Bar your windows, bolt your doors - crime

While taking a weekend in Detroit, I spent the night recently at a friend's home in Hamtramck. It was a beautiful house - one that his parents owned so he didn't have to pay rent (can you imagine?), one that he had painted and decorated nicely, one that had an extra futon with clean sheets for me to sleep on. Everything was perfect, my friend was super hospitable, and the cats purred peacefully as I prepared to sleep. But I couldn't help being a little on edge, and that's because of the cumbersome security door and window grates that had greeted us upon entry.

Boondoggleopolis

The word boondoggle was recently brought to my attention after residing sleepily in that part of my brain reserved for little-used vocabularly - by a commentator on a local new site who stated that the countywide transit plan in Washtenaw was the "biggest boondoggle in the history of the nation."

Wow! Do we get a medal for that? It sounded like quite a distinction. Having trouble summoning the mental dregs that would give me a precise definition, I turned to our good friend Wikipedia:

"A boondoggle is a project that is considered a useless waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy motivations."

I considered posting that maybe, you know, the Vietnam War was a slightly larger national boondoggle than the transportation planifications of the fourth-largest county in Michigan - but my more prudent side prevailed.

A Detroit School of Urban Studies?

Ooh, sounds cool, what is it?

A week ago I attended a forum at the University of Michigan on the question of whether it makes sense to establish a Detroit School of urban studies. First of all, that’s pretty damn fancy. Second, everybody in that room was geeking out over cities, which I found delightful.

photo by Carolyn Lusch--that's me

One panel member made the theoretical case for the new School—planning has traditionally been seen as managing growth, but Detroit is not growing. How does one use planning to manage shrinking or decline?

Another panelist added that Detroit is not on a path of returning the past; rather, the creation of something completely new. We all know that manufacturing in Detroit will never be what it was. Thus, revitalizing is not an appropriate word.

Ok, I’m with you for all that.

But what about…?