By Alex Pearlstein, Senior Project Manager.   Time magazine has taken pity on Detroit. It is sponsoring a campaign called “Selling Detroit” that aims to help “America’s most struggling city (attract) business and talent.” Part of a yearlong project – Assignment Detroit – reporters and editors from Essence, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, Time and related Web sites are living in a Detroit house and writing about the city from an on-the-ground perspective. Maybe Detroit is less depressing up close than it is from afar. I guess we’ll see.

My hunch is that the Assignment Detroit series will be yet another in a long line of “rebirth” stories written about the “city that success forgot.” I’ve read many of them and grown leery of hopeful accounts of a new casino, or refurbished hotel, or new stadium bringing Detroit back from the brink of extinction. Despite all best efforts, Detroit has come to be the “Teflon City”; revitalization plans just don’t stick. The reasons for this are many and have been detailed a million times. Too many for me to repeat here.

In my city planning Master’s program, we often studied Detroit’s rise and fall; it is the planning equivalent of a Shakespearean tragedy. The “Paris of the West” becomes a Dickensian wretch, sullied and scrounging for nickels and dimes. In fact, I know of many planning students that make pilgrimages to Detroit as an archeologist would visit a fossil bed. Some enterprising urban historians even document Detroit’s decline as a Hellenistic study-case. The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit is a popular website displaying images of the city’s fallen glory.

What might be useful, however, is to use Detroit as a case-study of what cities and regions should seek to avoid. A sort of “Urban Decline for Dummies.” In no particular order, here is my take:

• Look forward, not backward – Stubbornly clinging to its past as America’s auto-manufacturing juggernaut has led Detroit to continually await the traditional industry’s renaissance. This has stifled progressive, proactive strategies to 1) acknowledge the need to transform how Detroit designs, produces and markets vehicles, and 2) actively pursue a consensus vision of what a “new” Detroit could one day become. Even today, there is an undertow of hope that a pallid “reinvention” of American car companies will turn the city’s prospects around.

• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – Employment diversification is the economic “golden goose;” if Detroit had sought to aggressively build non-automotive sectors decades ago, it might have survived the meltdown of the domestic auto industry more effectively.

• Don’t ignore issues of race and class – Simmering resentment over entrenched inequalities boiled over during the race riots of 1967. The riots launched what has been a tidal wave of middle- and upper-class “flight” from the city to the suburbs. The resulting “city versus suburbs” divide has crippled regionalism ever since.

• Don’t allow what are seemingly the most powerful voices to staunch progress – The auto industry had such a stranglehold on Detroit politics and policy, the city never made serious investments in multi-modal public transit. As a result, Detroit is the largest U.S. city without some type of rail transit (other than its rarely-used, limited-capacity people-mover system). Resulting auto-oriented growth patterns have led to sprawl, traffic and non-pedestrian-friendly urban environments.

• Don’t throw a hundred strategies against the wall just to see if one will stick – Over the years, Detroit has become a sort of “lab rat” for urban renewal programs. One after another has been launched, then withered. If the billions invested in Detroit revitalization had been focused on a handful of transformative efforts, the city might have already seen a turnaround.

• Insist on accountability from government and elected officials – Detroit government has been a dysfunctional parade of ineffective, corrupt politicians and administrations. Lack of trust in city officials and processes ultimately creates a dispassionate distance between the electorate and its leaders. “It doesn’t matter what we do, they city will screw it up anyway.” Without strong accountability, Detroit politicians are free to act with near-impunity until they mess up and their dirty laundry gets aired in public, a la Kwame Kilpatrick.

So, what of Detroit? At the risk of appearing cynical, I think Detroit is past the point of no return. The dynamics necessary to bring the city (and region) back to its past glory are virtually impossible to realize in today’s hyper-competitive economy and constrained budgetary climate. What happens, then, if Detroit becomes the first major U.S. city to essentially implode under the burden of unfunded services mandates, lack of employment and income growth, and perpetual disinvestment and population decline? History is littered with tales of once-great metropolises that disappeared from existence. Perhaps a population hundreds of years in the future will find the ruins of Detroit and ponder what happened there as we have with cities of the biblical and imperial past. It should be all our hopes that this apocryphal story does not become that of America itself.