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| Detroit's Riverfront during the summer festival season. Source: Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan. |
To those of you who recently found this blog through links at the Urbanophile and tweets of gracious colleagues, welcome to the Corner Side Yard. I hope you find the content here enjoyable.
Alas, the content. Try as I might, it’s been difficult to get content up here on a regular basis as work and family life intervene. However, I do have some ideas that I will put into place in the coming weeks that will ramp up content and hopefully make this blog an even more enjoyable experience.
One quick note. In the comments to my "Detroit: America’s Whipping Boy" piece that was posted at the Urbanophile (and originally ran here in October), I received some criticism about being, if I might paraphrase, a detached naysayer on the city’s revitalization hopes rather than an involved participant. True, being away from the city for more than 30 years does make me detached, and one person’s take on the lack of discussion on Detroit’s emerging positives could be that I’m dismissive of them. But that’s definitely not the case. My intent was to show that there are deep psychological forces that Detroit uniquely faces that hinders its revitalization, in spite of positive efforts. Detroit needs those forces to recede before current positive efforts bear fruit and new ones can emerge.
That being said, I think the criticisms raised were valid. I’ve written extensively about how Detroit got to where it is and what keeps it from moving forward. It’s time for me to envision a feasible and sustainable future for the Motor City. In the coming weeks, I’ll take a stab at identifying a future vision of Detroit and outlining a set of recommendations that the city could employ to get there.