How do you fix ailing cities like Detroit?

I’m not trying to pick on the “D” here. The city’s plight just happens to hit close to home because, besides some years in Chicago and Pittsburgh, I’ve lived in the metro-Detroit area for most of my life. So I’ve seen this city try to resurrect itself countless times, only to end up back at square one. It’s no secret you need people to live in a city for it to be healthy. But how do you do that?

The idea I like best is not my own. It belongs to Jane Jacobs who authored the book “The Rise & Fall of Great American Cities”. She argues that it’s not necessarily the institutions or tourist attractions that define the livability and greatness of a city; it’s the neighborhoods.  And what do iconic neighborhoods like Lincoln Park (Chicago) and Nob Hill (San Francisco) have in common? Foot traffic.

We’re not talking just one type of foot traffic. The dynamic of it has to change throughout the day for the sake of sustainability otherwise you get a neighborhood with the vibrancy of an office park. For example, think of a healthy city neighborhood. In the morning the foot traffic is made up of people going to work. During the day it’s a mix of tourists and stay-at-home parents. Late afternoon you see people coming home from work. And in the evening it becomes neighborhood people, families and friends visiting one another.

The foot traffic becomes the neighborhood’s unofficial security patrol. Businesses sprout up because a demand for them organically grows from the foot traffic. The neighborhood becomes a desirable place to live and from there surrounding neighborhoods start to thrive as well. Sounds simple enough, right?

The problem is the return-on-investment for this kind of approach is not fast enough for people who don’t actually live in the city. They want a place they can hang out now. So to attract them cities do things like build a casino to try and convince people that it’s a sign of better times (but honestly, who wants to live by a casino?).

Talk to the people who live in the once-dying city of Pittsburgh (Forbes magazine’s Most Livable City in America). They’ll tell you their rebirth took up to 20 years. And it all started with the neighborhoods.