Detroit: urban crisis, reinventing cityness and the role of the public

Detroit: the images and numbers of the crisis of a city and an economic system have fed up the pages of local, national and international news during the last two years. In fact, the city has become the symbol of how a city can 'die'. Actually this situation is not a recent one, dating since the sixties and seventies. But the recent economical crisis has particularly exacerbated the frailty of this, as many other cities in the American rust-belt. Press and media have grasped the importance of the case, providing chronicles of a dramatic urban condition, but also chronicles of research and projects, public and private, of ways to get out of the crisis. These include on the one side a particularly striking revival of the practice of urban agriculture, which has brought to the light the traditional role of this economic activity in the history of American cities, but also a challenging way to stress the same idea of “city” and the relation between “city” and “growth”. On the other side this process is dealing with the challenged role of public action: where on the one side there is a new federal urban agenda, with a revived central action proposed by President Obama, and on the other a local administration, with a major, like Bing, which is proposing uneven programs to contrast foreclosures effects and dealing with NGOs action in order to save the city.