A downtown still being built

Troy is a city of corridors that has spent years trying to assemble a downtown. The place it has to assemble one is the civic campus at Big Beaver Road and I-75, a large public property where city hall, the library, and the courts already sit.

Big Beaver itself is not that downtown. It is a boulevard: offices, malls, and a lot of lanes. The city and its planners have drawn a walkable center onto the civic land beside it, with blocks and a public square on paper. This piece does not claim a groundbreaking on October 4, a finished street, or a count of anything under construction. The news is the gap between the city as it is used and the center it keeps saying it wants.

What exists now is still the civic campus and the corridor. People come for city business, a library, a job along the boulevard. They do not yet arrive at a main street that was always there, because it was not. A downtown still being built is a public process on a specific piece of ground, not a mood about growth.

Stand on the civic campus and look at Big Beaver. One of those is a place you can be without a car for a few minutes. The other is a road. The downtown, if it comes, has to be built on the first, not declared along the second.

Troy