Detroit as Ecotopia?!?

As frequent readers of this blog already know (ah, that's a joke) I am a big fan of Ernest Callenbach's book Ecotopia. Yesterday I read a news article about some elements of his book apparently coming to life in the most unlikely place: Detroit, Michigan.

As reported in this article, there are currently 12,000 vacant homes in the city of Detroit and 1,500 to 2,000 new homes are abandoned each year. The City does not have enough money to tear all of them down and they can barely keep up with new abandonments. A professor of urban planning at University of Detroit Mercy has proposed converting a large swath of the abandoned City back into farmland.

I think this is a brilliant idea, but it does not go far enough. I think it would be fantastic if the City that spawned the Age of the Autombile--and has subsequently been cannibalized by the very technology that it created--capitalized on this opportunity to emerge as the global center for sustainable manufacturing and transportation. It makes sense--there is plenty of open land, an enormous trained work force that is chronically unemployed, underemployed, or in imminent danger of becoming so, two world-class universities adjacent to the city to train the engineers and MBAs to design and innovate, and all of the industrial infrastructure for shipping and distribution. Think about it: Detroit as the world leader in wind turbine manufacturing, maglev train design and production, large volume heat exchange systems, and on and on. I think it could work.