#CITY OF SECRETS AND DREAMS BOOK SERIES#

вЂњThis meticulously researched book brings to light an important piece of Detroit's complex history. Professor of Urban Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design With meticulous research and persuasive insights, Conrad Kickert outlines how this will unfold, and how it should inspire other American cities on their road from postindustrial decline.' вЂњIcon of industrial America during the first half of the twentieth century, Detroit is poised as archetype of urban reinvention during the first half of the twenty-first. 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. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistentlyВ yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. 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. 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.

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.

#CITY OF SECRETS AND DREAMS BOOK SERIES#

Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. 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. 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. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit.Дowntown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth.

City of secrets and dreams book