people were like really it was way too big uh and then very slowly did it start filling in and frankly when detroit really started growing again is the thing was cast aside so that's why a very small portion of a plan was implemented i think it's a very interesting plan if you think about streets like washington right so there's these very wide streets that he envisioned because he had a grandiose plan those are now beautiful hybrids between the street and the park right it's recently recreated as a very nice sort of parkway there's a lot of very striking vista terminations in this plan which as true urban designers we love right it had a hierarchy of streets in the plan which is unique for a grid in an american city which tends to not have a hierarchy of streets so you have the main woodward avenue uh named after himself of course right um you have these beautiful very enclosed parks like uh capitol park right is very very nice that really create an urban quality that would not otherwise have existed wider streets as i mentioned are good and a bad thing as well the 1950s the modernists picked that up saying oh we should widen all the streets anyway what a great idea actually from the 1920s onwards already and people did criticize that it has a lot of angles in the plant which can create a bit of confusion right i mean from a legibility perspective mark and dorian can find their way i can find my way but the poor tourist that has to walk around like you know i turn all these 10 degree angles where am i what's going on i mean that can also create a nice sense of mystery as well the blocks were decently sized i mean they allowed for the construction of the hudson's department store second largest in america so that certainly did help but even what you find is that that block structure was eroded over time especially during the modernist era right blocks start to get consolidated because they're too small for parking garages and stuff like that that became a little problematic so what i find interesting is just that power of an original plan woodward was able to do whatever he did being as disliked as he was because there was nothing there the only place he could do was on government land where his plan came to fruition was only on government land so he had full free reign to do it whenever he encroached on private land is when the grid continues essentially so he has this very precious bit of baroque urbanism in the center where of course none of the original buildings that woodward envisioned still stand but the structure remains right that structure still mostly stands as i said broad avenues terminated vistas grand circus park beautiful beautiful space was supposed to be a circle was a half circle doesn't matter you know still looks very very interesting so i would invite anyone to go visit downtown detroit and see the merits and the drawbacks of of that plan um i think i summed him up hey mark dorian what do you think no good no that's a good it's a good summary i mean i think there are definitely you mentioned the positives and negatives and um and i think that that with any complicated plan like that it does lend itself to being for for newcomers lend itself to being um a bit distracting and concerning as far as getting around but but i think on the other hand i think you pointed out the important thing is that it actually is dynamic and it allows this layering which i think is really quite um pleasant and the terminated vistas and then these sort of pocket parks that happen that i think have been very very beneficial to establish sort of these little neighborhood hubs you know the harmony park the capitol park the grand circus park and of course campus marshes all have been a great sort of ebb and flow of the downtown where you have 50 story buildings and then a park directly adjacent to black sober similar two blacks over similar and that that come that i guess that that complexity of uh of solid and void if you will it has been i think a really unique factor in our downtown core which many cities really don't have right capital park i think uh just to bring to your point that was one of the places i was in 2003 i was like this is one of the most beautiful urban spaces i've seen in north america why is this all empty right and and you know that this is one of the later ones to get fixed up right gilbert was mostly working to the east other developers picked up capital park and yeah if you see it today it's unbelievable it's really really nice completely fixed up and it really turned back to me to it's to its former glory good and bad right i mean because it had the elderly living on the east side artists living on the west they're no longer there anymore but uh the space of the park is is grandiose really nice i often tell people uh when they when they when we tour people around town that i i consider that one of the best public spaces in in the country and it's just a phenomenal urban uh room that is is by way of all the elements that make those places special it's uh it's pretty uh pretty rare and unmatched by most places in the country i think yeah and i think one of the um important things that it needs to be brought on i don't know if you mentioned it or not but that was the site of the state capital at one time so the the grid itself has created this situation where the demolition of a structure created one of the best you know urban spaces in the city and that brings me to just another question that i had uh you touched on lessons learned and and from a urban design standpoint because the the plan is so different that that may not be uh easy to to quantify but were there any like revelations that you you had in studying the the plan of the city or even the development of the downtown that you said oh wow this is really something different that may or may not be applicable in other situations i always call downtown detroit