Blog
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City Love for Detroit Friday, September 10, 2010
For a few days in November, the CreateHere team is uprooting from their Chattanooga home and trekking up to Detroit, Michigan to help an excited group of hopeful and helpful Detroitians catalyze civic pride. The event is called Detroit Civic Intervention and it will include up to thirty urban innovators—Detroit locals and out-of-towners—gathering to explore ideas, share experiences, and actualize solutions.
“We’ve been to a lot of gatherings of emerging urban leaders that have been show-and-tell not show-and-do,” says Josh McManus, Co-Founder and Creative Strategist at CreateHere. “The most powerful ideas come about when we have a lot of horsepower in one place and people actually doing something.”
Symbolic of the devastating effects of Detroit’s recent economic downturn is the privately owned and entirely emptied Michigan Central Station. Sprawling out in front of Michigan Central Station is Roosevelt Park, the largest of many semi-defunct parks that now dot the landscape of the once great Motor City. “Detroit government has said that parks must be abandoned because of lack of funds,” says McManus, “but parks don’t go away. Sadly, few people in Detroit even think of Roosevelt Park as a park anymore.”
Participants in the Detroit Civic Intervention will gather at Roosevelt Park for 48 hours in November to tackle the problem of city park closures and cutbacks. “What we want to see come out of this is a tool kit to help citizens across America engage in park maintenance and upkeep,” says Helen Davis Johnson, Co-Founder and Creative Strategist at CreateHere. “Detroit citizens may not be able to take back Michigan Central Station right now, but they can take back and take care of their once-great public spaces.”
The work has already begun in Detroit. Civic pride is marginal, but proud citizens are taking risks to boost Detroit’s economy by starting businesses and finding in their success a city itching to connect, innovate and grow.
A month ago, many of these bright emerging leaders flew down to Chattanooga for two days of sight seeing and to hear Chattanooga’s story first hand—a story whose beginning sounds very similar to their own. Like Detroit, Chattanooga once lay ravaged by the flight of industry. From this, Chattanoogans learned about civic reinvention—a practice that Detroitians are eager to learn about and enact.
Says Josh McManus, “We’re inviting innovators from many different cities to go make some change in Detroit with the idea that they can bring that change home and scale it for their own place.” This November’s Civic Intervention is for Detroit and put on with the help of Chattanooga, but it is part of a vision for place-based change that expands well beyond those cities and into the hearts of any citizen who believes that change begins when individuals take action for the betterment of their communities.
