Friday, April 19, 2024
Urban Planning

Tschö, Detroit!

Today I’m headed off on a multi-modal transit odyssey that will eventually land me in the Ruhrgebiet, in Nordrhein-Westfalen, as the first stop on a mobility study trip sponsored by the German-American Chambers of Commerce (GACC South in Atlanta, or, AHK in German).

To pregame, I will be seeing how well or how badly intermodal transportation works across three international borders: Tuesday morning, I’ll take the tunnel bus or get a ride from Detroit to Windsor, where I’ll take the Via Rail to Toronto, then a train to Pearson, flight to Frankfurt, then a train to Dortmund. Then I’m headed to Wuppertal and will be hanging out in the Ruhr for a couple of days, hopefully hitting up the crazy paragons of adaptive reuse and public space in Duisburg or the Zeche Zollverein, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, before heading back to Frankfurt– then onward with the AHK crew.

Stay tuned for live updates!

Also, Happy Halloween. Also, in observance of All Souls Day, a.k.a. the benign, German corollary to our spooky holiday, kick it to these deep cuts from Franz Schubert.

Nat M. Zorach

Nat M. Zorach, AICP, MBA, is a city planner and energy professional based in Detroit, where he writes about infrastructure, sustainability, tech, and more. A native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he attended Grinnell College in Iowa, the Kogod School of Business at American University, the POCACITO transatlantic program, the SISE program at the University of Illinois Chicago, and he is also a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow. He enjoys long walks through historic, disinvested Rust Belt neighborhoods at sunset. (Nat's views and opinions are his own and do not represent those of his employer).

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