sort of american uh downtown amplified so there's a lot of things that have happened in other cities i think downtown is unique just in the sheer level of abandonment it had which actually in hindsight also to get back to mark's point is the savior of it you know there's a unique collection of art deco architecture why because from the 1950s 60s the private market had completely collapsed so in other cities that had even more of these towers they were replaced by something else right here they were not they were kept uh poorly but you know they were kept uh which now of course is really really great it's great built fabric uh to to renovate as well you know these sort of classy towers nice thinner towers they're great to put to other use as well versus the 1950s 1960s far deeper floor plate much harder to do as well so in that sense detroit's quite unique but there's a lot of other midwestern cities out there that have a similar condition as well same thing goes black bottom it was you know heart-wrenching to to follow that history but most other american cities had similar districts you know lives and work in cincinnati the west end and cincinnati tens of thousands of people kicked out for a highway for urban renewal so i i still think that there's a lot of lessons in there that are applicable to other cities i will say is that sort of accumulation of land and most of downtown in the hands of like six six organizations that's pretty far reaching right now like which other downtown has most of its historic urban fabric owned by one mortgage billionaire uh and surprisingly i hope we'll have that discussion you know people say oh we want a dan gilbert right where's our billionaire to buy up the whole place that's for better or for worse you know that's that's not always a good thing uh very risky from a development perspective what if dan loses interest uh or he finds another venture who then owns most of downtown right um so but i still maintain it's it's american downtown amplified let's just leave here one one thing i think is important uh you might want to get to the q a yeah uh soon you know you can go back to a discussion if you want but yeah no i i think we were just going to jump there i do i do want to make one comment based on what you just said there conrad is the idea that um we just we need to be clear also about what what we're talking about when we say downtown because i think one of the things that is oftentimes unclear is the downtown core is what much of what we're talking about which is really just the um you know the area between uh the freeways let's say a mile square but uh the way we sort of think of the downtown now and it's grown over the last 15 20 years is the great what we call now the greater downtown which incorporates midtown which is immediately north and it also incorporates new center eastern market the riverfront court town and a few other peripheral peripheral areas so i think we just want to be clear about what we're talking about with the downtown as well as the greater downtown because there is a a broader collection of of things which include cultural residential you know all a number of things that we're kind of not talking about because we're focused on the downtown core and i just wanted to point that out because it's an important i think uh important factor absolutely you just i have to focus on something because those absolutely took a long time to make i still wanted to sleep at night so some people would say well i live downtown but they actually live in midtown which many people consider downtown so anyway it's just a sort of a clarification note so we had a number of questions that have come through um i i think there are a couple of couple of things right off the top it would be great great i'll uh uh i'll i'll bring up the question but i'm sure dorian can answer better than me even uh one of the questions was about these suburban type developments around the perimeter uh the casinos the dte energy area the uh the stadiums you know these large sort of uh mega multi-block project developments that really are the kind of surrounding the down you call it the fringe it's sort of the perimeter of the downtown core um one of the questions is where do we see these going over time and is there an opportunity to make them more urban more pedestrian oriented which they're generally not and more integrated into the fabric of things and we're seeing a little bit of that with dte in the in the creation of the new park there um uh and and and beacon park and in a couple of other areas but it is a challenging uh aspect and it's a it's a good question so one of the things sorry yeah dorian go ahead no i'm just saying go ahead i think we want to hear your perspective on that look it's hard right now you have to give utility company dte some credit they came around a little bit right so they created a park once they saw the tremendous success in the core of downtown they said oh maybe we should do the same thing so they created their own i think they uh they went quite overboard where they said oh it's the second campus marshes look it's a you know it's a lovely park to to the northern side of their of their campus i really hope they see the positive momentum so that perhaps dte that that part of downtown can really kind of become more urban on its own casinos are more difficult you got to remember the model of a casino is to enclose you to switch off the lights to switch off the clock you know you got to stay in you got to spend some money the same goes i mean concessions are incredibly valuable to sports franchises so why would they send you out so so the larger sports stadiums i maintain are difficult that said if you think about say a place like navy yard in washington dc where they really program a stadium to do more than just sports games which i think detroit's doing as well you know that is