You may recall last week when the Huffington Post ignited a few sparks when Rabbi Jason Miller posted a response via the HuffBlog to Toby Barlow’s original article titled “Detroit: Meet Detroit.” The response by Rabbi Miller spawned an argumentative couple of days akin to the days of the RoboCop controversy. On the heels of such fiery (but massively important) conversation, I suggested via the DL! blog that we take this fiercely debated topic of suburbs-v-city to a more constructive platform to breathe some more life in to understanding the nature of each side. My thought: Get Rabbi Miller (the pro-suburbs side) and Barlow (the pro-city side) to have a discussion on the Craig Fahle Show via “Crossing the Lines,” a feature that WDET has been putting together. In the ongoing segment, city dwellers, politicians, designers, writers and everything in between discuss the really tough issues we face in moving Detroit forward.

Well, the suggestion worked.

Thursday morning at 10am (stream live here), Rabbi Miller and Mister Barlow will discuss the question, “Who is a Detroiter?” I trust it will be a fruitful conversation. I think it should also stand as a case in point of why it is so massively important to search for solutions and answers in the quest to move this city forward. We cannot dwell on what is or what has been, we must think of what can be, and ferociously search for ways in which to realize that potential, even if its just creating some fruitful dialogue that seems difficult. With a little calculation and thoughtfulness, or hell, just a blog post and a note to Craig Fahle, things can happen. You can do it. We can do it.

Onward.

Last week Toby Barlow wrote an article (link) via the new (controversial) Huffington Post Detroit blog claiming all suburbia needed to do was move to Downtown Detroit and the city would be better. A response (link) from Rabbi Jason Miller asserts that actually it’s the suburbs that have revived the city and it should continue to be that way. Both articles I think have their points, the pros and cons. My personal opinion is that there is no Jesus solution to this city. Read: it’s not going to be one thing that “saves” us here, it’s going to be the collective energy from a lot of isolated happenings: inner-city community leaders rising up through urban agriculture, suburban high schoolers coming down for Deadmau5 shows at the Fillmore, the creative sector providing a growth tool for economic activity, the state enacting policy to support angel investments, families coming down for a ballgame at Comerica Park, active city-dwellers convincing friends to move to the city, suburbanites growing their businesses in the suburbs and considering office locations downtown. I could honestly go on and on– literally– for another ten minutes. We need it all. Every single ounce of energy we need to harvest it.

Toby is a really well-spoken, smart guy. Rabbi Miller, who I know considerably less about but have done some research, also sounds like a really intelligent, forward thinking fella. But I propose we take this discussion to the next level. Recall WDET’s “Crossing the Lines” feature that I mentioned a couple weeks ago– an ongoing segment where the station tries to create dialogue around the really tough issues that we face as a city. Within the confines of those discussions and features, the whole “insider-outsider-suburbs-v-city” has become hotter than a Spanish pistol. So, let’s talk about it. Clearly a lot of people feel strongly about both sides. Let’s get Rabbi Miller and Mister Barlow on the Craig Fahle show to address each side. It’s massively important to the future growth of our region, and there’s no single X or Y solution, we need it all. At the end of the day, I think we’d all be surprised with what kind of middle-ground could be unearthed in the discussion that would make both sides feel like active stakeholders in the forward movements of our fair city.

Because seriously– think about it. Actions that lead to growth start only with participants that feel empowered enough to be involved in the process. And while we might all not get along hunky-dory, lovey-dovey, when we can agree that we all need to play SOME part in moving this city forward, our collective growth potential exponentially increases.

(In other controversial news completely unrelated to this discussion, Nickelback responded to the 55,000+ people that have signed the petition against them playing the halftime show tomorrow. See it here)

Kind of a mixed bag of updates:

1) We are almost emerging from four weeks of really intense editing for the film. It’s still got a lot of work to be done (sound engineering, color correction), but the bones are all there, now we just have to make them operate as a total package. Basically, the hard part is really done. And honestly, I am ecstatic about that. If all this sounds like Chinese, recall our Kickstarter campaign that describes the film in detail.

2) David Deal posted a nice interview on his blog SuperHype! where we discussed DL! and shifts in the American Dream. It was kind of a cool conversation, I like the way it turned out. Read it here.

3) Remember talk of HATCH Detroit? The contest offering $50k and a host of business services to a user-submitted retail business idea in Detroit? Well, the semifinalists have been posted and you need to vote! Do that here.

4) Finally, watch this new mini-doc produced by Team Detroit’s Dorota Coy, Toby Barlow and Brian Merkel. Exceptional edits and DP courtesy of Jeffrey Richardson. All the art direction came from Michael Burdick, the fella that also designed this poster for DL!.

