by Evan Lowenstein, Green Village Consulting
On a recent summer, 230 Greater Rochesterians journeyed to the historic George Eastman House's Dryden Theatre to watch and discuss a documentary about the importance of transportation choice to America's revitalization.
This screening of Beyond the Motor City, organized by Empire State Future and ESF Coalition member Rochester Regional Community Design Center (www.rrcdc.org), was followed by a panel and audience discussion featuring eight local and state transportation experts and advocates.
Beyond the Motor City is part of the PBS initiative Blueprint America, a groundbreaking (pardon the pun) investigation and illumination of the frightening plight of America's aging, overburdened, and neglected infrastructure. Beyond the Motor City delves deeply into the most distressing and certainly the most ironic case of poor urban/regional planning, misallocation of resources, and infrastructure-driven inequity--Detroit, Michigan. The city that gave us the "freedom" of the automobile now suffers terribly from the economic, ecological, and social wreckage--and lost freedoms--that automobile-driven culture and community development has created.
The powerful film roller coasts viewers' emotions from the nadir of despair for Detroit and American cities like it, to the very real belief that even the Motor City can turn itself around by focusing on multi-modal transportation as not only an essential service for downtrodden Detroiters, but also for the city's entire revitalization. Audible gasps (much like the one I emitted when I first saw the film) filled the theatre when the shell of the palatial and once prosperous Michigan Theatre, now a parking garage (!), appeared on the screen, with several spaces filled with cars, and several empty. The poignancy and irony just drips down here: the city made wealthy by the automobile was also killed by it; and the betrayer humiliates the victim by literally occupying its body, clueless to the irony.
But again, the many tales of woe about Detroit's people and places, borne by building itself intensively over decades for a single, inefficient mode of transportation, are each matched in the film with stories of promise and progress to reinvent and revitalize Detroit through sound transportation planning. For example, the film illuminates very real plans to return local rail to Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main drag and the symbol of both its heyday and decline, and to the entire city.
On the whole, this documentary does give the viewer emotional whiplash, but does a stellar job explaining the complex urban/regional planning history and dynamics that brought Detroit from where it was (2 million people and a source of envy) to where it is today (850,000 people and a source of pity and even shame). It is so very essential that a critical mass of government officials, citizens, business leaders, and everyone else understand the many parts that created the urban hole--um, I mean whole.
The panel and audience discussion included a few worried expressions that Rochester and Detroit are eerily similar despite their difference in size. One pointed out that Rochester would have actually been Detroit if our hometown inventor George Selden, credited by many such experts to be the inventor of the internal combustion engine, hadn't had to abandon his patent battle with Henry Ford. Some spoke with sincere enthusiasm about the progress made in relatively rapid order to bring high speed rail to Upstate New York. When the film delved into Detroit's fascinating (yet sensible) plan to return huge swaths of the city's derelict built environment to green space and urban farms, I was reminded of Rochester's auspicious own Project Green, a very similar "right-sizing" plan (that we covered in a recent blog on this site). Overall, the panel and audience discussion was robust and elicited a high percentage of the key transportation issues and challenges facing Greater Rochester.
Even though the George Eastman House's café was closed that night, and even though the sole source of refreshment--the water fountain--was broken (this being a source of concern to the organizers), well over half of the Rochester screening's attendees stayed over three hours, right to the end of the discussion. (In fact, the security guard had to kick at least twenty people out of the building at about 10:15.) These facts about the Rochester screening are surely encouraging--a pleasantly surprising volume and variety of folks coming out to learn about, and talk about, the importance of transportation planning to Rochester and America's cities and regions as a whole.
Empire State Future is proud to have co-organized this screening with the Rochester Regional Community Design Center. Look for more such Empire State Future-organized and sponsored events in the near future!
For more information about Beyond the Motor City, and to see a trailer, go to http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/beyond-the-motor-city/video-preview/861/.