the only way to get those places to spur urban activity but i maintain that they are very problematic i'm in buffalo right now we're having discussions let's bring the stadium downtown and all i'm thinking is oh my god please don't you know because they're so difficult to make work you cannot run a restaurant on 10 evenings a year you know it just doesn't work so places if you look at the riverfront of cincinnati they're struggling even with two sports stadiums bookended on either end very very difficult so for some of these larger uses i do not have an answer again navy yard i think has part of that answer program it makes sure that there's urbanism around it that kind of supports its own activity jane jacobs primary and secondary uses right get your big primaries in there get your anchors in there but make sure you got a lot of secondary stuff that kind of runs its own that's the spirit of the city yeah those large those large projects um as you said i think dte has done a pretty good job of trying to work towards something better and they have plans for mixed-use housing and some other things that haven't been implemented around the park you know but that's part of their thinking so that could have a future i think the casinos because of their nature are generally introverted as you know that's the nature of their business so they tend not to have really any external activity and they likely will not anytime soon um although i see uh the uh the renaissance center of course has been working hard and putting really literally hundreds of millions of dollars to try to become more of a good neighbor as you stated when it was built it really wasn't and hasn't been for a long time but it is it is considerably better than it was and i think their intention is to try to become even better um and then and then there's the stadiums which i think to your point the first stadium downtown the comerica park is really very much not very contributing outside of games but the ford field which was done in 2003 is actually much better in the regards where it's an integrated historical building plus it has mixed use it has some retail and it does have office uses in there so it's it's active in on a daily basis and there is uses uses on you know throughout the year outside of the 10 times or 15 times if there's an event at a at a stadium an nfl stadium and then of course now the new little caesars arena which just opened recently has similarly retail and office and really an urban edge where the arena is tucked behind and it's far more urban it's actually i would argue it's probably the most urban arena in america right now um in terms of the way it addresses the street it's not perfect but i think it's considerably better than most arenas by a long shot so um i think we're moving in the right direction of recognition of these issues and addressing them so we had another question too just off of the off the board if you will yes there's a question here please discuss your opinion about new concepts in urbanism specifically urban farms and vacant lots tiny homes land trust cycling and scooter and pedestrian mobility and that actually ties into another question which is about the green aspects because i think when we talk about urban farms we talk about green you know green infrastructure in the in the transition of some of the neighborhoods addressing the urban farm conditions which detroit is a leader in that regard but another question comes in is how does how do these sort of urban parks downtown lead to some of the urban farms or the other parks that are out and then how does that become kind of a green infrastructure that is kind of working its way through other parts of the neighborhoods and throughout the city as a potential asset so those are sort of two questions that come from uh from the comments that i think are somewhat tied together and i think are worthy of discussion one thing off the top of my head is uh the the joe lewis greenway um which is of course 30 miles throughout the city that is under construction right now and uh and we'll tie together a whole series of things like like the um the project in atlanta the beltway in atlanta yep yep so that i completely agree detroit is quite unique with that so there's this is the beltline in detroit it's currently under construction great project it is connected to downtown via the riverfront you know a pathway that's quite nice you know that's infrastructure again that is very desirable it allows people to live healthier lives you can now bike quite a bit you know i should be doing that but you know you can now do that in detroit as well urban farms are of course very very different i mean look i have a mixed view on urban farms i think they're great at growing community you know for people to come together grow community be as a social space growing food is a different story you know are we going to completely change our food infrastructure around uh you know usually smaller up to full block size community gardens i'm not sure but i do think they are really excellent at bringing a community together downtown is weird that way you got to remember there's not no such thing as urban farms other than you know the small ones north of dte because it's hard to describe downtown as of now as sort of a coherent residential community right the urban farm conditions really happen outside of downtown not far outside by the way you know if you think of like cork town brush park these are areas right outside of downtown there's a real strong in terms of the transect it drops fast right in detroit it goes from towers a little bit of missing middle not much you know and then boom neighborhoods um so that's that's very much a neighborhood question what i am happy to see is that people understand downtown's role in creating great neighborhoods as well that connection was really lost for a long time so that's