Big brands – from banks to cars, private equity to vodka – are desperate for a piece of ‘America’s greatest comeback city’. Does it matter if it’s all just a PR ploy?
Last April, Shell flew me to Detroit for the company’s annual Powering Progress Together conference. This edition of the event was held in the cavernous Cobo Center, Detroit’s newly renovated downtown convention hall, and the conversation was all technocratic optimism. The Houston-based oil company had convened executives, NGO leaders, techies, academics and Detroit pols to discuss the “urban nexus” – a vision of the future of cities. Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, was hip to the lingo. “The future belongs to the thinkers, doers and innovators,” he told the audience.
When the president of Shell, Marvin Odum, talked about Detroit and mobility, I presumed he was referring to the Motor City moniker and the auto industry. But Detroit is also the largest American city with no rail transit. Its bus system is among the worst in the nation. The most prominent kind of mobility in Detroit is the unprecedented, continued exodus of the citizenry: around 238,000 people left between 2000 and 2010; 34,000 since. Even as the outflow ebbs, no other large American city is losing people faster.
Everybody wants to be part of it because it’s a good story
Related: The two Detroits: a city both collapsing and gentrifying at the same time