Redefining Dreamland

Redefining Dreamland by Side Porch productions does a very comprehensive job talking to a whole host of interesting people.
The film is visually quite impressive and gives good face time for a number of talking heads who have great things to say.

Robocop: Detroit's Statue of Liberty, or, Who Decides the Image of a City?

If you saw the movie, then you can skip ahead. If not, in brief, Robocop, made in 1987 around the time of other post-apocalyptic sorts of distopias (all the Mad Max movies, for instance) chronicled a lawless American city featuring the clearly recognizable features of everybody's favorite punching bag, Detroit, and, the title character, an armored law enforcement machine in human form (no C3PO, this humanoid robot had a moral center, but man was he fierce) sent to quell the denizens of the dark and scary city.

Flash forward to 2011, and a small group of irony-clad hipsters seizes upon the idea of a Robocop statue. They raise 50,000 dollars, quite rapidly, through the online micro giving platform, Kickstarter. Push back from Detroiters ranges from bemused to hostile--I'm with the more extreme end of the spectrum for a number of reasons.

It does make one think of numerous other instances where symbolic gifts from outsiders are met with a cool response. A prime example is August Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States that has come to symbolize the immigrant experience, liberty and a democratic ideal. But this warmth and positive brand image did not come easily. Bartholdi was largely unsuccessful on a cross country US fund raising effort, resorting instead to private contributions from his side of the Atlantic. The shared history and alliance between France and the US (from the resistance to the British and collaboration across the 1776 and 1789 US and French revolutions, parallel human rights doctrines and similar Constitutional rhetoric) did help smooth communication and ultimately the statue was constructed, shipped and set atop her plinth to great public adoration.

So why then, you ask, given this example, am I, lets say lukewarm, about this intended gift? Who asked? I mean, who asked for it? The image of the city of Detroit, as painted by outside media, as a lawless urban zone, is not without its points of truth. Ask anyone living on the lower East Side, or in Brightmor, or Del Ray, and they'll tell you a police officer is hard to come by, and that, yes, the environment can be harsh at times. All the more reason that detached irony and quick money to celebrate it is a less than appropriate response. The velocity at which the money raised is inversely proportional to the appropriateness of the gesture--and extends the legacy of patronage and paternalism that privileged segments of our society continue to use with abandon.

The other parallel I think of comes from Philadelphia. When I graduated from college, I had one of my first jobs working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I also worked as a doorman at a hotel to support myself while I worked at my job at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On my first day, a tour bus pulled up to the front of the museum and disgorged its passengers who ran up the stairs to the front door. I could not believe what I was seeing--people so excited to visit the Museum that they ran. And then they stopped, turned to the city, pumped their fists like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, and ran back down. A few years back, Sylvester Stallone had this likeness of himself cast in bronze. He offered this to the city, to place at the top of the steps of the Museum. His request was at first denied, later granted, as civic culture bowed to popular culture.


But by this point, Philadelphia did not need Rocky's brawn to save it. Detroit needs plenty of things--better schools, better transportation, services for the people who live and work there. These are the lives and images and faces and voices who should make an image of the city. That would be a fine use for the quick cash. For now, I am a big fan of Robert Graham's massive Joe Louis fist down by Hart Plaza.



For more, check the Facebook page for Detroit Does not Need a Robocop Statue:


http://preview.tinyurl.com/4gfbsga

If you're not a facebooker, this is a great piece from
Crain's Detroit Business

many cities

Over the past month I've been spending time in two distinctly different parts of the city. Brightmor in the northwest, and Southwest Detroit in, well, Southwest Detroit. In both places I have the great fortune to work with remarkable people associated with schools--in Brightmor the gentle utopian, Bart Eddy, at Detroit Community School (a charter school founded on Waldorf principles of holistic education) and in Southwest with Juan Martinez, principal of Ceasar Chavez Academy.

The image above is of the Hickey House, a homestead/garden I'll write more about in the next few months.

I'm trying to parse out an outline for how I'd like to attend to the realization my time working in these neighborhoods has afforded. In short, it is that the vastness of the City of Detroit, which I had previously described in geographic terms (139 square miles, NYC, Boston and San Francisco could fit within etc etc) has a vast social dimension.

More soon

Fenkell Pet store

Everyday Creativity for 2011

A few weeks back I saw this chairs set up just like this on Vernor near Mt. Elliot. Later that day, two men in their 70's were sitting in the chairs, facing just like this, watching traffic pass by. "A beautiful day son!" they called out as I passed by.

The chairs were gone a week later. But I saw them set up by a bus stop further up Mt. Elliot near Gratiot, next to a bench made from an old bus seat. This time there was a small cluster of men playing cards.

These chairs reminded me of Ron Scott's statement in an earlier post on everyday creativity. Everyday creativity, as Ron described it, recognizes the efforts of people to make lives for themselves, to make ends meet, to gather the resources needed to feed themselves, their children.

