I was born in Detroit and I follow the city pretty closely. The mayor there recruited a city planner, Maurice Cox, who has been getting all sorts of favorable press.

The broken down state of the city's neighborhoods offers a unique opportunity to redesign them. Things like creating a walking path between two small colleges and creating biking paths from old rail lines. Cox wants to enable each neighborhood to have basic services within a twenty minute walk.

http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/columnists/2016/12...

I've had this idle thought of what a game-theoretic solution to the NIMBY dynamic would involve: Some kind of investment vehicle offered to a community as part of a development plan, perhaps? Surely someone has thought of this before. The incentives for residents to cooperate need to be really good, else they'll fall back on a conservative outlook. Especially so as you start looking towards residents towards the old/disabled/sick end of the spectrum, who may be physically burdened by the impact of new construction.

I can say that as it is, the process of development is more like consumer marketing: schedule lots of meetings and interviews that sell people on the idea of accepting development rather than giving them a stake in its success. It encourages confrontational deadlock, a buildup of pressure followed by earthquakes of change, as the developers and government gradually start colluding to strongarm residents when they refuse to budge.

Well, generally the game-theoretic proposals are for some kind of direct compensation for impacts - developers pay the residents directly for new impositions like shadows or traffic. But this really throws the whole notion of "master planning" and "expert opinion" out the window (as it's now a transactional system) which is why people who think of themselves as expert city planners do not like it.