THE CITY IS HISTORY :

Detroit Urban Renewal Without the Renewal (JODI WILGOREN, July 7, 2002, NY Times)

Like a gardener pruning rosebushes, Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick wants to tear down this city to save it.

Not the whole thing - just the rotten parts. The burned-out facades and shattered windows, caving porches and crumbling rooftops that mar the landscape from the crux of
downtown to the city's outskirts.

But what sets the mayor's project apart is not the pace at which buildings are coming down or the scale of the effort - other cities have become more aggressive about demolishing abandoned buildings as part of revitalization - but the high likelihood that little will go up in their place.

I've been having a discussion via e-mail with a Temple University professor who was quite upset about the generalizations I made in my review of The City in History (1961) Lewis Mumford (1895-1990). He's specifically upset with the suggestion that cities are obsolete. Maybe he ought to visit Detroit or Los Angeles which is about to disintegrate. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 7, 2002 12:40 PM