Brooklyn, New York, is undergoing a bit of a Renaissance this past decade and any period of success is going to lead to development for better (superfunding the Gowanus Canal) or for worse (the Ratner complex downtown). Nowhere in Brooklyn are these changes more apparent than the waterfront.

Miles and miles of old industry and rusted shells of piers are giving way to rolling green hills, trees, organic markets and wildlife reserves. Rejuvenated warehouses - boarded up and coated in graffiti not 15 years ago - now have green supermarkets, pottery classes and homemade jewelry. The change on the Brooklyn waterfront is a good metaphor for the general cultural shift in Brooklyn.

Because the Brooklyn waterfront is incomplete and neighborhoods like Red Hook are still adjusting to the change, the area is a curious twist of the old and the new. Solar panels and vegetable gardens are intwined with anchors, enormous truck tires and other toss-ways of a once bustling port. Cranes loom in the distance.

Here at sunset in Red Hook, you are looking at the Statue of Liberty beyond the little barge that serves as the waterfront museum.

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The New York Times features the Villa Charlotte Brontë, 17 co-ops overlooking the Hudson River. With the winding staircases and sidewalks, ivy overgrowth and organic structure, you’d think this the Rivendell imagined for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series. But it’s in the Bronx.

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Not a month since we learned that reforestation efforts are part of Detroit’s revitalization, we have this from the New York Times regarding efforts to rethink Michael Moore’s beloved Flint, Michigan and what should be done with what’s left of it:

Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.” [...]

On many streets, the weekly garbage pickup finds only one bag of trash. If those stops could be eliminated, Mr. Kildee said, the city could save $100,000 a year — one of many savings that shrinkage could bring.

Mr. Kildee was born in Flint in 1958. The house he lived in as a child has just been foreclosed on by the county, so he stopped to look. It is a little blue house with white trim, sad and derelict. So are two houses across the street.

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”

This is bold stuff but I expect we’re going to see more of it. This combined with the Detroit story some weeks back recalls the Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers” for me. At the very least, these regions are doing the right thing for their cities, their people and their environment.

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Last week’s Time ran an interesting article by Alex Altman: Road to Renewal. Altman puts forward that Detroit is an icon of America’s crumbling cities and exurban Rust Belt. The population is just a quarter of it’s 2 million peak. Empty factories, unused transit centers and desolate streets characterize the one-time center of industry and culture in the region.

What would a new Detroit look like? Many say it will have to be smaller, greener and denser. The city can start with the chunks of town that have withered into wasteland. The exodus from Detroit–triggered by suburbanization and the 1967 race riots–dovetailed with the national foreclosure crisis, which has battered few cities as badly as this one. According to a regional listings service, the median home-sale price has plunged to a paltry $5,737–yet tens of thousands of dwellings stand vacant. But the “long-term perspective,” says Heidi Mucherie, director of the organization leading the Detroit Vacant Property Campaign, “is that these are opportunities.” It’s the hopeful note sounded by Detroit’s optimists: The approximately one-third of the city lying empty or unused–an area about the size of San Francisco–is not just an emblem of its corrosion but also the blank slate on which to chart a path to renewal.

Time also put up an accompanying photo essay by Sean Hemmerle online. Beautiful stuff…

There are many efforts to restore Detroit in one way or another. Naturally, there are big pushes to restore the industrial core of the city and bring business and commerce to the area. But let’s be realistic: the New Detroit will not be the Detroit we’ve known and (sorta) loved all these years. In fact, despite my sympathies with the people of America’s Rust Belt, I think we need to be honest with ourselves that the manufacturing sector is not going to magically reappear. Sure, a restored economy maybe built on green jobs will do the region good; but it will never be the same. Ever.

If we can come to terms with the concept that regions of our country will rise and fall with America’s changing needs, we can then do some really (for lack of a better word) awesome things. After all, we are a disposable society and our modern architecture of glass and plastics seems built to erode or, at least, be replaced.

At the Heidelberg Project, an outdoor art installation that has become one of the city’s top tourist attractions, founder Tyree Guyton says Detroit’s struggles could help unlock creative solutions. Standing amid houses awash in Technicolor polka dots and trees festooned with stuffed animals, Guyton poses the billion-dollar question: “What might the future look like?” Plenty of people are trying to envision it. Among the ideas are the reforestation of the city’s dead zones, the planting of large-scale networks of parks and commercial farms, and schemes to repurpose unused space–such as in the Brightmoor neighborhood, where Justin Hollander, an urban-planning professor at Tufts University, suggests converting vacant housing into parking lots that would accommodate the local trucker population. But progress has been fitful. “I don’t see a lot of action on the city’s part,” says University of Michigan urban-planning professor June Thomas, who cites the absence of a master blueprint. John Mogk, a professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University Law School, issued a different indictment to the Detroit Free Press: “The plan is not focused on building a first-class city with a smaller population but, unrealistically and wastefully, on rebuilding the city to its former size.”

Reforestation you say? When I first saw the picture above in the print edition, I thought: plant a forest. Rip up those sidewalks and half the roads, bury the power lines, tear down the condemned houses and plant a forest of local flora. In ten or twenty years, reintroduce regional wildlife. I’d put money down that the remaining houses will see their values increase dramatically.

It’s among the many options of what we can do with at least parts of our dilapidated cities. Let’s put aside our obsessions with recreating yesterday’s glory and creating a new one. A new Detroit is a great place to start.

PS - So I’m coining a phrase right now: exurban reforestation. And I’m going to talk about it a lot here. I just need to do some research.

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Brooklyn is a borough in flux, mostly characterized what everyone calls ‘gentrification’. But in the last few decades, before young professionals started moving in, the borough’s most significant change has been de-industrialization. Many parts of Brooklyn still had thriving mills, plants and refineries, particularly the area around the Gowanus Canal.

The area sometimes now referred to as Gowanus is sandwiched between two very successful neighborhoods, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. Since the nearby strip of Smith Street, for example, went from a crime-ridden alley to a blooming row of restaurants and boutique shops, Gowanus has struggled to form an identity. Old mills made an ideal location for artist studios of course and there is lots of open space for megastores like Ikea.

Buildings like this remain…

I find these old industrial buildings aesthetically pleasing and that’s why I went around some months ago and took a whole bunch of pictures of them before they’re torn down or - believe it or not - converted into condos.

The Gowanus area is about to undergo a massive residential and retail rezoning that could be the death knell for some of these buildings. Towers of condos are popping up but, with the economy headed toward depression, they are largely empty. Activist groups are pushing for a major clean-up of the notoriously filthy canal.

So take it in while you can…

This page has never been anti-development like some of the area’s concerned citizens. The only hope is that these architectural gems, with their smokestacks and other industrial details, survive the change.

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