Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, well known experts on urban America from the Brookings Institution and authors of a new book about the rebirth of cities, focus on the hulking Argonaut Building in the New Center as a symbol of how Detroit might be evolving into an "innovation district."
"From 1936 to 1956, the Argonaut Building was the home of the General Motors Research Laboratory, the first in-house research and design studio in the automotive industry. The mass-produced automatic transmission was developed there, and over three decades every GM car was designed and styled in the Argonaut building. From 1956 to 1999, the building housed Argonaut Realty, GM’s real estate arm."
In an article in the New Republic titled "The One Building that Explains How Detroit Could Come Back," Bradley and Katz describe how the Argonaut has been re-imagined and re-named the Taubman Center for Design Education, where today the Shinola company:
"produces watches and bicycles, curiously old-fashioned yet hipster-ready objects, in a 30,000 square foot watch factory and smaller custom bike workshop. The highly regarded College for Creative Studies also uses the building for its graduate and undergraduate programs in advertising and various aspects of design. There is also a charter school on site, promoting arts and design education for 6th through 12th graders."
The authors describe for a national audience aware of Detroit's financial woes how the Midtown and downtown neighborhoods have undergone a resurgence in recent years. They note 37 percent of the jobs -- about 120,000 -- in the entire city of Detroit are in these neighborhoods, which take up only three percent of the city’s land.
"Midtown and Downtown have the potential to do even more for the city, and the wider Detroit region. The metropolitan economy needs to generate new ideas, products, and services that the rest of the country and the rest of the world wants to buy. Midtown and downtown could become the country’s next innovation district, where the density of innovative institutions and companies—hospitals, universities, research centers, clusters of tech and creative firms, plus resources for entrepreneurs and new businesses—begets still more new businesses, new products, new export opportunities, and new jobs.
"Over time, this economic activity, and the new apartment buildings and retail strips that it draws, spread into surrounding neighborhoods. This is how the Detroit economy could, slowly but surely, regain traction. Getting the city’s fiscal house in order is only part of the story.
What is an innovation district?
"An Innovation district is a relatively new term just beginning to gain currency among political, business, and civic leaders. Just a handful of places in the world have used the term to self-consciously describe a concentration of innovative institutions and resources that together create a “more than the sum of their parts” effect. In Barcelona, for example, the new 22@Barcelona innovation district transformed a 494-acre industrial area scarred and separated from the rest of the city by nineteenth-century railroad tracks. In less than a decade, 4,500 firms have located in the area, and there are thousands of housing units, plus university campuses, tech businesses, and new spaces for start-ups."
