Former Metro Times editor says there's a lot to learn from Detroit

In the 80s the writer of this article, Ron Williams, was editor and publisher of the Metro Times. He sent out his photographers to break into abandoned theaters and shoot them. The idea was to bring attention to these beautiful structures in order to save them. A few were saved, a few were lost. Flash forward 20 years and two French photographers were sent here to take some photos, some of the same photos that were taken back then. Williams, like most Detroiters, says we've seen it all before. And that there's more to Detroit than that.

Excerpt from AlterNet:

I would argue that Detroit not only still matters, but it is at this moment the single most important city in North America. Detroit is coming to a neighborhood near you–it is an early warning of what urban communities across the US and far beyond are facing as those post-industrial, peak oil hurricane winds gather strength.

Thing is, there is a flip side to Detroit's devastation. With the disinvestment and abandonment of the city at such an extreme and criminal level, the usual entrenched interests are far weaker and less capable of controlling the landscape. Call it the VOID. No where else are the opportunities to re-invent, re-think, re-build and re-imagine a major American city greater than Detroit today.

With the city's current leadership hypnotized by what they see as a civic death spiral, new leadership is coming from the place it always does in the end–from the bottom up. This new life cycle is a grassroots affair with an astonishing number of people fashioning solutions and affirming. There are now eight hundred community gardens on abandoned lots, peace zones for public safety, green retrofitting of empty houses, new open source media projects and an exploding hip hop and poetry scene.

Read the entire article here.