The notion of the brand that is Detroit and the power of that brand is a conversation that is no stranger to this blog. It’s certainly a topic that has been talked about a fair bit, from insiders and outsiders alike. Detroit’s brand power is represented by many forces– everything from grit and gore, doom and gloom, to architectural wonder, to food haven to faith-based organization and now, more and more, innovation through creativity. In many cases, that brand power is demonstrated by those in the city, but what seems a trend lately is a reflection of that brand power through the city’s exported talent.

The first reaction when you hear “export” might be to shrug it off. Sometimes it is hard to see that for some people to succeed they have to leave this place, simply because they can’t find their niche here– or in other words, a job. It’s a problem we certainly suffer from, but maybe we can use the efforts of these people when they leave as an integral part of the brand message about Detroit in creating momentum.

Just a few days ago, in West Hollywood, a restaurant called Coney Dog opened up on Sunset Boulevard. They serve, you guessed it, Coney dogs, chili cheese fries and Better Made potato chips among other Detroit staples. There are well over 5,000 fans on their Facebook page, and on opening day earlier this week, people were lined up along Sunset Boulevard to get in to the place. Interesting. Why? Well, for one, there are tons of Detroit ex-pats in LA that probably revel in the opportunity to get a taste of home. Two, there’s an alluring force to the notion of getting a taste of Detroit and experiencing it in some way. It’s that odd city that everyone around the country is increasingly curious about. In a video posted on a West Hollywood blog about the restaurant opening, a couple commented in an interview that they were dying to taste a Coney dog for the first time in there life, seemingly without any connection to Detroit. Kind of powerful.

Perhaps the momentum of Detroit’s brand forces all over the country could/should be a function of activating the momentum right here on the ground at this moment. When people in LA are experiencing Detroit through a Coney dog probably hundreds (maybe thousands?) of times a day, there has to be a way that experience can be used as a tool to kickstart momentum here and there. Sometimes a city’s forward movements, or just progress in and of itself, is directly related to the way that it’s existing forces are embraced and nurtured from the inside and out.

Tiger’s opening day kicked off the madness, Art X kept everything lively throughout and Sunday’s 70+ degree weather was the icing on the cake. This past weekend was easily the city of Detroit’s official gateway to Spring.

There’s so much to cover with Art X. What a wonderful presentation of Detroit’s talent. Galleries, spaces and public places were packed to the gills all weekend with folks flocking to see all sorts of things– panel discussions, films, piles of shoes, flamenco dancing or jit techniques, to name a few.

Of particular interest was a panel discussion Saturday afternoon at MOCAD titled “Chronicling a City in Change.” It focused mostly on the notion of “ruin porn” and what implications it has for the city. The discussion was moderated by Toby Barlow, and participating panelists were Dr. Craig L. Wilkins, Vince Carducci, Sean Doerr, Eric Smith, Bill Gaskins and Jim Griffioen. The discussion was phenomenal, creating some real dialogue, even heated and emotional at times.

Mr. Barlow clearly thinks our ruins should be used for the sake of creating a tourism industry, allowing people to get a sense of our industrial heyday first hand while simultaneously creating a revenue source for the city. Dr. Wilkins, on the other hand, would claim it seems ridiculous to have industry built on despair. Here’s my question: would a tourism industry built around the ruins remove some of the sensationalization of despair because of the diluted sense of appeal by legalization? If five year old kids were wandering through relics of Detroit’s industrial heyday, looking at its wondrous caves and crannies, would it be as cool for photographers high on an adrenaline rush to take pictures with $15,000 cameras to then sell the images for double that?

These abandoned places, for those that have lived in Detroit for many, many years are hard to look at. They are the cast-iron indication of loss and decay. These were the places where friends and family were once employed, and now they sit left for dead. It therefore seems difficult to build a tourism industry on top of that. Equally as ridiculous is the idea of allowing countless photographers to capture images of despair that are then pumped in to the traditional media spectrum and wiped across the masses, making them the ad-hoc representative sample that becomes what people associate with Detroit– further perpetuating the idea that it Detroit is dead and gone forever.

So, where does that leave us? This was the primary pivot point of the panel discussion.

This is where creativity and strategy should come in to play. There are certainly ways we can use these buildings and we should seek to employ at a municipal level administrators that can tackle these issues. Urban planners, architects and artists have convened in other cities to produce impressive results under similar circumstances. One such place we could look for help is Cleveland and a woman named Terry Schwarz, who I wrote about lat week. She works as the director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and is most concerned with funneling parts of the city’s industrial past (warehouses, factories and remnants of heavy manufacturing) in to their current planning and design aesthetic. Have a look at last week’s interview for some specific ways they use these spaces that we could emulate here in Detroit.

