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.

As Rial Slides, So Do Iranians’ Dreams

In the Iranian capital, all anyone can talk about is the rial, and how lives have been turned upside down in one terrible week. Every elevator ride, office visit or quick run to the supermarket brings new gossip about the currency’s drop and a swirl of speculation about who is to blame.

“Better buy now,” one rice seller advised Abbas Sharabi, a retired factory guard, who had decided to buy 900 pounds of Iran’s most basic staple in order to feed his extended family for a year.

“As I was gathering my money, the man received a phone call,” said Mr. Sharabi, smoking cigarette after cigarette on Thursday while waiting for a bus. “When he hung up he told me prices had just gone up by 10 percent. Of course I paid. God knows how much it will cost tomorrow.”

While only a few people actually need to exchange the rial for foreign currency, its value is one of the few clear indicators of the state of the economy, and its fall has sharply raised the prices of most staples.

In Tehran, many residents spend their days calling on money changers and visiting banks, deliberating whether to sell their rials now or wait for a miracle that would restore the rates to old levels, or for even a modest rally from the panic-driven lows of the last week.

“The fluctuations are so large that nobody knows whether it is better to wait or to change now,” said Ahmad, 65, as he shared a taxi to the west Tehran neighborhood of Sadeghiyeh. “I am so fed up,” said Ahmad, a garment seller, who like others here did not want to be identified by his full name for fear of retribution from the authorities. “I want to have a normal life, but from breakfast, to lunch to dinner, everybody only nervously talks of hard currency.”

Like many residents of the capital, Ahmad had tuned in to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s news conference on Tuesday, hoping that he would offer some sort of solution.

Instead, Mr. Ahmadinejad attributed most of the rial’s weakness to currency speculators and the sanctions, saying that it is only natural that the currency should suffer when it is possible to sell oil only in small quantities and when it is hard to make international bank transfers. His opponents say he is trying to avoid blame for his own mismanagement of the economy. He even went so far as to threaten to quit.

“He has made a mess, and now he wants to leave us,” Ahmad said of the president. But a passenger in the taxi named Mostafa interrupted. “No,” he said, “most of our leaders are at fault, but they are trying to blame everything on Ahmadinejad.”

Just a day later, on Wednesday, clashes erupted when riot police officers on motorcycles dispersed sidewalk money changers near Tehran’s main bazaar. The government has accused them of deliberately manufacturing the currency crisis. At the bazaar, an important trade hub, shopkeepers closed their shutters, and hundreds of citizens joined them in a protest against the bad economy.

While life seemingly returned to normal on Thursday, the outburst of public anger exposed the deep feeling of hopelessness that has taken hold among many Iranians.

Experts are divided about whether the crisis has been caused more by Tehran’s longtime mismanagement of the country’s economy or by the American-led sanctions, which have been imposed over Iran’s refusal to halt a nuclear program that the West suspects is a cover for developing weapons. Whatever the cause, members of the once-vibrant middle class have turned into cynics, many of whom say they might be alive, but are not living.

For Maysam, the son of a man who was killed in the Iran-Iraq war, a decade of relative prosperity and technological innovations had enabled him to travel widely and had turned him into a prominent blogger and critic of the system that his father had died defending. Instead of hoping to die on a battlefield, he had planned to run his own Internet start-up company.

But those dreams have been shattered. “We can’t even think of the future, of tomorrow, the day after, or the next week,” Maysam said. Foreign trips are out of the question, as even the price of a cup of coffee in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, or Istanbul — favorite destinations for Iranians — has tripled when calculated in rials. Parents of the legions of Iranians studying abroad are calling their children back to Iran, as rents and college fees in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia have become unaffordable.

Ramtin Rastin contributed reporting.