Reactivating Downtown Detroit

Dan Mullen : Yes it could be our motto. Not only do we want people to live, work, and play in downtown Detroit, but most people already want that themselves. Living in an urban area gives you opportunities that suburban areas don’t. You can walk to work, to restaurants, to what we call your “third place.” The first place is home, the second place is work, so where is your third place? It could be a coffee shop, a restaurant, an entertainment event, a friend’s apartment. That motto and model can work in every urban city. You want to live, work, and play and provide outlets for people in all three of those areas.

Stream : When you started this project with downtown Detroit, how did you go about planning this idea of bringing life back to the city center? Did you work with city planners? What process, what methodology did you come up with or test, because it seems to be a very unique case? With Detroit there is a preexisting city center—a very large area—which is very different to developing a new city like Songdo in Korea or cities in China. Here there is an existing architecture that you need to rejuvenate. It must have been a very exciting process.

Dan Mullen : There were a few different elements at play. A lot of it happened organically, just by trial and error, but we also brought in some urban planners, a company called Project for Public Spaces (PPS) based in New York. They helped to activate outside spaces, to brainstorm to really drive traffic to these streets. They’ve done work in Paris, in 150 different cities. They did Bryant Park in New York. They did SoHo in New York before SoHo was cool, South Beach in Miami before South Beach was cool. And a lot of it was just brainstorming creative ideas of how you can drive traffic to the streets. That is what it’s all about, street activation.

In the summertime we took out the park with the ice skating rink and put in an urban beach bar. We took a grassy area replaced it with sand, brightly colored chairs, umbrellas, and a tiki bar. All of a sudden it was packed, from 11 a.m. until midnight every single day. That is just one example of outdoor activation.

Organic urban identity

Stream : From sprawl to density: intensification, that’s certainly the key for many cities around the world. In Detroit one interesting consequence of this low density was urban farming, which is now authorized and legal. Do you think that can be compatible with what you are doing here? Can these things coexist ?

Dan Mullen : Absolutely. The city of Detroit is massive. Three or four major cities—San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston—could all fit within Detroit’s city limits, so there’s a lot of land you can take advantage of. I think there could be an interesting contrast between urban farming and urban density, if these things are treated as complementary. Look at Eastern Market, it’s the oldest farmers market in the country, and every Saturday morning throughout the summer it’s packed with vendors. That is where most of the grocery stores come to buy their produce for the week and where the farmers come in to sell their goods. Urban farming has been growing organically for several years.

Stream : We have the feeling that these difficult years for Detroit—the automotive industry falling, and the like—has forced people to find different ways to innovate and that the city has become a laboratory for city planning. It could be an interesting new type of city, with agriculture inside high-rise buildings. Do many people come to Detroit to see this ?

Dan Mullen : There’s a huge amount of interest in what’s going on here: from the technology boom that’s happening, from agriculture to real estate development to restaurants and retail, reporters from all over the world are coming in to study what’s happening here.

Stream : What would you say is the most unique thing? Do you have a vision or an intuition of what could become Detroit’s specificity?

Dan Mullen : Over the next five to ten years, many people see Detroit booming with continued development and activation. There’s going to be streetcars with the M-1 Rail project which is a curbside light-rail program that has just been approved. So we have public transportation coming in. Thousands of lofts are being developed, there is retail that’s filled. The city of Detroit is going to have unique destinations that you can’t get anywhere else in the world. Every one of our retail buildings and outlets and all of our real estate holdings are going to be experiences, but we look at downtown Detroit as one overall experience. People will be blown away from the second they park in garages filled with the most beautiful graffiti, street art, and murals, to the second they hit the streets and experience the different colors, music, smells and the interaction and collaboration between people. We see an amazing opportunity, for real estate developers, for entrepreneurs, for farmers, for those who have lived in the city for fifty years. There is no single city we are going to replicate, because Detroit has its own identity. And this is going to happen organically.