Whatever the argument in such a difficult topic, the overall point is that the the weekend created a lot of dialogue around some really important things in Detroit– our talent, our future direction and the idea of just getting out and having fun on a warm Spring day. Ultimately, it is experiences like this that will put us on fertile grounds to start making intelligent and creative decisions about how to best position ourselves in the future.

Paul Gunther recently wrote an article in the Huffington Post that came out like a play out of the Toby Barlow playbook. In the DL! film The Farmer and the Philosopher, Barlow discusses, among other things, Detroit’s inevitable rise to power in the next 50 years due to its location proximity to the country’s highest concentration of freshwater. Not to mention the fact that through navigable canals and waterways, you can easily access the Atlantic and the Mississippi. So, what exactly does this mean?

Well, Gunther asserts that this will lead to population increase in Michigan. And given that most populations naturally congregate in metropolitan areas, you can bet that Detroit will probably see sharp increases.

Interesting.

Gunther continues, as Barlow points out in the DL! film, energy costs are going to ride people out of the South where temperatures are only rising. What once cost $100 to cool your home in August will be much higher. To the east and west, coastal flooding will make living impossible or very difficult. And where does that leave us?

Detroit! Welcome to the future of America.

As some of you probably know, last fall DL! finished up its first film “The Farmer and the Philosopher.” We had a cool screening event at Whitdel Arts (formerly the Ladybug Gallery), screened it with the Mitten Movie Project and even alongside Jeffrey Dechausse’s film ‘American Auto‘ for its USA premiere in Detroit. We’ve been making an honest attempt at getting it aired nationally on Current TV’s cable network (more info here on the network, it’s pretty cool). At this point, no word on an airing schedule. The film, however, has been airing on CMNtv– Comcast channel 52 and WOW channel 18– Mondays @ 6:30pm; Tuesdays @ 1pm and 9:30pm; and Saturday @ 7:30pm in the following cities: Auburn Hills, Berkley, Royal Oak, Ferndale, Huntington Woods, Pleasant Ridge, Troy, Clawson, Rochester, Rochester Hills and Oakland Township. Recently, we got the film uploaded on to YouTube and Vimeo due to some complaints about the ease of viewing on Current. So there you go, check it out if you haven’t already:

DETROIT LIVES! // The Farmer and the Philosopher from DETROIT LIVES! on Vimeo.

The Dateline special that aired last week is causing something of a backlash from activists, local media outlets and just ordinary folks that live around town. This is certainly not new news, and was half expected when Dateline announced they were doing the special. It seems major media outlets have failed across the board when trying to capture the essence of Detroit, and so naturally, the responses start rolling in trying to expound on the positive. The latest attempt is a special on The Takeaway, a national morning show partnered with BBC, the New York Times and Public Radio International. Hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee tackle everyday issues that Detroit faces in trying to portray a positive image and bring on guests (Rochelle Riley of the Free Press, Luther Keith of ARISE Detroit, Toby Barlow of Team Detroit) to try and substantiate this claim that Detroit really isn’t as bad as the media might make it out to be. Have a listen to the live stream and tune in for yourself.

The TIME machine is still churning out content over there in West Village. Steven Gray pumped out an interesting piece that certainly tells the consistent tail of Detroit’s issues, but follows it up with ample evidence that Detroit is certainly not alone as it attempts to pick up the pieces and start again. Gray rambles off a baker’s dozen worth of other cities across the nation in dire circumstances with budget deficits, necessary infrastructural improvements and things like tax bases that don’t support necessary public services. Hmm. So it is set up quite nicely that Detroit is positioned quite well right now to be a leading example of how these problems can be addressed all across the country. Kind of similar to something Toby Barlow said in a DL! interview, all cities, at some point, are going to be in Detroit’s shoes– and as Gray points out in the TIME article, there may be more than we think. So, if we take the lead right now, we could be looked at down the road for quite some time as a model of re-invention for struggling cities across the country. Quite a nice prospect. Time to get to work.

Toby contributed another piece in the New York Times this past weekend covering the Cooley Family, that is, the family who has sons that run the popular BBQ joint on Michigan Avenue called “Slows.” You’ve probably never heard of it. The story tells a tale of retired Patty and Ron, migrating back to Detroit, “home,” to escape Florida’s black-hole real estate woes and live in the confines of Detroit– to be with their boys, their grandchildren and all the other creature comforts. It’s a story less about successes with the BBQ joint and so much more about the benefits of being close to the ones you love. And more. It’s about creating the whole “dream” and the fact that Detroit can also provide that canvas. It’s not just cutting edge artists and the techno crowd that are finding refuge in Detroit. It’s the retirees, too. Jonathan Oosting talks lightly about the article in MLive today, but catch the full article here.