How Detroit recast itself as a centre of tech innovation

Once infamous for its urban decay, Michigan city sees better times ahead

The fully restored and renovated Michigan Central in Detroit's Corktown. Photo: Stephen Starr

For 36 years, Michigan Central train station stood dilapidated as a hulking, painful reminder of Detroit's decades-long fall into decline.

Shut down in 1988 and then abandoned, it epitomised everything about the city’s failures.

When the body of a dead man – frozen and half encased in ice in an abandoned lift shaft – was found in a nearby building in 2009, authorities could not get Michigan Central and its surrounding buildings levelled and erased from the city’s collective memory quick enough … if only they had the money.

Today, Michigan Central has a very different story to tell.

In June, tens of thousands of people were drawn back to the now-restored, 18-storey Beaux arts-style building to watch Eminem, Diana Ross, Jelly Roll and others perform a concert marking a new chapter for the building, now reimagined as an innovation and mobility centre.

About 60,000 tickets to visit the new building were snatched up in one day.

“People have stood in the pouring rain and lined up around the building just to get inside and see,” says Dan Austin, a preservationist and the director of communications at Michigan Central.

Inside, gone are the smashed windows and trash, now replaced with terrazzo floors and tens of thousands of ceiling tiles.

The sense of history is palpable: through its doors once walked some of the first Middle East immigrants heading to Henry Ford’s nearby car factories a century ago.

And it’s not all eye candy.

The Ford Motor Company, which is spending $1 billion on revitalising the building and surrounding neighbourhood, supports a mobility technology centre from the building next door, which was once a major post office.

'People have stood in the pouring rain and lined up around the building just to get inside and see,' says Dan Austin, a preservationist and spokesman for Michigan Central. Photo: Stephen Starr

Google has set up a hugely successful Code Next programme, while Newlab, a venture platform for critical tech start-ups, is supporting a host of pilot entrepreneurial projects.

They include the country’s first in-pavement, dynamic charging road to drones that light up streets for pedestrians at night, and Bloom, a supply chain solutions company for the small electric vehicle market.

“The vast majority are mobility and electrification start-ups, but there are some that are not,” says Mr Austin.

“The idea is that if you are a start-up with a great idea but limited resources, you don’t want to spend those finite resources on buying a 3D printer – you can use the equipment here.”

One such innovator is David Medina Alvarez, the chief executive of Livaq, who has come all the way from Mexico to join in and lead Detroit’s tech revival.

Mr Alvarez, 25, is building electric all-terrain vehicles, or EQuads, with a range of 285km and 4D-printed seating.

“We haven’t yet discovered what its speed limit is yet,” he says of the prototype. “They are great for police that use ATVs – they have rules that their ATVs need to be always on, so they consume a lot of gas.

"Electric ATVs are always on. And we have zero emissions.”

For Rasmus Bendvold, who moved to Detroit from Oslo, Norway, to lead US operations for wheel.me, a company that says it has created the world’s first autonomous wheel, the Motor City has many advantages.

“You have Stellantis, Ford and GM, and we’re working with two of them,” Mr Bendvold says.

“They basically said: ‘If you come to Detroit you’ll have business with us'.”

He says another major advantage to Detroit is the low cost of living compared to other, better-known start-up cities such as San Francisco and Boston.

“I was a little bit sceptical in the beginning and my wife even more so,” Mr Bendvold says. “But I really like being in Detroit and it’s really good for business.”

“They basically said ‘If you come to Detroit you’ll have business with us',” says Rasmus Bendvold of wheel.me. Photo: Stephen Starr

The scenes on show at Newlab and Michigan Central today are in stark contrast from years past.

At the height of its industrial powers in the 1950s, Detroit stood as the fifth-largest city in the US. But as industries packed up and moved overseas, the Motor City, like many other Rust Belt communities, found itself left behind.

No other large US city has lost as many residents – down from 1.8 million to 700,000 by the time it filed for bankruptcy, the largest US city ever to do so, in 2013.

For years, the city that revolutionised the world of mobility through household names such as Ford and General Motors was better known for its unchecked crime and urban decay.

By the time it filed for bankruptcy, more than half the city’s budget was being spent on emergency services called to extinguish fires in the city’s thousands of vacant homes.

Today, while many believe the city’s revival efforts and future goals are admirable and ambitious, some observe that gentrification is an inevitable if divisive consequence.

“It’s a very complicated thing,” says Chris Copacia of the City Institute, a grassroots non-profit in Detroit

“There are business owners that have been there for a long time, live down the street and don’t want to move. You’ll see signs in neighbourhoods that say, ‘Neighbourhood closed to gentrifiers'.”

But most agree that the city’s future is significantly brighter than its recent past. Many of the city’s downtown high-rises, which were at one time completely abandoned, are again occupied and thriving, Mr Austin said..

For the first time in 66 years, Detroit’s population is growing. In a neighbourhood next to Michigan Central’s Corktown that is home to a growing Latino community, a football stadium is set for construction.

“You’re actually seeing intentional access to opportunities and encouragement of folks who historically have not been provided opportunity,” says Mr Copacia.

“That’s one of the most exciting things.”

Some of the grafitti art on Michigan Central's walls has been preserved. Photo: Stephen Starr