why i think it's it's a very important question that is difficult to answer within the downtown itself i will say i think one of the things to think about is that all of these things are pieces that that work together and from the standpoint of building great cities it's what's the connectivity between all of these different pieces that i think we need to focus on let me just interrupt for just a minute and just say that we're at the hour point and we can continue our discussion uh there's more questions in the q a and i'm sure you guys have more things to talk about there we will post the video um on our website uh in about 24 hours and folks who have to leave now can uh check out the rest of the conversation uh when that happens so yeah we can keep talking i'm not going anywhere no that's good i think you you mentioned um and i think it's important to mention the the idea that it and i think it was part of your your sort of summary presentation the idea that that it's downtowns versus the neighborhoods or or sort of the uh the center and all the activity that's going on there versus all the neighborhoods well that's been obviously a focus for many years now to address some of that and and we're seeing some real moves in a positive direction i mean now now you can point to a whole series of uh of neighborhood changes that are actually um some of them are more organic some of them are more um really directed from the city leadership uh you know the organic ones are sort of southwest for example in court town which have evolved really out of uh a variety of different things but but done in a way where the where just the demands and the the law of supply and demand kind of allowed it to uh to grow and evolve but but we're seeing um places like livernois six mile uh mcnichol mcnichols around the mary grove college as well as university of detroit mercy that area really being an area of focus where the city's putting a lot of effort to try to uh not only develop some of the the the historical um commercial district there along livernois the old avenue of fashion is it was referred to years ago and now that's been reestablished with new infrastructure and pedestrian pathways it's all been rebuilt and now the neighborhoods around there the fitzgerald neighborhood and such which are really focused on some of these changes so um and you got you know grandma rosedale you have uh indian village obviously palmer park warrendale uh far east side east english village i mean these are all neighborhoods that are finding some level of resurgence and uh and new development and new infill some missing middle housing some infrastructure changes in some cases uh urban farming and some things like that i mean it's very it's very much uh on top top of mind with civic leaders here and with the development community and where there's an opportunity for some of that to kind of come into fruition and become an asset it's it's actually happening so uh it is it is definitely not the uh 1980 mindset of let's um you know let's just put a bunch of big projects downtown and cross our fingers you know uh it was uh it's it's much more i think aggressive and i think it's succeeding right i think oh dorian go ahead i was just gonna say i i think um from the standpoint of of what what you were talking about downtown versus the rest of the city i think we've seen a market shift from a period of time in the 90s early 2000s even where it was the rest of the city as a whole versus downtown everything focused on the downtown and the neighborhoods feeling like they were neglected and we've seen somewhat of a flip as the downtown is has started to revitalize itself the neighborhoods became the focus and through some efforts from the city and some grassroots efforts these neighborhoods have started to come back and so it's it's it was a chicken or egg kind of thing but now we're seeing both of them starting to uh starting to thrive and so i think that's important to remember also very different dynamics though right i mean i i see a couple you know i'm looking at the q a myself formal urban planning of the past look i mean the dynamics are very different in downtown versus the neighborhood downtown is where the magazines are you know that's where the pictures are taken neighborhoods deal still with issues of decline issues of crime issues of inequality as well which require vastly vastly different responses to me you know to answer perhaps robert's question it's very difficult because it's very difficult answer because it's so different in downtowns versus neighborhoods i mean what you see is that formal urban planning in my view and mark and dorian i'd love to hear your view in downtown uh as as we know it as a public formal urban planning is almost non-existent you know i think there's mostly it is run by private dynamics at this point with larger public interventions that luckily now move in the right direction so if you think of like the removal of interstate 375 i think it'll be a great initiative if it's picked up properly as well and unfortunately i will say is there's a there's a long history of poor connection between public and private uh in in planning it tended to be that public planners envisioned something that the private market didn't pick up or they were too late for the private market that was already doing something they didn't want to do case and point parking for example you got to remember parking the little parking lots those are private efforts um there was no zoning so to get to stephen's question stephen there was no zoning in downtown detroit any of detroit until 1941 which is when the most of the city was was built up so you're looking at a city that was mostly constructed without zoning in place so landrieu's regulations were barely there easy to vary from um as well but again downtown versus neighbors is so different now looking at buffalo where