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.

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