I hate cars.
I’m all too aware that I’m in the minority with that sentiment, and that generally speaking, people love their cars. And I know cars have a major role to play in America’s transportation system. I can accept that. Still – speaking only for myself here – if I could go the rest of my life without ever owning or driving a car again, and still be able to fully participate in society, I would gladly do it.
One of the little ironies of my attitude toward cars is that I come from Detroit, the car capital of the world. Or at least, it was when I was born. These days the big three are a lot smaller than they used to be, but I think that even if the city doesn’t dominate the auto industry the way it used to, from a cultural standpoint, it’s still synonymous with cars.
Which makes sense, because when you look at the history, it’s clear that Detroit was built by the car, not the other way around. Slate recently posted an explanation of how Detroit became the Motor City in the first place. When economic geographers try to explain why cities are established where they are, and why they grow and thrive there, they tend to look at factors like access to raw materials, proximity to markets, proximity to transportation, and the availability of an appropriate workforce. As Slate pointed out, Detroit had easy access to timber and iron ore and was located along major water and rail transportation routes. But the same could be said for Milwaukee, Buffalo, Toledo, Cleveland, or Chicago, and none of them became the Motor City. The reason Detroit did is that Henry Ford lived there, which is one of those factors that geographers and economists have a hard time accounting for, because they’re essentially random.
When Ford founded his company in 1903, Detroit had a population of about 300,000. Less than 50 years later, that number was almost 2 million. Many of those 2 million were displaced African Americans who had come up from Mississippi and Georgia to find work in the auto plants.
And now, over a hundred years later, the car is killing the place.
When I said earlier that Detroit was built by the car, that’s only half the story. It was also built for the car.
Detroit is the poster child for low-density urban sprawl. With nice, wide roads and endless parking, Detroit has physically changed itself over the years to accommodate the needs of the vehicles it produces. But since that’s where my early growing-up years were spent, it all seemed completely normal and natural to me; I never really gave it a second thought. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I figured out that the kind of built environment that dominates Detroit was neither a) inevitable or b) inherently desirable or superior to anything else. But now I know better. I know that real urban density offers advantages that sprawl does not. And a lot of other people are coming to that same conclusion.
The entire metro Detroit region is having a lot of difficulty attracting educated, creative talent from the outside. What firms in the area are finding is that it isn’t Detroit’s, um, gritty reputation that’s scaring people off. No, it’s the sprawl. (And really, do read that link.) The inconvenience and ugliness of it all is preventing – or at the very least noticeably hindering – the city’s rebirth.
I don’t mean to suggest that the entire city has its head in the sand about this. For example, the mayor’s office got behind an effort to encourage urban biking in Detroit last year; Detroit seems like a city with a lot of potential to build and expand a cycling infrastructure, with its flat terrain and wide roads. And until late last year, there was a strong push to build a light rail system running along Woodward Avenue between downtown and 8 Mile Road, the city’s northern boundary. Unfortunately, that project lost its federal backing and has now been repurposed as a bus rapid transit route instead. True, it’s better than nothing, but worse than what could have been.
But neither urban biking nor BRT will change the physical characteristics of Detroit’s built environment in the short term. The silver lining is that with large sections of the city emptying out as rapidly as they have been, it may be possible over the next several years to radically redesign the city to accommodate transit, cycling and walkability.
Maybe.
Place is everything.
Billonions
April 23, 2012
One of the first things I noticed on my first Detroit visit was the beautiful highway system clawed through the city. Zipping along at a comfortable pace and looking up and over the fence above and seeing smoke damage and plywood over windows of house gables barely glimpsed. Later and over the years since, I can’t help think that the building of this highway system broke and fragmented the city much as if a a giant river had changed direction and had plowed new channels through the city.
Cars have enabled a kind of isolationism that compounds the imaginary culture found on television. They have enabled a ghettoing of subcultures of all types, a clustering of heuristically similar types, and a division of people into winners and losers and endless parsing of subgroups therein.
Cars, and the choices we made using them.
Spencer
April 23, 2012
“Isolationism” is a great word for it – a critical mass of cars absolutely works to destroy community rather than create it. What’s so discouraging is that even when people understand and accept this, they often respond by talking about how much they love their cars. We as individuals tend to overvalue the feeling of freedom we get from owning a car, mainly because the feeling is more of an illusion than we might realize.
Eric
April 25, 2012
You may think it was the car that shaped Detroit’s sprawl, I say it was Northern Racism (Don’t Live Near Me if You Have Darker Skin). 8 mile wall ring any bells?
Spencer
April 25, 2012
Eric, I will never deny the role that racism and White Flight played in Detroit’s population decline. But I’ve been in other cities – north and south – that have similar race issues, and they don’t all sprawl the way Detroit does. (Boston is a good example of a city with a history of racial conflict that is still geographically compact.) In many cases, just having a single major street separating black and white neighborhoods is enough for the people who care about those things. It doesn’t always require decamping for the pastures.
noah
April 26, 2012
spencer, read “the urban crisis” by t. j. sugrue. He makes an extremely strong case for racism as a driver of both sprawl and poverty. and not just personal racism, but he shows a wealth of evidence which points towards a great deal of institutional racism.
Spencer
April 26, 2012
Thanks for the recommendation, Noah – I will definitely check it out.
Jon
April 26, 2012
People bike a lot in Detroit, critical mass often tops 1000 riders. and those are just the people who have time on their hands.
Also, it looks like the light rail is going ahead, though just a small chunk to begin with.
The city itself is actually quite nice, if perhaps unintelligible.
Spencer
April 26, 2012
Yes, I just saw that the M-1 group has a big chunk of money secured for the shorter line. That’s certainly encouraging, and I hope it eventually leads to a more comprehensive system – certainly a city with as large an area as Detroit has needs more than just 3.4 miles of light rail, even if a Boston- or DC-style system is an unrealistic expectation.