Designing Detroit: How Motown rediscovered its mojo | Architonic

In 2015, Detroit was named UNESCO‘s first American City of Design, before New York or Chicago, before Los Angeles. Detroit, the city synonymous with urban decay and the collapse of the American auto industry. Detroit, with its evaporating population and the highest crime rates in the nation, whose crises have invoked superlative after superlative. Detroit, the city that, in 2013, filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in the country’s history. Only a year later, however, it left that bankruptcy behind and though not yet out of the red, the city’s grassroots creative energy – from bold entrepreneurism to architecture non-profits like incubator Practice Space – has been remarkable. Instead of flight and failure, we talk about Detroit’s success, civic courage – and design. In April, Ideas City, a travelling intensive studio and public conference hosted by New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, took place in a disused Detroit hospital. “The city is in the process of reinventing itself

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