Update on Growing a Shrinking City

Not to beat a twice dead horse, but I found a great follow up to my blog posting last week about the plans for Detroit and the vacant space. There’s an initiative going on to encourage the citizens to be proactive in the rebuilding of the city called the Detroit Works Project. The first of five community forums was held last night and from what blogger Desiree Cooper described, it may not be as easy to incorporate some of these ideas into the population.

At the helm were the City’s Deputy Director of the Planning and Development Department Marja Winters and nationally renowned urban planner Toni L. Griffin. They greeted the crowd, then urged the massive gathering  to divide into break-out sessions to discuss one of four topics: Innovating our Neighborhoods for the 21^st Century, Creating a City that Works, Connecting Detroit & the Great Lakes Region, or Growing a Thriving Economy for the 21^st Century.

An angry tide washed over the crowd. “You mean the mayor isn’t going to speak?” people balked. “We need to know what the Mayor’s vision is first, then we can help!” objected Wanda Hill. “It’s disrespectful that he’s not here.”

The staff tried to quell the dissention, assuring everyone that the mayor would be visiting each of the breakout groups to listen to citizen feedback. But people didn’t believe them. “He’s not coming here,” the man next to me mumbled.

I have been in Detroit for more than a quarter century, but I hadn’t realized how deeply the learned helplessness had soaked to the bone.  There was a time when top-down planning would have caused an uproar in Detroit. Not anymore. It’s time for us to decide what our city should look like and how we can get there, and all we can do is fling ourselves against the walls of a very small box. Maybe Detroiters have lived so long with so little hope, that blue-sky thinking has become impossible.

While I think this is a more of a hyperbolized view (I'm sure that a good portion of people there were interested in getting information as well as giving suggestions), I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. The post goes on to say that the mayor did show up and that the sessions did began to have some progressive dialogue. However, they were cut short again by the mayor. Hopefully, the next forums are more organized and give more of a system of how the citizens can guide the vision of Detroit.

With the Detroit Metro area still being one of the largest in the nation, I'm positive that many of the progressive thinkers will step up to the plate.