Semester D

Enjoy! Some are pretty interesting… “In 5 years Detroit will be the city where innovators, entrepreneurs, creatives, and social change agents come for inspiration and opportunity.” “Great potential if Bing will allow an Emergency Financial Manager to come into the city and connect the structural problems that are strangling the city, the schools, and other [...]

Throughout the last half century, it has been disheartening to see plans to change Detroit fail miserably. These plans for change span from since before Coleman Young until the present and have had little effect on the downward spiraling course of the city. It can make one wonder if they’re working for an unattainable goal [...]

It might be a tall claim to make when I’m only twenty years old, but I don’t intend to leave Detroit.  Sure I’ll go back to Ann Arbor to finish up undergrad and perhaps to complete a master’s program, but my future seems tied to Detroit.  There is really only one direction for the city [...]

In five years, I imagine Detroit to be a place not entirely different, but definitely changed from today. Like Grace Lee Boggs said in her WDET radio interview with Smiley and West, “revolution and evolution are not that far apart.” Nothing will change overnight and it has to begin with individual change – which will [...]

I’ve always been an optimist—and something of a dreamer—but I think Detroit is on an upward trajectory. For decades, the news stories coming out of Detroit were about deindustrialization and depopulation.  But now there are stories about inventors and a New York Times profile on how to spend a weekend here.  People used to talk [...]

With no prior knowledge of life in Detroit, I came to the city pretty open –despite what people “forewarned” me about. Then with any and all standards pretty much blown out of the water from what I have experienced I have come to love Detroit, and view it as a part of me now –one [...]

Five years from now, I see myself here in Detroit working as a community member. I see myself a part of a community that uses the best of the individuals within to maintain cultural and social benefits for itself. I would like to be a part of the transformation of Detroit as businesses begin to start [...]

Before I came to Michigan, Detroit never really entered my mind. I was from New York, and Manhattan was my city. It never would have occured to me that I would become so involved in Detroit and so personally tied to it. Through volunteering in the schools, to working at Focus: HOPE, to literally digging [...]

On Friday night, Misbah, Lauren, Jeneen and I were downtown walking to Lafayette Coney Island from Café D’mongos through Capitol Park. We were pretty much the only people down there. As we looked around at all of the setup chairs and tables and the beautiful architecture surrounding us we said to each other this would [...]

Detroit is unlike any city I have ever been to. It’s history complicates it’s future, and in some respects Detroit is a place full of contradictions. Yet in the midst of all of this I think we can agree (Buffalo Springfield included) that “there is something happening here” in Detroit. For the good and for [...]