The case for (re)vitalizing existing cities

I recently applied to debate at the Reindustrialize Summit in Detroit for June 25-26 and one of the requirements was a 30-second video. The debate topic is as follows:

Novel city concepts like California Forever and Telosa promise improved quality of life, modern urban density, productivity, community, and sustainability. They promise us the future. But can they deliver? Why not try to solve the very real problems where people already live, play, and work?

While I patiently compressed the bulk of our thesis build_cities into a 30-second video arguing for the improvement of existing cities, I couldn't help but feel the rush of supporting arguments bleed out the edge of my timebox. So here is an expansion of these arguments:

1. Cities are byproducts of markets, not the other way around.

Most cities grew organically out of well located villages, accruing capital along the way for expansion, often through fine tuning economic policies, rather than front-loading the CAPEX. This is written about extensively by renowned urbanist Alain Bertaud in his book Order Without Design, How Markets Shape Cities.

Even newer megacities like Dubai for instance can trace its origins back to the early 18th century as a small fishing village. Fast forward to 1901 when Shiekh Maktoum bin Hasher Al Maktoum established Dubai as a free port with no taxation on imports or exports, accelerating economic activity and thus the city's growth and development.

All of this port activity and subsequent growth was pre-oil, which wouldn't be struck until 1966, ushering in a massive growth period in the 1970s with the 1-2 punch of oil and trade.

Tack on more forward-thinking policies such as the establishment of Dubai International Financial Centre in 2004 as an independent free zone to further advance and accelerate its place today.

tl;dr Dubai was not built in a day.

2. Macro trends support the growth and development of existing cities.

There is a number of converging drivers happening simultaneously that have not reached their conclusion with respect to living patterns post-COVID. Between conflict-driven or COL-sensitive migration patterns, increased rural connectivity and WFH policies, emerging resource and economic hubs, there are evergreen opportunities for existing cities.

On the innovation front alone, at build_cities we like to view every city with < 100K residents as a seed-stage startup. And the top 100 emerging startup ecosystems, collectively worth $1T, increased by 96% from 2021 to 2022 alone, with Detroit ranking #1 according to Startup Genome .

As this trend continues to spread laterally to longer-tail cities, these cities will grow into formidable economies of the future and notably their network effects will be distributed among each other rather than condensed into a handful of major hubs as the world continues to Balkanize.

3. We have a moral imperative to (re)build existing cities.

Logistically, it might even be simpler to build a new city then reindustrialize a city like Detroit. But at least in the U.S., we don’t do things because they are easy, and building cities is no exception.

The (re)vitalization of existing cities extends to more than the tangible aspects of city-building. It takes into account the history, character, and populace which are just as important (if not moreso) than the concrete and foundations upon which they rest, especially because this is the foundation which constitutes the market in point #1. Taking a holistic approach that includes all these attributes and pulling them forward in the 21st century creates a more resilient and dynamic city that ties together its past, present, and future moreso than a greenfield city project can ever manufacture.

The symbolic and challenging endeavor of reviving cities like Detroit will have far more lasting impacts to the morale of not only the city, but America herself.