i am right now i often do community projects i think a lot of this has to be that bottom-up approach uh what my dean robert shibley calls place making place making the widest sense of the word so co-creating places with the community there without community support nothing gets built as well so it's a whole different role for the urban designer almost as a facilitator that said and this is me coming from my formal dutch training i think there's tremendous value to the urban vision as well someone has to set out that vision someone has to set out what the future or place could be or it's very difficult to start a discussion as well so there's this balance between setting a path forward setting up a structure and listening and co-creating with the people that inhabit that structure in the end but from a from an urban planning standpoint one of the things that we always have to keep in mind is that the the city has the infrastructure and the bones and and the layout there and so the need for what we can typically consider a three-dimensional physical master plan may not be there uh that need may not be there as much as the need to guide the form and type of development that begins to fill in those areas in the downtown right the neighborhoods are are different and there was a question in here regarding the public space within the neighborhoods and as you mentioned that's a that's a very different approach to planning and fortunately again detroit being a a city that's been around for 300 years we we have some of those public spaces already in place in many of the neighborhoods but i think what we're seeing is that from a grassroots perspective new public spaces the streets and vacant lots are being converted all around the city yes you see a pretty amazing typology of new stuff going on you know when i was in michigan doing my phd i would always get questions of people you know i want to i want to come visit you in detroit i want to go see stuff and in general i would get annoyed at the end so i want to go see a band and stuff i don't care i don't want to show a band and stuff but at some point during my phd i got phone calls no no i want to see the future of the city i said what do you mean well there's some of these projects you know that are very low budget and they can still get going this was the beginning of like the real push for urban farming for example some of these bottom-up retail things that are happening in midtown beyond midtown as well public art heidelberg project i mean there's some really crazy cool stuff that's going on that doesn't fit into the vocabulary that i was taught as an urban designer that is tremendously useful to give meaning to public spaces and really make detroit worth visiting downtown is definitely worth visiting but i want to invite everyone to come over and visit the many many other places a very short point to nancy the waterfront is not ignored at all uh there's a question here on the on the waterfront it's actually a really nice nicely designed currently under construction being expanded uh riverfront conservancy project that connects downtown to the to the rest of the city there's a lot of stuff going on and it happens on this complete spectrum from total top down to total bottom up right uh and there's a lot to learn from that that that's a very there's a couple good points to that to that whole thing i think we should expand on a bit because it goes to this idea of of uh ways that that other cities can learn from what we've done to succeed in succeeding and i i think for one i i want to go back to the to the question or the point about how much traditional planning that it's been done here versus other planning and it ties to its ties to this idea that you mentioned about organic sort of organic organic ground-up kind of development that's happened i i think we've done like most cities we've done both in recent um in recent decades there's been large-scale master plans of a number of things i mean we've had we had brush park which was a big master plan we've had a master plan for the eastern market we've had a huge uh skidmarlins in maryland som did a big master plan for the waterfront uh there's a greek town plan that general greek town area that's been been out um you know there's been a number of these initiatives and then there's in recent years there's been these sort of sub-area neighborhood plans that have been that have been going around the um the overall city outside of downtown the the uh the reality is is that most of those plans like we often see in most cities haven't really taken root in the fullest form of you know maybe as guidelines or what have you but for the most part what's really evolved is this organic nature of building upon the strengths that are already there in many cases ground up development and in many cases this sort of um this sort of uh opportunity uh development opportunity that happens when you know somebody sees a piece of property or a building and a developer team comes in and takes a look at it and many of those frankly are existing buildings that just need to be need to be resurrected from you know beyond as we've seen many times so there there's not a lot of planning necessarily that goes on with that because it's an existing building uh someone comes in and renovates it turns it into something and then it may spur on other developments so that that's a i think it's a relatively common story in cities around the country and i'm sure in buffalo you could say probably the same thing and other other cities and that's what we've experienced here i think for many years that that said there have been a couple of key um i think really important kind of initiatives that i think are good examples for other cities and and that you mentioned the word conservancy and that that either are two good examples off the top of my head and there are others as well but