The Statement: The Detroit Issue

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement RUBY WALLAU/Daily

Dear readers,

DIA

Welcome to The Statement’s Detroit Issue. This week, our magazine is dedicated to the many complex and bold narratives of the city, ranging from youth-crafted poetry, to catfish burgers, to the difficulties of public transportation.

There’s an incredible amount to learn from the challenges and growth that Detroit is currently experiencing. The Statement staff hopes these stories amplify such issues in new light.

— Carlina Duan, Magazine Editor

RUBY WALLAU/Daily

Kehinde Wiley’s Officer of the Hussars at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2007)

COVER BY RUBY WALLAU & KATHERINE PEKALA

THE

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Magazine Editor: Carlina Duan Deputy Editors: Max Radwin

Photo Editor: Ruby Wallau Illustrator: Megan Mulholland

Amrutha Sivakumar Editor in Chief: Design Editor: Amy Mackens

Peter Shahin

Managing Editor: Katie Burke Copy Editors: Mark Ossolinski Meaghan Thompson

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), formerly known as the Detroit Museum of Art, has been a landmark in the city since its creation in 1885 by James Scripps, a newspaper publisher and philanthropist with a love for great art.

Scripps donated the first pieces to the museum — 70 Dutch and Flemish paintings he had collected while traveling around Europe — which were valued at around $75,000.

Over the years, the DIA evolved and changed, taking on different forms as other museums in the area combined with it. At one point, a natural history museum was absorbed into the museum, so that there were antlers and stuffed animals in one gallery along with art.

It wasn’t until the 1920s — by which time the museum’s name had been officially changed to the Detroit Institute of Art — that the museum began to thrive, due in large part to private donations.

The collection continued to grow with each new director, who made their own contributions. James Scripps’ son-in-law, Ralph Harmon Booth, was actively involved in bringing German scholar and art connoisseur, William Valentiner, into the project. Together, the pair helped the museum acquire what is now one of the greatest collections of European art in the country.

The last substantial lifetime gift the DIA received came in the 1970s from Eleanor Ford. The museum used the money to build their African collection.

This collection — considered one of the best in the United States — includes an astounding 65,000 pieces, ranging from classic paintings to indigenous American sculptures. Six thousand of these pieces are currently on display in the museum — van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Jan van Eyck, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, to name a few of the highlights. But the museum is also one of the most representative, with pieces from almost every culture in the world.

“We regard ourselves as what we

now call a universal museum,” said Graham Beal, director, president and CEO of the DIA. “But you can also use the term encyclopedic, which basically means there is no where in time or geography that we will not go looking to acquire art. The only significant area where we have genuine weakness is the Oceanic, or the art of the Pacific Islands. You can see dozens and dozens of cultures represented here.”

Current difficulties In recent years, the city of Detroit has faced severe financial turmoil, filing for bankruptcy in July 2013.

The city’s financial straits directly affected the museum when Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder to handle the city’s finances, announced that he would consider selling the museum’s art, if it would help the city’s financial crisis.

The DIA’s art can be sold because the museum is not a nonprofit organization like many museums, but rather a city agency, like a public library. In 1920, when the independent organization that was running the museum could no longer afford to keep up operations, an agreement was reached wherein the building and its collections were turned over to the city of Detroit.

The foundation that started the museum, which renamed itself the Detroit Museum of Art Founders Society after operations were turned over to the city in 1920, stayed on to work as an advocacy group, raising funds to continue purchasing art until 1998. After that year, the city could no longer maintain the museum on its own, so operations were subcontracted back to the Founders Society under the name the Detroit Institute of Arts, Incorporated.

The city, therefore, owns the building and all the art inside, while the independent, not-for-profit organization has been responsible for taking care of day-to-day operations within the museum.

An uncertain future As the building and collections belong to the city of Detroit, it is within the city’s right to sell the art as they see fit. Several steps have been taken to avoid this unpopular outcome. Several foundations in the city have stepped forward to pledge roughly $370 million to the museum to help it maintain the collection, as well as assist the pension program.

From this, a plan has been negotiated, but not finalized, where the money from the foundations — in conjunction with $100 million dollars pledged from Detroit Institute of Arts, Inc., which is the organization running the museum and $350 million promised by the state — would be used to turn the museum back into a privately owned not-for-profit again.

