Big Dreams, but Little Consensus, for a New Detroit

But reinventing a city so devastated is hardly a sure thing, and the questions about how to proceed loom as large as the answers:

Should its areas of nearly vacant blocks be transformed into urban farms, parks and even ponds made from storm water?

Could its old automobile manufacturing economy be shifted into one centering on technology, bioscience and international trade?

Should Detroit, which lost a million residents over the last 60 years, pin its sharpest hopes on luring more young people here, playing on an influx of artists and entrepreneurs?

Should the city take down its enormous ruins, like Michigan Central Station, that have devolved into bleak tourist attractions or restore some of these buildings and market them, perhaps as museums or tributes to a proud industrial past?

“Every once in a while you encounter a situation that gets so bad everybody has to put their weapons aside and say: ‘You know what? It doesn’t get any worse than this,’ ” said Henry Cisneros, a former Housing and Urban Development secretary who recently worked on a housing project here that never came to fruition. “It lets people start talking about things that we couldn’t talk about before because we can’t lose a great city.”

The chances of a true makeover have grown significantly since July, when an emergency manager assigned by the state to oversee the city’s finances sought bankruptcy protection. The city is expected to emerge from the courts a year from now no longer juggling the $18 billion in debt that had sidetracked it and, according to the emergency manager, more capably providing essential services that make a city livable, like stopping crime and putting out fires. All of that, planners said, should make a larger transformation, outside the court system, conceivable.

Some have long been searching for solutions to the hollowing out of Detroit, a city that measures six times the land mass of Manhattan but is now home to only 700,000 people, down from 1.8 million at its peak. Individuals have often pressed forward with their own answers: The city should be perceived as a hub for fish farms or techno music or public art displays or film (an announcement last month that a Superman-Batman movie starring Ben Affleck would film around Detroit drew headlines here).

As recently as January, Detroit leaders rolled out an elaborate plan known as “Detroit Future City” that ran 347 pages and called, in part, for building up thriving neighborhoods and turning other land into parks, landscapes, storm-water runoff areas or even commercial sections in the neighborhoods that have all but emptied. Authors said the plan — written over the past three years even as the city’s financial crisis loomed — included guidance from thousands of residents, and a wide range of leaders here say they have begun to view it as a guide. And the Kresge Foundation, which was founded in Detroit in 1924, has pledged $150 million to support the goals laid out in the plan.

Urban planners and political leaders liken the scope of changes being pondered for Detroit to some European cities after World War II. Rip Rapson, president and chief executive of the Kresge Foundation, called it a “rebirthing” of Detroit, and Toni L. Griffin, an urban planner based in New York who has been a leading consultant on Detroit’s long-range plan, portrayed it as a “super-restructuring” to improve the quality of life.

“After a tragedy is one of the few times you can be trying to reimagine a city rather than just trying to go back to what you were before,” said Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane University, who is writing a book examining the remaking of New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “What you really need is transformational change, not just incremental change to get back to where you were,” he said in an interview. “That’s been very important to resurgence of this city, and Detroit has to do the same thing.”

Some Detroiters see urban farming as an elegant solution to several of the city’s woes — an abundance of land but not of people; a shortage of jobs; and, according to some, a dearth of fresh food. Plenty of farms, some tiny and others not, already are thriving, though critics question how sizable a dent such notions can ever make to solve the city’s larger economic challenges.

“The promise that Detroit, one way or another, is going to restart so it’s actually functional is a really big step in this,” said Mike Score, president of a company that wants within two years to plant at least 15,000 trees as part of a farm in a section of the city’s East Side that is troubled by vacant buildings and empty lots.

No single economic answer will be enough for Detroit, say experts like Donald K. Carter, of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Another silver bullet will just be a silver bullet that runs out in 20 years,” Mr. Carter said.

Instead, leaders have their hopes set on a range of fields, many of which have already found some success here. They have pushed for new medical and science-related businesses near the city’s universities and new technology companies and start-ups in the city’s downtown. And some are pondering prospects for expanding international trade, given plans for a new bridge to Canada.