the the uh the riverfront conservancy which actually allowed the riverfront to become what it is today which it's i think i just read somewhere it was identified as the number one riverfront uh in some you know some analysis poll what have you number one in the country and uh you know that's the whole river walk from from downtown or even west to downtown all the way to india to uh you know uh indian village and then eastern market or i'm sorry uh belle isle and then of course to 2000 my 2000 acre belle isle belle isle park the island park designed by frederick law olmsted so you have this whole sort of um waterfront initiative that is based on originally a conservancy which was put together i think nearly 25 years ago which was a funding source put together largely from large corporations like general motors and kresge and others that put together money to allow this sort of initiative to kind of take root in many cases some huge moves like buying cement plants and tearing them down to make way for pedestrian activity along the waterfront i mean these are huge huge initiatives that allowed us to get from where we were in the you know say the mid 90s to where we are now and then of course the the creation of campus marshes is based on a conservancy which is the uh 300 year anniversary of the city 2001 um the campus martials needed to be kind of part of that uh and that was part of the kind greenberg plan and all of that so so you have you have and that's the initiative that still pays for the programming the upkeep and the maintenance the security and the future development and that's still paid for by a conservancy which is a sort of a funding source that is separated from the city to a large degree it's its own entity that allows the campus marches to be also considered one of the greatest public spaces in america by uh project for public spaces they always rank us very high as one of the one of the best uh public spaces in america and i think you go there at any given time and you probably wouldn't argue that um so so these are these are methods and funding sources and ways to do big moves that have been successful and we have 20 to 25 year uh periods now that we can look back at and say here's the success of that and it could be applied to cities all over so i want to bring back one one point that i think robert haley brought up in the q a which let me put on my academic hat here is speeds of change and what i mean by that is you know ultimately we are looking to build cities that are resilient that will stand there for hundreds of years that's part of what i did in the book is okay what kind of stuff stood there for hundreds of years to get back to dorian's question well woodward plan you know that that weird judge in the early 19th century well whatever he did it's still there the buildings aren't right so you have the urban structure that you set up which is tremendous it's almost set in stone then you get the built structure in there and then you get the program in there as well now i will have to say to get back to dorian's other question this was a case study for a completely different research project that i was working on which is what's coming out in my frontage book street level architecture which was what functions were there on the ground floor so i had to sort the built form as sort of the container of stuff that was there in the ground floor uh you know because that is how the ground floor ultimately relates to public space or was there a shop or a house or was vacant stuff like that right i think that's really important that we need to attune our toolkit to the speeds of change in the city of course wouldn't we all like to change the urban structure because that nearly lasts forever right i mean that stuff is is almost indestructible that is fine but it's not always achievable right so then we go to the built structure we change buildings we construct buildings that support urban life you know pps had a region article on that as well those are the types of resilient buildings that mark and durian both build all the time and then we get to the programming so we can't also kind of resign ourselves as well you know it's all tactical it's all organic that's fine but the structures higher up the food chain they need to be in the right place as well so that speeds of change um sort of a resilient urban form resilient buildings with a program that is flexible i think that is the core to where we go to as urbanist some of that has been reached in downtown detroit and some of it has not right but that to me is the funner academic question behind it as well like what stays the same what changes why you know what are just dumb ideas that were never demolished within 10 years uh those are those are fun questions i don't have answers to those that's again the fun part of being an academic i don't need to have answers but i have the right question you know so so stay tuned that's all i can say for that one yeah and stay tuned for sure there's a there's a couple of questions where a couple comments about the people mover and you brought that up in your presentation and i think um it leads to the question and i think another comment was in here about about uh mobility and the changing of mobility in the city and how how that's being addressed of course we know great cities mobility is a key part of any great city any great urban environment and so we not we need to understand sort of how detroit is evolving that regard and i would say there's um there's a few interesting aspects of the people mover of course is is well noted as a as a thing it's been here since the early 80s and and everybody seems to notice it right because it's above ground and it goes around and all that and it's a key element in the downtown but um we all know and those of us who have have lived with it for our whole life or its whole life i should say um