The chairs transformed an open lot into a habitable public space--architecture and planning discourse describes this often as ad-hoc urbanism.

Everyday creativity, like its near partner, functional creativity, carries promises and suggestions of innovative and interesting responses to challenges in daily life.

In his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida describes a demographic he calls the super-creatives, incorporating artists, architects, engineers, and other vocations where innovation or interpretation is central to a practice.

I'm trying to place these chairs and their use in this spectrum from everyday to super creative. One place I'm lingering is sublime creativity which I associate with fantastical work--great musicals, opera, earth shaking paintings or films. Creative work that shifts the way we see the world. Seeing these eccentric chairs against the open land of Detroit's east side someone could shift a view and take it upon themselves to re fashion an environment.

Everyday Creativity

A segment from CAID's Panel Discussion on Art, Race and the Image of the City.

In this clip, Ron Scott, founder of the Detroit chapter of the Black Panthers speaks beautifully hear about the creative class in relationship to what he describes as "everyday creativity."

Also in this segment, Shea Howell puts this recent media focus on artists and Detroit's image in context with a look at the early days of Detroit Summer and how the narrative of Detroit as it is represented in the mainstream media de-legitimizes the capacity for black people to contribute to a positive and productive text while parallel media attention around white artists as essentially generative extends this narrative.

Free Corktown : Letting Public Sculpture Speak

(photo of by W. Kim Heron, appeared in Metro Times, Dec 8-14, 2010)

Corktown, walking distance from downtown's core, from the river, from Campus Martius, with its great brick paved stretch of Michigan Avenue and its network of small streets, bars and eclectic architecture, is a magnet. For its convenience, for its scale, for its services that include neighborhood places to eat, whether you have money or not. This is a neighborhood that has clear Maltese, African-American, Mexcian, Irish, and Appalachian whites as part of its demographic mix.To me, this is what an urban neighborhood should be, and when we talk of downtown density for a sustainable future, this mix needs to be part of the plan. That is, everyone needs to eat, to walk to the river, to live in a vibrant part of the city where the spirit of the neighborhood encourages a living, creative city full of every imaginable presence.

But Corktown keeps one of its pioneering spirits locked up.

A few summers ago, I needed a place for a group of 10 students to stay. Our short range housing plans had fallen through, and The Day House on Trumbull run by Father Tom Lumkin in the Catholic Worker tradition, opened their doors to us. We slept on their couches, and were welcomed instantly by Sister Sharon and Pat Dolan. One night the group wanted to go for a walk around the neighborhood. Sister Mary advised us to be careful--because it was sport for people to leap from their cars and attack the population huddled in doorways.

Corktown, with its co-existing populations--of bar trawlers, of guests of Manna Meals--occupies one of those uneasy positions in almost any city, where the tension between a long established social service and its guests comes face to face with the pressures of gentrification.

But this one is ours here in Detroit. With the limbo like nature of the neighborhood's once anchor, the old Tigers stadium, its former hallowed grounds now largely demolished and waiting in the balance for City/development , Cortktown is home to a rising population of new arrivals, mostly young white artists on one hand, and black housing projects like Kern Gardens on the other. With Bagley Street as its divide--by race and class--Corktown means solid blocks of 900 square foot wood frame Victorian houses with elaborately painted trim on one hand, and the abandoned Michigan Station (and, until recently, a sizable homeless encampment within Roosevelt Park in front of the station until police sweeps dispersed this community) on the other.

Bill Wylie-Kellerman wrote an eloquent and passionate plea for the need to address this divide directly. In the wake of an attack on Charles Duncan, a Corktown resident who happens to be homeless, by another Corktown man, who is not, Wylie-Kellerman paints a chilling portrait of the hostility that can exist when those with power victimize those with out.

Bill uses this image above of Father Kern, whose activism on behalf of people lacking resources fueled a continuing the tradition of Corktown as a welcoming place for those in need. In his article, Wylie-Kellerman writes of Corktown's new arrivals as needing context to inform their understanding of the presence of the soup kitchen at St. Peter's as part of Corktown.

I'd advocate for opening up the pocket park where Father Kern's statue is locked up now, right at Bagley and Trumbull. Come to think of it, there are more monuments and statues around town that would help us all understand that these men and women, standing still on their plinths, have quite a lot to tell us. I think of all of these statues, the figures they represent and the artists who made them, and recognize that any image--whether chiseled into the face of Mt. Rushmore or standing in a lonely and shuttered park--only matters when they can be calls to action. Father Kern is calling for a civil Corktown. It is up to his neighbors--both those who have been around and artists moving in--to listen. How about opening the park soon for public events rooted in the neighborhood. Not just the neighborhood that hangs out at Slow's or the Lager House or Manna Meals, but all of them.