At Street Level is a series of posts talking about individual cities unique and often bizarre built environment and what that actually means for the people who live there.

Detroit has undergone a huge amount of change in the last few decades, (and even in the last few years), and that has left it with some of the strangest urbanism in the country. A few things I like to keep in mind about Detroit to give you some background on the city.

The City of Detroit has over 600k people and metro Detroit is actually over 4 million people, meaning that under any consideration, Detroit is still a major American city, contrary to popular belief. In recent years the city has undergone a transformation and a revitalization of its central districts (namely, downtown and midtown, with less development the farther away from these neighborhoods that you travel). At it’s peak in the 50s, over 1.8 million people lived within the limits of the city, meaning that the area was meant to hold a much larger population than it currently does. This manifests itself strangely in the urban form of the city.

Also, while Detroit itself has undergone a heavy population decline in recent decades, its suburbs are still strong and many are wealthy and prosperous. Many of the people who left Detroit didn’t move to different metro areas, they simply moved a few miles north or west to the suburbs.

The observations of Detroit at Street Level:

1. The city is over 140 square miles in size, making it a relatively huge city. However, most of the area is squarely suburban in scope.

2. It’s actually quite shocking to see just how many structures in the city have been abandoned and blighted. The blight is present throughout the city in almost every neighborhood and in the majority of blocks.

3. Some neighborhoods and blocks have more blight than others.  There may be a block with 20 plots of land for housing which used to be a typical suburban neighborhood street and, for example: 9 of the houses are blighted and need to be torn down, 6 houses have already been torn down, and 5 houses are actually lived in. Some homeowners have used the situation to their advantage to buy the adjacent vacant lots and turn them into large side-yards. IF the neighborhood ever returns to a normal housing market, this strategy will add huge value to their properties.

4. How blighted a neighborhood is inversely tied to how much money is concentrated within the neighborhood.

5. In some neighborhoods of the city, so many houses have been torn down, the neighborhood looks downright rural and returned to nature. You may see a few houses in the distant blocks, but most of the neighborhood is open field and wooded areas. These areas are also shockingly close to the downtown. You would never believe that you are literally a mile or two away from a downtown of a major metropolitan area. It feels like you’ve been transported to a small town hundreds of miles away.

6. The blighted neighborhoods are actually incredibly close to the formerly wealthy parts of town. For example the small neighborhood of Indian Village on the eastern side of the city is a neighborhood with stately mansions and huge front/backyards. Yet its no more than a block or two away from the blighted and abandoned areas surrounding it.

7. The infrastructure still exists in these blighted neighborhoods. The homes have been torn down, but the roads/sidewalks and (probably) the underground infrastructure of pipes, electricity and sewer still exist. If these areas were built up again this infrastructure would probably make it easier to rebuild.

Final Thoughts: The urbanism of the city is so unique. Full of stark contrasts. Parts of the city are thriving, while others are literally being abandoned. Detroit is going through a transitional period and it will continue to evolve rapidly in the near future as blighted structures are torn down and central areas are revitalized.