Detroit has been through decades of social and financial problems ever since the city slowly slumped into oblivion and collapsing on itself until bankruptcy. The auto industry fueled the city’s growth for many years starting at the beginning of the 20th century with the advent of the automobile.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and everything is gone from the city once thrived with the biggest industry of the West. But it wasn’t enough for Detroit as it gamble its entire economy on cars rather than diversifying the industry investing in different fields. By the time politicians realized that it was too late.
We can trace back how the city developed into something fit only for those having the ability to afford cars, while the rest of those who relied on walking were left out of the equation for good. Today Detroit still lags behind in having an effecting public transportation system to make a significant impact, but it’s very hard when the entire city was developed inside the car-culture.
Three freeways isolate downtown from the rest transforming it in a citadel.
One of the main issues that affected the urban development and prevented the city from adopting a better road system, was the the layout of the freeway system that chokes downtown Detroit. The John C. Lodge, Fisher, and Chrysler freeways surround the urban center isolating it from the rest of the city.
Artificial barriers in the form of roads, ramps, collectors, are responsible for creating specific condition among neighbors, mostly negatively impacting hundreds of blocks at the time. Developers find this method very useful to separate high and low values housing so it won’t affect the pricing market, thus ensuring specific parts of town remain within a specific yield of profits.
Another important issue is the large presence of parking lots surface downtown. Highlighted in red the volumes dedicated to car parking are spread out comprising a large portion of the city core. Whenever cars have a place to be stored they will create incentive to use them everywhere as an extension of people’s lives that cannot be excluded.
The two portions in blue represent large areas of vacant lots that once hosted buildings. Today they leave tremendous gaps between blocks that reminds of Berlin in 1946 after the rubble removal. Focusing on the site located on the top-left corner we can comprehend how much Detroit has been neglected.
The highlighted area has an approximate dimension of 176,900 square meters of vacancy (plus/minus the presence of some buildings).
A close up of the area shows how depressing the area appears. Temporarily parking lots are placed where once buildings stood as there is no certainty of the urban plan for this area.
Uptown faces the same issues of large presence of parking areas that make up for a large potion of the space. The gargantuan suburb conveys tens of thousands of drivers every day requiring areas to leave their vehicles somewhere. Although commercial and public volumes required park spots for obvious reasons, they still represent a small percentage compare do the rest.
The red area represents the high-density portion of Detroit while the yellow one is low-density with suburban-type zones. This has been impacting the city for decades: everything revolves around vehicle ownership and those who don’t cannot rely on the weak public transport system or downtown residency.
Crime and high rents have pushed people away from the high-density areas towards the suburbs. Downtown is a corporate fortress that is ‘protected’ by a ring of freeways which doesn’t allow for a smooth transition towards the fringes.
The sprawl of Detroit -like many American metropolis- has impacted the life style of many citizens who are subjugated to the condition their neighbors dwell. In the last 20 years the city has suffered from crime sprees, major city corruption, financial collapse.
To build and to maintain such enormous suburbs required billions of dollars that cannot be made back in tax revenues: low-density neighbors don’t yield enough property taxes. The city was lost with a 20 billion dollar budget gap in 2013 after declaring bankruptcy.
The only way for Detroit to swamp itself out is to drastically rethink its urban design by reshaping vacant lots and abandoned neighbors. Building hi-density zone with enough green and public surface will create a major investment for the future.
At the same time public transportation must be made bigger than it is today, so streetcars and buses will have to increase in fleet size and stop network to provide access to everybody from the city fringes to downtown.
Retrofitting neighbors has the best ability to render any city a place worth caring for. Once dead malls and flat surfaces are reborn building gracious communities and promoting pedestrian activity, then everything can become precious again . Areas that are well lit and offer rich patterns in their design will always engage the eye placing more importance in its care and existence.
Detroit can surely use what New Urbanism has done to other cities by reclaiming unused volumes and structures to increase their values by tailoring places around people first and cars second. Redeveloping city blocks opens for new opportunities of business and residential units for mixed using, departing from the old concept of leaving the housing pod with the car just to make small purchases.
My animatronics from Dandy Bear Amusement. One set being retrofitted pizza time theatre cyberamics, and another being completely custom made bots produced by VP and Marylen costumes.
Official confirmation from a collector where Dandy Bear’s animatronics were sourced from! It seems that one set actually WAS retrofitted from PTT characters, and the others were modeled to have a similar look, so that’s why they resemble PTT characters so much! That solves that mystery! Thank you, OP! It’s also great to finally know where the other bots came from! (There are two animatronic companies by the name of VP that I could find– OP is referring to VP Animations in this case.)
Here are some pictures of the VP Animations characters when they were being produced!
It looks to me like VP Animations also worked on the retrofits, as the fox(?) and the elephant look to me to be PTT retrofits based on their masks. Pretty cool stuff!
@robotronix, if you’d like to share any more information about these guys, we’d love to feature it here on AmazingAnimatronics! :D We’d be quite interested in knowing their history and what the characters were like!
Just a reminder to not believe everything you read in the fandom! Weird rumors get started all the time. This kid on Instagram just commented that this strange Dolli Dimples retrofit is the Dolli that Captain Slappy owns, and that he retrofitted her back into Dolli, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. (It’s not even possible, since this character, while using Dolli’s mask as a base, isn’t on a Dolli body!) I know Slappy personally, and I can tell you the story behind Dolli’s acquisition.
Slappy’s Dolli came directly from the Tully Road location years and years ago, where she had been in storage for many years after she was decommissioned by order of corporate. (Please please PLEASE don’t harass anyone at that store for any hand-outs; any historical objects like that are long gone since the store has gone through many remodels since then.) The tech at the time (who I believe has since retired) had held onto her for reasons unknown rather than getting rid of her as directed, and so he sold her to Slappy when it was time for her to be removed from the store entirely. She was never in the possession of anyone else, nor was she ever retrofitted.
This story wasn’t exactly public knowledge, but Slappy’s alright with me sharing it now that he’s not really in the fandom anymore and doesn’t care who knows. The retrofitted character in the picture is allegedly in storage somewhere in Canada, but I don’t know the details behind that, nor is it any of my business, to be fair.
(However, fun fact: The Jasper that Slappy used to own DID used to be retrofitted! He was once Banjo Billy of Banjo Billy’s Pizza! He no longer owns this bot, though, and I’m not sure who owns the bot now.)
It’s SO important to be cautious where you source your information from in this fandom. People get things wrong when they don’t know the whole story. I myself have probably stated some historical inaccuracies on this blog, to be perfectly honest. I do my very best to do a full investigation on what I post to make sure I’m giving the most accurate details as possible, but there’ll still be things that slip through the cracks. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions, but just don’t trust random people at their word when it comes to things like this.