“The deal would be that the city would relinquish the building and collections to that independent, not-for-profit entity,” said Jeffrey Abt, a professor in the department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University. “Then it would continue on into the future as it had originally been established.”

If the plan does go forward and the museum is turned back into a nonprofit organization, the financial position of the museum could be strengthened in the long run. However, the museum may face some financial difficulties in the short run as it had already agreed to a plan, before negotiations had begun about turning the museum back into a nonprofit, that would require them to raise $400 million in 10 years, in addition to the $100 million the nonprofit entity pledged to raise over the next 20 years.

The museum’s future, though, is still unclear as plans move forward.

Until the uncertainty is cleared up the museum intends to carry on operations as normal.

“Right now it’s business as usual,” Beal said. “We know what we want to do, we’re very aggressive and I don’t think I’m boasting when I say we’re one of the leading art museums in this country.”

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement KATHERINE PEKALA/Daily

READ THE FULL VERSION AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM

BY MAX RADWIN

W

hen Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was a student at the University in the ’80s, he used to organize a group of friends to go down to Tiger Stadium for opening day every year. For many of those students, the annual trip was their only exposure to the city. According to Duggan, young people didn’t want to settle down in Detroit or even road trip there — they had New York, Chicago or Los Angeles on their minds.

Now, Duggan looks out his window everyday at Woodward Avenue from the Mayor’s Office. On the surface, the mayor faces many of the same problems that made it a foreign and unappealing place to many of Duggan’s college peers — deindustrialization, depopulation, high unemployment and crime.

With the start of Duggan’s time in office comes a new chance at reversing these longstanding problems to bring the city back to the prosperity it experienced in the 1950s. Duggan is the first white mayor of Detroit since 1974, winning 55 percent of the vote in a city that is over 80 percent Black.

His campaign platform centered around crime reduction and financial and economic turnaround.

Two months after that message landed him in office, Duggan met with President Barack Obama to discuss how to make those ideas a reality.

“The conversation was about how do we bring jobs to Detroit and how do we train Detroiters for jobs,” Mayor Duggan said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. “It was totally focused on creating opportunities.”

He declined to say more except

that there was no conversation about “writing a check for the city of Detroit,” something many are hoping for in light of its bankruptcy.

Though they’re keeping quiet about the details of their conversation, the report President Obama asked Duggan to give him in 90 days should include a lot more than repairing streetlights and working out a viable budget plan with the state-appointed Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr. And besides the well publicized issues, Duggan admitted that some of his conversation with the President included Detroit’s longstanding public transportation problem. It’s an issue that has taken a backseat to bankruptcy, but which is vital to bringing Detroit up to par with the likes of some of the cities his college friends decided to settle down in, many of which to feature efficient transportation within, as well as back and forth from their city limits — whether it be subway, rail or otherwise.

“A piece of (the solution) is that we have to get people to the jobs,” Duggan said.

To date, Detroit’s primary public transportation service comes in the form of two bus systems — the Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT) and the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART). Each morning, DDOT tries to field 220 buses to meet the needs of the city’s residents. DDOT buses are old and in poor condition, Duggan said, so on a warm day, 180 make it to their routes. On a cold day, only 150 do. While the city is working on maintaining the buses

they have, Duggan said it needs to purchase 50 new ones as well.

Meanwhile, some practical improvements to public transportation have already begun. In February, Mayor Duggan announced that the city would be installing cameras on all DDOT buses to create a safer riding experience.

But buses are often a compliment to larger, more efficient modes of public transit. Detroit has the Detroit People Mover — a 2.9-mile elevated rail encircling the central business district — but beyond its limited access and the struggling bus system, the city lacks a comprehensive public transportation option.

According to Joe Grengs, associate professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, more than a third of Detroit residents don’t have cars. He attributed the city’s carlessness to high levels of poverty and comparatively costly automotive maintenance and gas prices.

“The metropolitan region is built on the assumption that you drive to places, so it’s a tremendous disadvantage,” Grengs said.

