Detroit 2000 was a sweeping urban vision developed in the late 1960s by Greek urban designer Dr. Constantinos Doxiadis, in partnership with the Detroit Edison Company. Framed as a blueprint for the city’s revitalization into the 21st century, the plan championed large-scale urban renewal as the path forward, privileging infrastructure, mobility, and technological progress over existing social and spatial realities. At its core, Detroit 2000 reflected a deep faith in inevitable progress and a futuristic conception urban development. Traces of this vision are woven through the Planner and Phantom sound tapes, where echoes of past planning ambitions resurface as both aspiration and warning. What sits at the heart of these project, as suggested by the presence of the Detroit Edison Company — whose sponsorship was to project sites of future electrical plant development — is for the growth of capital as supported by real estate speculation. These speculation narratives haunt Detroit's "redevelopment" within the contemporary as developers continue to buy land surrounding the I-375 freeway. One must then question, who will own the acres of land that will be freed when the highway is removed?
What you see below is a booklet created for The Detroit Times, designed to advertise the Detroit 2000 plan to the city’s residents. The publication attempted to generate public enthusiasm for a future already decided. Its pages offer insight into how planning language and visual media were used to manufacture consensus and reframe change as inevitable.
Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library archives.
