Foundations 19 – Infrastructure Space

In his keynote speech at the Forum, Stephen Henderson presented what this negative development means in day-to-day life. The jour- nalist, who received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2014, grew up in Detroit. After years of successfully pursuing his career in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, he returned to his native city in 2007 to live there with his family. “In my childhood, Detroit was packed with people,” he says. “This has fundamentally changed. When only 700,000 people are living in a city that was built for two million people, you have a lot of unused space. There was a time when we wanted more space, but now everything is empty and we have to ask ourselves: How should we use the space?” The collapse of the city involved not only the car industry, which once made Detroit a flourishing industrial center, but also mismanage- ment. After all, people didn’t evacuate to other states or regions – they relocated to the Detroit suburbs because the city itself failed to offer the desired environment. The people who remained in Detroit were mainly those who could not afford to move away. This led to a vicious circle: The city had less and less money and could no longer maintain its infrastructure – which prompted even more people to turn their backs on it. Detroit became the poorest and most violent large city in the USA: Public services and infrastruc-

Many buildings and entire districts have seen much better days. About 70,000 buildings in Detroit have been abandoned.

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