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The pictures say it all. Well, no: Data Driven Detroit's Kurt Metzger and his charts say it all during episode 11 of DetroitUnspunTV. Plan to spend a good half hour getting an education on proper council re-districting that manages to keep the integrity of neighborhoods intact. Metzger knows his stuff.

Watch the video, commercial free, here.

Carleton S. Gholz, a native Detroiter who earned a Ph.D in communications at the University of Pittsburgh and now teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, is writing a book on "Post-Motown" Detroit. Some of you might remember Dr. Gholz from our August speaker series on Detroit music.

While we wait for the book, here's a tease -- an illuminating interview in the Daily Swarm with Morris Mitchell, a Detroit DJ (way back in 1971) before mixing records was the norm. "Close and Play" meant just that -- playing a record all the way through, take the record off, and slip the next song on the turntable -- all the while, maintaining a flow to keep the audience on their feet. Mitchell belongs to the small group of historically gay DJs who brought the music from places like New York and Chicago and laid a foundation for dance culture in the D.

Excerpt:

I’ve never been scared of anybody that was better than me; I think that made me popular. When I did cabarets, if I had somebody spin with me that they weren’t familiar with, and then they were really good, the crowd would really appreciate it. You follow what I’m saying? Because it was somebody new they had never seen get behind those turntables, they wore it out. They wore the crowd out.

Feel the beat here.

After spending much of the past year in storage, a mural completed by famous graffiti artist Banksy will be on display at the 555 Gallery as early as November.

The painting, which depicts a boy holding a can of red paint, alongside the words, "I remember when all this was trees," was removed by gallery artists from the Packard Plant in May 2010. 555 Gallery, in contest with the owners of the Packard Plant, won clear title to the piece for a mere $2,500 -- a fraction of its estimated $100,000 worth. It's the culmination of a saga which pitted graffiti purists, arguing that place is intrinsic to the meaning of the mural, against preservationists, who contended the removal saved Banksy's work from certain destruction.

Excerpt:

The controversy itself has now become part of the accrued meaning of the mural -- what Becky Hart, associate curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, calls "a patina of narrative."

"The piece is different now that it's not in its original location," said Hart. "But part of the meaning is its accrued locations. 555 entered into that dialogue about abandonment and re-use when they relocated the piece."

Read more here.

Journalist Desiree Cooper asks the tough questions about urban farming and Detroit's future on the DPTV series Sustainable Detroit, which aired its second episode Sunday nationally on PBS. She talks of the next wave of fortune-seekers to the city -- not property-flippers, but hoe-wielding gardeners who see promoting urban agriculture as a necessary next step for repairing, as Cooper says, the city's social fabric.

Excerpt:

"If you're a caring person and you're surrounded by what seems to be just nothingness, it's a heavy, heavy burden," said Myrtle, adding that the gardens are a visible sign that someone on the block values the land, themselves and others. "When property is neglected, it says, 'We don't care, we can get away with dumping, and we can get away with vile behavior because nobody is watching.'" What they are really planting, said Myrtle, is a revolution in values.

Check out Cooper's blog, and cllick here to watch the video.

Quite simply, Detroit is a city of extremes, and its music reflects that. Detroit's importance in the global electronic music scenes is often referred to in the past tense. With the recent emergence of Kyle Hall and other young Detroit producers, however, it's clear that a spark remains. When we visited, we found a number of artists with their eyes (and ears) firmly set towards the future.

"The gardens are everywhere," writes food scribe Mark Bittman in a moving editorial in the New York Times Opinionator blog. His chronicle of a visit to our city describes Detroit's burgeoning food movement powered by the breadth of our residents' imagination -- and the belief that only we will turn this city around. Local food in public schools. The Peaches & Greens produce truck. And acres and acres of cultivated land, harvesting not only food, but a key to this city's future. If the journey is as important as the destination, Bittman concludes, Detroit's back-to-basics green revival is already a success story.

