Woah. I’ve been thinking for awhile that, right now, Detroit is the most interesting city in America. This seals the deal. Detroit Lives!, a creativity-factory of sorts with a mission to revive, remix and re-inspire Detroit has just come through with a long-awaited documentary about what was once the Motor City, titled The Farmer & The Philosopher. I just checked it out for the first time minutes ago and it looks great and inspires. For some reason, I can’t get the video posted on the blog, but check it out here.
Detroit-based author and Huffington Post contributor Toby Barlow puts the city this way:
“I often say Detroit is the city of the future because it’s either going to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and be this wonderful, interesting place…or every other city is going to wind up like we are. Because they’ll all be de-industrialized, they’ll all be emptied out, they’ll all give up on their civic government, they’ll all be abandoned. So we get to decide. And the city doesn’t have to rebuild itself as Houston, it doesn’t have to rebuild itself as Atlanta, it doesn’t have to even rebuild itself as Portland. It’s going to be something totally unique to Detroit.”
Indeed. I posted thoughts on why Detroit might be America’s first post-growth city here, which dove-tail nicely with another point Barlow makes: in the coming age of climate change, guess which city is poised to be prime geographic real-estate? I wrote recently about freshwater scarcity as a pressing ecological limit, which is decidedly less of a problem for the water-rich Great Lakes region Detroit calls home. And, as Barlow notes, sea level rise, heat and drought – some of the worst predicted effects of climate change – are primarily coastal problems.
Granted, this is a lot of long-view speculation from the editorially-lax blogosphere, but Barlow points out something else that rings awfully true these days: “The idea of a place without hope – having hope – is a story people really want to hear.”
That’s Detroit. And that – in some ways – is the Butterfly Generation. We’ve been painting ourselves into a collective corner for decades – maybe centuries. But have we ever been so globally interconnected? Have we ever been so wired together? Has there ever been such an impressive web of passionate advocates in civil society? NYT’s Andy Revkin called it a coming of age story on a finite planet. In Detroit, you could call it hope.
For the curious, check out some other Detroit thoughts here:
Detroit: America’s First Post-Growth City?
Local Resiliency from the Ground Up
Detroit’s Eastern Market: The Anti-Whole Foods
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