“If the city of Detroit has all these bike lane dreams, well, they’re going to need some educational and participatory resources to allow people to use those kinds of bikes at least.”

What it means

Whether you’re conscious of it or not, moving to the city becomes part of the reversal effort, or what Alan Ehrenhalt called “demographic inversion” in an article this summer in The New Republic. Chicago was Ehrenhalt’s contemporary example of suburbanites moving back to the urban center, a city to which Detroit is often compared, for better or for worse.
“There’s sort of a generational shift away from living in the suburbs to living in the cities,” Kurashige said. “People want to be more environmentally conscious, people are interested in both ethnic and cultural diversity in terms of their activities … I think because Detroit’s population declined so quickly and the suburbs expanded exponentially, a lot of the sense of community was lost. (It’s) a connection and a sense of wholeness that people who are part of the suburbs are yearning for.”
Ehrenhalt echoed urbanist Jane Jacobs and the goals of most urban planners when he wrote about American dreams of a “24/7” downtown, “a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day.” Part of the reason why density is returning to formerly sparse city centers, according to Ehrenhalt, is because “the youthful urban elites” of today are looking for something like this, an experience “vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in.”
University urban planning Prof. Christopher Leinberger, in his book The Option of Urbanism, suggests that the number of downtown residents depends on supply more than demand. If both Ehrenhalt and Leinberger are right, a two-way pipeline between Ann Arbor and Detroit may someday show Detroit to be more than a textbook tale of deindustrialization.
“Detroit is not going to get better without people investing in it,” Palazzola said.
At the very least, a different consciousness will expose more young people to substance beyond the newspaper headlines: organizations like Detroit Summer, the annual People’s Arts Festival at Russell Industrial Center, Friday nights at D’Mongo’s.
“It feels like even in the last couple of years, there are a lot more kids from U of M that are starting to go down to Detroit,” Notorianni said. “You sort of need them to be stewards to the city, take others down and show them around, and show them what this city is all about.”