ABSTRACT
To many Europeans, even well-informed ones, planning in the United States is a contradiction in terms. The country is seen as a land where rampant individualism provides the only guide to economic development or physical use of land. Though international comparisons are notoriously difficult and possibly misleading, it appears clear that regional disparities in economic development are somewhat greater in the United States than in typical Western European countries. Until the 1960s, the machinery for regional economic development in the United States tended to be quite local and ad hoc in character, even if it resulted from initiatives from the Federal government. The United States witnessed changing economic fortunes during the final decades of the twentieth century. New developments in the 2000s had started to address Detroit’s fortunes, with approval for new casino and hotel complexes in downtown, new public parks and waterfront development and passenger terminal.