Public transportation often becomes the only option for Detroit residents, albeit an inconvenient one. The city’s low and diminishing densities — i.e. that buildings and houses are far apart from each other — are a major problem that has arisen from a shrinking population and tax base.

“The great majority of buildings we’re talking about are single-family homes,” Duggan said. “That’s what were going to be selling and so we’re going to knock down the houses that can’t

be saved.”

With every transit trip comes two walking trips: reaching the boarding area and walking to your destination after getting off. So, when a Detroit resident gets off a bus, they have to walk long distances to get to their final destination. Detroit is so low density that it’s becoming hard for residents to reach that destination at all — to the point that they choose not to make use of it in the first place.

“By investing in public transit, hopefully we can also in turn start to attract new investments into the city in a more dense way that makes the environment a more sustainable situation over the long run,” Grengs said.

Chris Mourgelas, an architect for the United States General Services Administration, commutes into the city each morning from Ferndale. He said that while Detroit’s public transportation is much different than what he’s used to having grown up in Chicago, the commute to work is generally fine, though buses are sometimes late and break down.

“I started riding the bus when my car transmission failed,” he said. “With that, I decided I’d take it into the shop and try the bus for a day and it was fine enough that I didn’t replace that car. We’re now a one-car family. Have been since 2004.”

Craig Regester, associate director of the University’s Semester in Detroit Program, said he was also fortunate enough to own a car during the 20 years that he lived in the city.

“I did bike a fair amount,” he said. “I rarely used public transit mostly because it wasn’t particularly convenient as far as timing and where I needed to go, frankly.

And the system itself has been seriously challenged for a very long time.”

Regester — who spearheaded the MDetroit Center Connector that allows University students to travel to the city — said public transit is an issue for residents who have to travel to the suburbs to reach their jobs.

“While some (Detroiters) have cars,” he said, “many of them probably do not and it’s why people have to get up two hours before and leave on a bus two hours before to get to where their job starts.”

But investing in public transit to fix these issues is easier said than done, especially in light of the city’s bankruptcy. What kind of transit? Light rail? Heavy rail?

Bus? Bus Rapid Transit? Street-

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car? These are all options that Detroit continues to explore.

The M-1 Rail has been one of the largest projects of the last five years. It began in 2008 as a privately funded three-mile streetcar running along Woodward Avenue to accommodate Super Bowl XL, and to stimulate economic growth, but the project was delayed and then expanded, with a vision of a faster Light Rail Transit system stretching nine miles to 8 Mile Road to allow for easy commuting in and out of the city. But the project proved infeasible despite receiving a $25 million grant from the federal government in 2009 because Detroit still did not have the funds to complete the project. In 2011, a slower 3.3-mile streetcar system was proposed in place of the Light Rail and expects to break ground this spring.

Despite its past failures, there’s also been talk of re-expanding the project out to 8 Mile once again.

Critics have been quick to point out that streetcars are slow, and are better used for making frequent stops in condensed areas.

To go all the way to 8 Mile, covering long stretches where almost nobody would want to get off — even with increased urban density — seems impractical.

“The M-1 Rail is a piece of a plan,” Duggan said. “Ultimately, we need to build a rail line out to 8 Mile and out to Pontiac. But we also need to support it with frequent buses that run on time and when you put those pieces together, you have a real transit system.”

According to Grengs, Detroit has never had a “real” transit system — one that comprises those multiple modes of transportation, operates on a regional level and is controlled under one organization that helps them interconnect.

“Everywhere else in the country, there’s an authority that ties all of (these modes of transportation) together,” he said. “We don’t.

We don’t have that. We never have.

We’ve tried decade after decade after decade … (Cleveland) established one in the late ‘70s and even that was a little bit late. Here we are all these decades later and we can’t get this together.”

Duggan denied that these repeated failures in the past could come from institutional pressures from competing industries in the area like the Big Three automakers. Instead, he agreed with Grengs.

“The issue is that we’ve had a lack of coordination between city and transit for 40 years,” he said.