Excerpt:

As Jackie Victor, co-owner of the Avalon Bakery, an unofficial meeting place for the Detroit food movement, says to me, "Imagine a city, rebuilt block by block, with a gorgeous riverfront, world class museums and fantastic local food. Everyone who wants one has a quarter-acre garden, and every kid lives within bike distance of a farm."

Imagine. Read more here.

Detroit's affordable real estate, diverse architectural styles and urban leadership won high praise from the Financial Times, with an article that digs deeper than statistics to interview several residents who couldn't be more optimistic about the city's progress. And though prices are still low around the city, one local real estate expert says the housing market is finally moving upward again.

Excerpt:

Kelly Sweeney, chief executive officer of Coldwell Banker Weir Manuel, has been a local estate agent for 30 years and is convinced of an upward trend. "Because of the loss of manufacturing jobs, our market went into freefall well before the subprime crisis," he says. "But we reacted quickly to that, and we are in a better position now. And there has been some improvement in employment. Also, our inventory of bank-owned properties is going down."

Read the rest of the article here.

A new nonprofit is planting nine vegetable gardens around the city, allowing the city's hungry to stop by and pick their own produce. Urban Farming founder Taja Sevelle teamed up with Coca-Cola and Home Depot to fund the gardens. They'll all feature a rain barrel system that provides irrigation. Any garden with the Urban Farming logo will invite residents to help themselves to some vegetables, 24/7.

Excerpt:

At the Urban Farming garden we visited at Linwood and Gladstone, the soon to be planted rows will yield a variety of produce. "Fresh collard greens, fresh tomatoes, fresh peppers, fresh carrots -- anything you can think of at the grocery store you can get here," said Sevelle. "This is in the middle of a food desert, which means that there are no grocery stores in this area."

Watch the whole story here.

When the 555 gallery boosted Banksy from his Packard Plant hideaway last February, outrage ensued -- and the frenzy went national. In fact, LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne is still thinking about Banksy. He relates the tale to the looting of objects from the Le Corbusier-designed model city of Chandigahr in India, which have been sold off in auction houses around the world, to question whether art loses its context when wrenched from where it was intended. Does the Banksy painting, in which a little boy is pictured next to the words, "I remember when all this was trees," carry the same meaning inside gallery walls, rather than an abandoned plant fit for razing?

Excerpt:

A broader and frankly more compelling issue is how these two stories turn inside out the relationship between patrimony and exploitation, and between local heritage and colonial privilege. It is one thing when occupying British forces forcibly remove an artwork from its setting, as they did two centuries ago with the pieces of Greek temple architecture and sculpture known collectively as the Elgin Marbles, and ship it out of the country. It is something else entirely when the pieces at risk were created by outsiders, and locals are the ones rushing to loot as well as protect them.

Read more here.

The music blog soultracks.com recently polled its readers to crown one metropolis "The World's Greatest Soul Music City." At the top of the list, with 30 percent of the total vote, was Detroit (which, we might add, absolutely trounced the competition). And the blog makes it clear it isn't just the city's history as the birthplace of Motown Records that deserves recognition.

Excerpt:

Yep, Detroit won hands down. It's long history of great soul stars, including the Motown legends, along with its new generation of soul stars like Dwele, Monica Blaire and Amp Fiddler, gave it the edge over the runner up city, Philadelphia, and lots of other great soul towns.

Get the full list here.

The Seattle Times makes its way across the US and runs down what a few of Detroit's neighborhoods are doing to fight vacancies.

Excerpt:

Eric Blount, 51, an accountant, spent the spring and summer mowing grass at his own yard in Detroit and also at the large corner lot next door.

And when a real-estate agent nailed plywood over the ground-floor windows of the vacant, foreclosed home next door, Blount went over and painted the wood white to match the white-painted brick exterior.

"It doesn't pay to just look and not do anything," Blount said.

The foreclosure epidemic, while devastating to home values and the quality of life, has created bonds in neighborhoods hit hardest.

"Having this large a number of vacant homes and knowing no one is going to fix it, brought us together as neighbors," said Gail Rodwin, who heads the vacant homes committee in Sherwood Forest neighborhood in Detroit, where Blount lives.

Read the entire article here.