In a letter accompanying Thursday's filing, Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder...said...residents needed a clear exit from the "cycle of ever decreasing services".

"The only way to do those things is to radically restructure the city" — BBC News

Last week, we published the winning projects of the international design competition Redesigning Detroit: A New Vision for an Iconic Site. Organized by the Opportunity Detroit campaign, the competition sought after ideas for a potential signature project on the former Hudson’s Department Store site in downtown Detroit.

[...] the proposal "The Grand Opening" which won an Honorable Mention. The design team comprised Chung Whan Park, Terry Park, Jeong Jun Song, Hyuntek Yoon, and Kyung Jae Yu. — bustler.net

The international design competition Redesigning Detroit: A New Vision for an Iconic Site has announced its winners today. Hosted by the Opportunity Detroit campaign, the competition solicited ideas for a potential signature project on the former Hudson’s Department Store site in downtown Detroit. — bustler.net

Does the fact that Whole Foods Market is opening a store in Detroit surprise you? Well, a lot of Motor City residents were surprised by the decision, too.

The move does signal that a little pocket of Motown is thriving. And that’s great news – especially to Detroiters, who have seen their city eulogized ad nauseum in recent years. But the level of affluence in the neighborhood surrounding Whole Foods is well below what you would see in other cities that have undergone urban revival. — marketplace.org

According to academics like Brent D. Ryan, author of “Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities," it is one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history. — NYT

vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is superficial, I feel it will succeed in attracting ‘qualitative and quantitative tourist flows in the area,’

Ruins don’t encourage you to dwell on what they were like in their heyday,before they were ruins. The Colosseum in Rome or the amphitheater at Leptis Magna have never been anything but ruins. They’re eternal ruins. It’s the same here. This building could never have looked more magnificent than it does now, surrounded by its own silence. Ruins don’t make you think of the past, they direct you toward the future. The effect is almost prophetic. This is what the future will end up like... — nytimes.com

The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of my home is one reason why I’ve chosen to reside within a dense urban fabric. I am not a voyeur: I do not receive sexual satisfaction from watching the daily lives of others. But I do like to imagine the many meaningful “relationships” I have created with people that I will never meet or even recognize on the street. — Places Journal

... the buyer will be contractually obligated to shell out over $10 million to execute a detailed, 80-page list of renovations, ranging from a handful of new peepholes to a sweeping overhaul of the buildings’ bathtubs. On top of that, the buyer must deposit just over $2.5 million into an escrow account that HUD can access in the event that repairs are not on schedule, as evidenced in the illustrated quarterly progress reports the buyer will be required to send. — artinfo.com

The city is deep in debt; it's got a state-appointed board managing its finances, so it's gotta cut services it can't afford. Services that it can't afford in part because it's a city built for two million people that's now home to just over 713,000.

So street lights could be a luxury Detroit can't completely afford. — marketplace.org

The story of the automobile — like the story of the city of Detroit — is a tale of unwitting eternal returns. At every turn the inventors of modern life — of its machines, its aspirations — seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the meaning of what they were in the process of creating and unleashing, and what they were thus undoing and destroying. — Places Journal