Visiting Detroit
Imagining Detroit
spring 2009


Looking up?

I really doubt I agree with country singer John Rich's politics, but his song "Shuttin' Detroit Down" hits a vein. The images are real, the anger is real. The twang is real. And the song is unusually activist for a genre that usually talks about love, swigging beer and bailing hay. Here's the video. Worth it for the images and for the novelty factor:


I spent last week in Detroit. I twittered from a bus full of 7th graders and radical activists planning the 2010 US Social Forum. I argued with locals that corporations could indeed be a force for progress and "good". I met angry poets toughing it out for decades in the streets. I ate at Avalon Bread, which is one of the first "social enterprises" I'd ever read about. I stayed in the third floor of the artist mansion Trumbullplex with an old friend. I sat in a circle with 94 year old activist Grace Lee Boggs and listened to that Chinese-American tell stories to the inner city kids of her 40+ years in the city and why she thinks Detroit is a City of Hope. I tried to retrace my roots to that crumbling, forgotten city....and I discovered that the place is alive.

Detroits plains gardens are blooming. Artists are moving in from all around. Detroit's music is thriving, even 50 years after Motown. And Detroit is so poor and so self-sufficient that it's the first place in the US that's had time to more fully consider what the low-energy, post-growth boom of the afterfuture might look like.

A Detroit New article from March 13 on the appeal of D-town to artists:

"Newcomers see an unusual receptiveness in Detroit as well. 'There are so many interesting things going on here that you couldn't do in New York,' says Barlow, 'both because of cost and crowding, and the fact that everyone's overseeing everything. Whereas in Detroit, it's like, "You're trying to do that? Neat."'"

Here are some of my pics from that journey:











Now I'm back in Beijing, where a different (but no less exciting) future grows. I'm hopefully staying in the same time zone for at least a few months, so I hope if you're passing through, hope that you stop by. We've only got a few years to shuttle ourselves around cheaply on fossil fuels before olfactory-rich dialogue between mortals on different continents (and different cities) probably becomes an afterfuture luxury, and digital (probably not smell-o-vision) is our closest thing to touching the other sides of our planet.

Read also my friend Rob Goodspeed's post on Detroit and the limits of urban decline.

Labels: detroit, development, michigan, photos, sustainable development