General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"I can't afford to (heart) NY": How Detroit became a makers' hotspot
Makers are slowly but surely helping to regenerate the city of Detroit, which collapsed with the auto industry. Since the Michigan metropolis went under largely because it relied on a single corporate industry, diversification by creativity seems a fitting antidote. When you take a city down to a low point, it requires such an enormous amount of heart and soul to rebuild, says Shane Douglas of Douglas & Co., a designer and hand-maker of fine leather goods in Detroit. ..
Creatives from other cities are even moving in now. Brooklyn-born-and-bred Galapagos Art Space is relocating its 20-year-old performance center to Detroit after being priced out of New York. Galapagos bought nine buildings totaling 600,000 square feet and has plans to create a 10,000 square-foot lake near Detroits Corktown in an area some refer to as the Hubbard-Richard neighborhood.
Galapagos Executive Director Robert Elmes told the New York Times they bought the buildings for the price of a small apartment in New York City at the time. Among the buildings is an old power plant that looks like a little Tate Modern, Elmes said. Galapagos helped put Williamsburg, Brooklyn on the art map. Now itll give Detroit cache...
Detroit...unlike most cities, it does not have a creative district per-se. Theres creative stuff brewing everywhere herein the Edison District, Corktown, and New Center even Downtown. A recent article by a New York Magazine writer on Vulture.com looked at nine artists who dont plan on leaving Detroit anytime soon. They prize the honesty and edge of Detroit and the low cost of living...Scores of nifty start ups in Detroit now sell locally made wares.
Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit-based author and social activist is one of many subjects interviewed and photographed in Detroit Resurgent, a recently published book of photographs, interviews, essays, and poetry that provides a powerful counter-narrative to the city as a Rust Belt wasteland. As she says in the book, I think the sense that you have in Detroit is that its the end of something and the beginning of something new. Its very rare that someone lives at that time, at that place, where somethings disappearing, vanishing into the past, and something new is emerging. Thats very inspiring, to be at that particular time.
https://www.yahoo.com/makers/made-in-detroit-110026670215.html