Detroiter’s constructs detailed ‘city’ that has lessons for his real city

Detroit Neil Greenberg took 17 huge pieces of poster board and constructed a highly detailed metro region complete with neighborhood histories, citizens with back-stories, and, of course, cul-de-sacs.Excerpt:A few months later I went to his apartment to check out the maps and
do some recording. I interviewed Neil for about 4-hours (none of that
tape made it into the final cut), without really knowing what direction
the story would go. All I knew at the time was that Neil’s vision was
so inspiring and creative, that a conventional profile piece would NOT
do him or his project justice. I understood that though his ideas were
really eccentric and quirky, it was, more importantly, grounded in
something that could be used for real-life application.
After that first night, we started meeting semi-regularly to talk
about his fake world. He thought of the maps as a laboratory to work on
various planning ideas that could apply to Detroit, or any other city
for that matter, without having to deal with the cynicism and
bureaucracy we Detroiters can often encounter in the face of meaningful
change. Read the entire article here.