know that it really is is very inefficient it doesn't really work and so in many cases it's it's really a tourist um for the most part it doesn't it doesn't help but come it doesn't help on a daily basis i mean we've been working downtown our our whole career and how often do we use the people mover almost never because we can walk to wherever we need to go before before we could wait for it to come and what have you but there's been a number of recent things that have changed um you know over the last few years that i think have been really key to changing the dynamic of the car only city you know obviously you mentioned now motorized and i would say uh we we did uh dorian and i were part of the urban is we're the urban design team on the citywide master plan for the for the uh um for the city of detroit uh non-motorized uh master plan and this was in 2005 when we finished that project and submitted to the city said here you go thinking the whole time that this was going to be one of those plans that we thought was very good and was really needed but it would look it would we just didn't have the confidence it was likely going to move forward to our surprise and our incredible uh um you know pl pl we're pleased with the the outcome the department of transportation really took it to to heart and actually started working on implementation and you mentioned earlier the wide streets the avenues that are exceptionally wide one of our fundamental findings was the streets are wider than we need them to be because they were built before freeways so when the freeways came they diminished the need for the wider streets and ultimately we said you know let's use these streets as is now motorized paths and and there's been hundreds and hundreds of miles of non-motorized paths that have been built in the city since that plan was was presented to the city and um and it's just growing all the time many people consider detroit a bike city now um you know detroit motor city well in many cases detroit rock city detroit bike city right i mean i think we are very much a bike city it's largely flat like the netherlands you know all about that um and because of that the allowance to get around is very uh simple and so there's been that there's been pedestrian increases and enhancements of of the walkability of the city in many ways and then of course we've added the queue line the key of course and one of the things we want to mention about that is each of these things uh i want to go back to the people mover for a second one of the things that is often overlooked is the fact that it was originally envisioned as part of a system that would take you out to the edge of the city and part of the beginning of an overall transportation system that lost its funding so it it's maligned quite a bit but i think you know the queue line starts to build on what that original vision was uh you know with a different mode you know back then we were all you know thinking about these elevated systems but now we're thinking street cars and and so it's and for those who don't know the queue line is a street car right but that's uh that that's uh obviously surface and up up woodward avenue right so it bring it brings me to a question i didn't even notice to one of the out of left field facts that i uncovered in the creation of the book how many subway proposals were created for detroit and its downtown it's insane i mean you're talking the oldest one was 1906. probably the coolest one was in the 1920s because one of his biggest proponents believe it or not was henry ford uh he said oh we absolutely need these things because he already understood is man if i need to get a lot of people to one space you know this factory all at once i probably can't do that with a car so we probably need some type of mass transportation and ford's backing was actually one of the reasons that it failed because detroiters were so angry at the guy because his plant was not in detroit right so it's like we're not going to subsidize this this this old guy's uh plans to build to build a subway because we're paying for it that was one of the many fun things that that came out of sort of out of left field and dorian's rate like the people mover a lot of shade is undeserved it was part of a of a regional network which had to do with the very problematic regional relationships partially along racial lines at the time oh no we don't want a subway because my god someone's going to steal my fresh my flat screen as i'm going to wait for the subway to go back to detroit right that's how it works so yeah it was supposed to be the centerpiece of a regional network i hope it will be discussions about street cars we could probably like leave best to another to another hour and a half uh to see the pros and cons of those systems you know a street car that runs all the way to to to say oak park or to birmingham that's going to take an awful long time for a streetcar right so there should be a sort of a multi-modal strategy there but you know if one thing i will say that that showed me is anything can happen i mean i showed up in 2003 in downtown detroit never in my wildest dreams could i imagine that it is that it looks like it looks today you know it's it's completely changed again i know for better and for worse is it inclusive change not as much as we like it to be but man you should have seen it 20 years ago it was quite something so that seems like a good note to end on and uh this has been in a really good discussion i wanted to thank you conrad um thank you mark and dorian um this has been a lot of fun a lot of good questions i want to urge everybody to read the book i think there's a lot more in that book and a lot more history especially the book is dream city and we will uh see you again and at uh on the park bench um uh and uh everybody have a good day all right thank you thanks mark thank you thank you