Wolfsburg, Germany tests the notion of car towns as 21st-century theme parks

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="350"] Volkswagen's Autostadt complex in Wolfsburg, Germany. Photo by ilovebutter.[/caption] Source: Detroit Free Press Author: John Gallagher Buy a new Volkswagen in northern Germany and you probably won't go to a dealership to pick it up. You visit a theme park called Autostadt in Volkswagen's hometown, where there are rides, dining, museums, celebrations of auto design and a final stop to pick up your car fresh from the city's factory. The brash promotion and family fun frames an automotive city at the top of its game. It recalls Detroit or Flint 40 years ago before deindustrialization and competition turned them into bywords for decline. Like Wolfsburg and Detroit, the world's uber-automotive city, there are car capitals around the globe at various stages of ascension and decline. The Free Press attended a three-day conference in Wolfsburg last month that looked at these automotive cities, trying to understand common themes of boom to bust and possible remedies. What can the world teach Detroit about surviving the harsh downside of an industrial life cycle? Can that life cycle be reversed? Russelsheim, Germany, home to flagging GM Opel operations, is trying to reinvent itself as a "City of Knowledge." Chrysler owner Fiat's home, Turin, Italy, lost much of its auto industry a generation ago but has been reinventing itself in various ways. It hosted the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. It has embarked on a major greening of the city's former industrial sites. It has developed a niche as a television and movie center in Italy. China, in its centralized fashion, hired a famed German architect to rebuild several of its cities as modern planning jewels to deal with overpopulation and traffic ills from too much success on the boom side. Chinese bureaucracy has slowed that process. Detroit, for its p