A design to save American cities
When Brent Ryan started doing academic research on Detroit, in the 1990s, he was immediately taken aback by the city’s plight: derelict commercial buildings, burnt-out homes and whole neighborhoods being abandoned. “I was really struck by the amount of physical decay I saw there,” says Ryan, the Linde Career Development Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “It was incredibly troubling to see a huge city laid to waste like that, and we didn’t seem as a society to be doing anything about it.”And that was during a decade when the economy and auto industry were rolling along nicely. Then, between 2000 and 2010, Detroit’s population fell a further 25 percent to 714,000, the lowest it has been in a century; Time magazine has dubbed Detroit the “vanishing city.” It is...