Chicago Reader says there is no place in America like Detroit

Yet even as GM closes plants and Chrysler faces Chapter 11, things are sprouting in Detroit. The city made the New York Times in March not for news about the Big Three but for the purchase by a Chicago couple of a house for $100, on a block being taken over by artists with plans for solar-powered art center and a vegetable garden. The city has a booming urban agriculture movement, and in April financier John Hantz, working with Michigan State University and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, proposed building the “world’s largest urban farm” on vacant and abandoned properties, starting with a 70-acre fruit and veggie patch on the east side. Also last month, a group of local businesses began printing their own currency, the Detroit Cheer, in an effort to encourage local spending.

“Detroit is the most democratic city in America,” writes Mitch Cope, one of the catalysts of the aforementioned artists’ block, on the blog at powerhouseproject.com. “Not in the political sense or government, but because the neighborhoods are ruled and run and controlled and developed by local citizens. It’s a city where you can do things, both bad and good as you choose without much oversight, enforcement of law, or rules imposed from above. It is up to the residents to decide what it is they want to do, how they govern their particular block or street, and therefore what they want their city to be. Democracy in Detroit has ironically come out of the lack of a functional government/political democracy.”