Matt Clayson, director of the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, the organization we have been developing the Speakers Bureau content for, is currently spending time in Algiers, Algeria with the U.S. Department of State and the Aspen Institute as part of a delegation effort to help Algiers define and develop its creative sector. Clayson penned a post for the Detroit Regional News Hub that has some interesting observations in it, mostly because the issues they are trying to overcome in Algiers are things that we are working on here in Detroit.

From the post:

A discussion amongst leaders in Algiers’ creative community consumed most of the day. Our role was to listen and to share limited feedback, when appropriate.
The discussion covered three core areas of need as identified by our Algerian hosts: the need for government support, the need for funding and the need for a unified advocacy organization.

Rings familiar, eh? Sounds like some of the kinds of efforts drummed up months ago during the arts summit as part of the Detroit Works Project. This summit asked many questions around how our local government can be a part of fostering development from the creative sector. Their were a multitude of proposed solutions– public officials embracing the arts as part of Detroit’s external image or opening up some of the 60,000+ publicly-owned buildings to artists and small businesses. Other solutions hovered around the third point in Clayson’s observation, that is, having a unified advocacy group that advised the mayor’s office on policy catering to the creative sector.

More from Clayson:

[In Algiers] the educational infrastructure for the creative sector is inadequate implicitly forcing many wanting to pursue careers and practices in the creative sector to study overseas. The result … a predictable brain drain.

Again, something familiar. What’s interesting though, in our case, is that we have the educational infrastructure, we have a ton of it in fact. This presents a great deal of light at the end of the tunnel in the sense that our infrastructure is sound, now we just need to a better job of creating enterprise and opportunity. In other words, we aren’t starting from scratch, we just need to learn how to bridge the gap from graduation to employment.

Anyway, it’s interesting as we delve further in to dialogue about Detroit and other places around the world going through similar growth struggles. We are obviously big fans of this trans-continental exchange, trying to contribute in this realm with our upcoming documentary release After the Factory. With so many cities confronting similar issues in the face of large-scale globalization and economic re-tooling, can’t we make the transition process easier by learning how to work together/share ideas more effectively?

Big day today in Detroit city: Bing unveils a budget plan. Yes, it’s quite important, but it’s also kind of boring– at least until budget unveiling day comes with a big party on Belle Isle.

This, however, is not so boring:

Sure, I guess it’s kind of old news now (four days old), but I somehow managed to skip over this little gem of an article by Jeff Wattrick over at MLive. He composed a wrap-up of sorts to the Rust Belt/Artist Belt Conference, responding to the overwhelming response/sentiment that all the talk of developing the creative sector meant it was outsiders doing all the cool stuff in Detroit, leaving the long-standing residents in their dust.

The short answer is that Detroit has a lot more to gain than lose by attracting outside creative sector development to Detroit. And here comes an objective explanation by Wattrick via the article I somehow missed over the last four days:

Detroit has shrunk from 1.8 million people to 713,777, a disproportionately large number of whom live in poverty. If 10,000 (or, since we’re speaking in hypotheticals, let’s say 100,000) middle-class creative professionals and artists move here, Detroit would not suddenly resemble Park Slope. The tax rolls might increase and the city could afford to operate the streetlights.

Second, when people act like they’re the industrial midwest’s equivalent of Mayflower Material or speak of Detroit’s “indigenous” population, they need to get some perspective. If Rust Belt/Artist Belt took place 60 years ago, these very same people probably would have had the very same concerns about outsiders, say John Lee Hooker and other Hastings Street blues musicians, trying to impose their crazy artistic ideas on native Detroiters. Actually, it would’ve been very different people then, but they’d have been making the very argument.

New people are good. They obviously want to be here. Why treat them as interlopers trespassing on hallowed ground?

Maybe I should have just pasted the whole article. Go ahead and read it.

It doesn’t hurt to really hammer home both the necessity and benefit of attraction to the region. In the same way that fresh eyes provide honest critique, fresh minds in Detroit can put us in new directions. Young blood can do some of the hard work, too. And with that development– whether its entrepreneurs coming to start a tech company or urban planners coming to the mecca of places to be planned– comes an influx of resources that moves the entire city forward: think streetlights as Jeff pointed out, a city-wide recycling program, or perhaps most importantly, a revenue source for the education system to improve the trajectory of kids in the city.

To boot, here’s a way that DL! is tackling this issue, recently covered by Crain’s Detroit Business. The idea, an achingly hip multimedia presentation for college graduates in the state, underscores the types of opportunity available in Detroit for young people wanting to build something. Sure. Baby steps, but it’s a start.

Let’s look at all of this development as a long-term process eventually affecting the kind of systemic change we need to see. Attraction is that push that can get the whole ball rolling.