Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.
In their new film Detropia, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady take on the well-trodden subject matter of modern-day Detroit in the context of what it once was. This increasingly familiar topic has become all but a formula in most examinations of the city’s evolution: Once great, now fallen. But Ewing and Grady, in a work as beautiful as it is engaging, take a far more nuanced look at the city’s challenges and opportunities. Detroit, in this film, is portrayed as suffering a fate both unique to the city and epidemic among other industrial (and formerly industrial) U.S. cities. Detroit, the film argues, could happen to you.
But the film doesn’t just document the gloomy outlook that’s become so familiar in these days of Motor City speculation and voyeurism. Detropia also highlights the chance this particular situation has created for many people, especially artists and entrepreneurs. Land and space are cheap, and the city is purring with a sense that something different needs to be done. For those with a creative bent, the city seems an ideal stage or starting point. Ewing and Grady don’t suggest, as some have, that these people are the answer for Detroit. In fact, their film argues subtly that even if there were one, the city doesn’t need an answer. It’s changing, and there’s no denying that. What it changes into is both a product of the city’s history and the people acting in a variety of ways today to make things better.
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.
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