Lessons from Detroit: Cities find a new way of working together
When the five Reimagining the Civic Commons cities met in Detroit earlier this month, the group consensus was pretty much unanimous: Detroit is creating a new model of community development with civic assets at its heart, and has learned lessons with implications for cities far outside its borders.
While some of the work being undertaken in Detroit is a response to the city’s famous decades-long decline, other projects carry significant implications for those who want to use civic assets to drive positive change and social impact. Detroit’s Reimagining the Civic Commons project encompasses a breadth of asset types: a community park (Ella Fitzgerald Park), a commercial corridor (McNichols Road), a residential neighborhood (Fitzgerald), a greenway combined with public and private investments in housing and streetscape improvements, including bike lanes, crosswalks, new lighting and street-side plantings.
The investment is needed: like so many areas outside of the central city, the Fitzgerald neighborhood and the adjoining McNichols corridor have continued to struggle, with vacant and overgrown lots, houses and commercial buildings dotting the landscape.
Since Reimagining the Civic Commons launched two years ago, Detroit has created robust, multi-sector partnerships and braided together philanthropic, private and public dollars to create a model of community revitalization so powerful it is now being carried forward to neighborhoods throughout the city. Of course, anchoring this model are the interwoven investments in civic assets, economic development and housing to create better public places — but underpinning it all is an entirely new way of working together across the boundaries of public, private and non-profit organizational sectors. This model — a mix of braided investments and multi-sector teams managing investments and making change on the ground — is what makes Detroit’s work particularly compelling.
A new model for working and funding across silos
During the studio, City of Detroit staff Maurice Cox (Planning Director), Ryan Friedrichs (Chief Development Officer) and Arthur Jemison (Chief of Services and Infrastructure) attributed part of the success in Fitzgerald to the collaboration. The team is leveraging various funding sources for projects, managing across the silos of local government and coordinating aligned investment with private, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. Working together on a “holistic approach” to community development has helped staff and teams across all departments work together, update each other and focus on end results, not turf.
“Sequencing matters,” said Arthur Jemison. “It is easy to sell a house when you can see a quality park across the street.”
The civic commons work allows them to learn how best to coordinate all of the investments in this quarter-square mile. At the same time, Detroit is reconsidering what “planning” means, with the department playing quarterback for the public investments and coordinating the execution of the cross-silo work. Detroit’s planning department isn’t drafting up plans and handing them off to someone else, it is working side-by-side with partners to deliver results to residents.
“I think this work will change the trajectory of the city for decades to come,” says Friedrichs.
Connecting the work to our shared principles
The Reimagining the Civic Commons cities have identified nine key principles for managing revitalized civic assets to achieve specific social, economic and environmental outcomes. These principles are fundamental new ways to think about how people manage and operate assets like parks, libraries, community centers and trails. They emphasize not just the official management of a space, but decision making that brings in community advocates and creates cross-functional, cross-organizational teams — including city-specific teams (urban planners, parks managers and housing staff working together) that work closely with philanthropy, neighborhood advocates, community development organizations and local business owners. In Detroit’s adoption of these principles, the creation of cross-functional partnerships provided the city with several successes:
Recognizing the intrinsic value of existing buildings, assets, neighborhoods and people that others disregard. Detroit’s team never thought of the transformation of vacancy into assets such as the park, the renovated houses or the community corridor as discrete projects. Rather, the team has always approached the Fitzgerald revitalization as an exercise in leveraging the intrinsic value of the neighborhood. “We did not brand our project as anything different than Fitzgerald because we know that this is a real place, with real residents,” said Alexa Bush, City of Detroit Design Director. “We are just reactivating existing buildings, places and most importantly, people.”
Throughout its work, the Detroit team has intentionally worked with small developers who traditionally lack access to capital required to do these kinds of projects. “We are working with people normally disconnected from access to capital or access to networks that can help them get that capital,” says Mike Smith of Invest Detroit. To help these smaller developers, the team bought smaller spaces that could be redeveloped more easily by smaller development companies. They also created an RFP that made responses by these small companies easier. The goal was to build capacity in these developers so they could move to new projects — and new neighborhoods — to do similar work.
The Detroit team also worked with local non-profit The Greening of Detroit, an urban forestry program that gives local Detroiters workforce training and jobs in landscaping. By providing residents with jobs as part of the creation of Ella Fitzgerald Park, the project reinforced ongoing engagement with the neighborhood and gave the area an economic boost.
Generating stewards and advocates for the assets that shift the behavior of citizens from consumers to producers. The Detroit team spent significant time and effort recognizing the community stewards that are already living and working in the neighborhood. They saw their job as building capacity to increase the impact of community members’ efforts. Much of the time and effort was spent uncovering these stewards’ efforts, who were often operating through community organizations, especially block clubs but also churches, schools and other places.
This work was harder than they thought, according to Bush, but using traditional means (community meetings) paired with informal outreach (pop-ups, fun activities, food) they were able to identify many people who wouldn’t have been on their radar had they stuck to traditional public engagement tactics. They discovered Michael Dones and his MoFlo community garden, Stephanie Harbin’s storytime and Bernadette King’s hula hoop troupe, and many more. “We were basically doing community organizing in Fitzgerald,” says Bush. The team was finding local champions and figuring out ways to let them thrive.
Front-ending projects with big public meetings can be problematic. The work in Fitzgerald is a model for gatherings that humanize local government: small meetings, one-on-ones and block clubs. “Detroit is moving toward a different relationship between citizen and government,” says Bush. The work forces the question, “How do we go through the messy process of democracy to make public, shared decisions?”
The process is not without challenges and continuous learning
There were challenges and lessons learned by the Detroit team along the way. In Fitzgerald, bringing people of diverse backgrounds into public life has been difficult, especially in a neighborhood that has traditionally been — and remains — overwhelmingly African-American. Providing the best quality civic assets for all is difficult when you are starting from a place of deep disinvestment over decades.
Attracting additional investment, particularly in the development of the commercial corridor, has happened more slowly than the team would like. Acquiring clear ownership of lots and buildings for redevelopment in an area where foreclosure rates were high has been challenging. The development of an impactful relationship with the two universities that anchor either end of the neighborhood has progressed slower than the team anticipated.
But despite these challenges, you can feel the strength in the Fitzgerald neighborhood.
On our last evening in Detroit, neighborhood residents from Fitzgerald, civic commons team members from the five Reimagining the Civic Commons cities and philanthropic partners gathered in Ella Fitzgerald Park, to eat a dinner cooked by local residents and to celebrate the neighborhood’s comeback. People talked over gumbo, fried fish and s’mores, while kids and adults alike tried their luck at cornhole, hula-hooped and blew bubbles. Others watched a wild game of Jenga, waiting with bated breath for the block tower to fall. Across the street, teens and adults played a vigorous game of basketball on a newly-painted court. We didn’t think about bridging differences or reaching out across social or economic divides; we were simply humans doing human things: eating, talking, dancing, laughing, and playing in a new park. Yet we were also doing more: building a stronger civic commons, one conversation at a time.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