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement

MATRIX THEATRE GIVES STUDENTS OUTLET FOR CREATIVITY, EXPRESSION

BY PAIGE PFLEGER

T

he home of Matrix Theatre sticks out from its surroundings — it’s a twostory brick building that looks like the other storefronts should surround it, but it stands abruptly thin, tall and alone. Michigan Central Station looms in the background, long-abandoned and windowless. To the east is the center of the city, a cluster of buildings that fan out from Detroit’s highest point, General Motors’ Renaissance Center. Directly to the west, the Ambassador Bridge crosses the Detroit River to Canada.

2730 Bagley Avenue looks nothing like the ruin porn that populates a Google image search of Detroit. Matrix Theatre is well-kept, and has been since it moved in. The theatre nonprofit calls the space on Detroit’s Southwest side home and takes in Detroiters of every kind to create an open community with one common mission: “Using the transformative power of theatre to change lives, build community, and foster social justice.”

Matrix began as a grassroots movement by Shaun and Wes Nethercott in 1991, who aimed to create original plays that would represent the community and offer an outlet for people of all ages to learn playwriting, performance, and puppetry. Matrix hit the ground running with successful plays that found their way to untraditional theater venues — jails, psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters, schools, universities and churches. By 1999, the company had become such a community staple that it decided to settle into their studio space on Bagley Avenue.

The stage inside the doors of Matrix Theatre’s is unassuming. Small and simplistic, rows of red chair seating stretch back away from the stage and spread to the sides of the exposed brick walls.

However, when the house lights dim and the spot lights rise, audience members are greeted with a sense of intimacy and closeness that can only be found inside a community theater like Matrix.

“In terms of the space, I was surprised by how small it was,” said Music, Theater & Dance senior Mary Naoum. Naoum first got involved with Matrix through the Semester in Detroit program over two years ago, and has been interning there ever since. “It’s a very small, cute theatre, but after seeing productions in it, I realized that the small space is what makes it such a powerful theatre. It’s such an intimate environment and their plays involve such important and sometimes challenging issues to talk about, so the environment works really well for that,” she said.

Now the Matrix mission encompasses its three main branches of professional theater, puppetry, and educational theater. The professional theater presents annual seasons that feature a myriad of shows, from classics like “To Kill A Mockingbird”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” to original plays like “No Child…” that deal with modern

RUBY WALLAU/Daily

issues such as the education crisis.

The puppetry department is another offering that makes Matrix unique. Inspired by huge puppets at a May Day Festival in Minnesota, Nethercott decided that puppetry would be an asset to the Detroit community. Yet these are no ordinary puppets; they depict important figures that connect to Detroit in one way or another, whether it be through civil rights activism or environmental issues, or important figures from the city. As the Matrix website boasts, these larger-than-life sized puppets are “people you can really look up to.”

The part of the theatre that has perhaps the largest impact on the community is the educational theatre school. The theatre school offers

donations on programs helping the children of Detroit. The prices are not easily affordable for many, ranging from $50 to $100 for the longer programs, however Matrix Theatre has a policy: Don’t turn anyone away.

“It’s possible through the very generous scholarship donations that we get from a variety of sources,” said Director of Education Andrea Scobie. Among such scholarships are the Hope Scholarships, which are need-based and funded through grants and donations. There is also the Youth with Promise Scholarship, which is awarded to students with promise in performance, playwriting, and puppetry. The student selected for the Promise Scholarship is required to have already participated in Matrix programs

ADAM GLANZMAN/Daily

catering to different age groups.

The younger groups of actors create a play that revolves around their experiences at school, exploring what they like and dislike about the educational system in the city. Through the process of creating the play, students gain important theatrical skills, from improvisation, projection and important public speaking abilities that can aid them in advocating for change in their schools.

The 14 to 18-year-olds are members of the coveted group called the Matrix Teen Company.

They are charged with writing an original play about the state of education in Detroit schools, drawing from their own experiences as well as what they see from the different schools they visit over the class period. This year, actor Justin Bartha (“The Hangover,” “Failure to Launch”) will join Matrix to guest direct their show, which opens in April and runs for two weekends.

All of the classes cost money with the exception of the Teen Company, which is funded by the Skillman Foundation, which focuses its

for at least one year. This fits in with Matrix’s goal to make theatre available to anyone and everyone who wants to get involved.

For Scobie, her involvement with Matrix began almost by accident; she had heard about an audition in 2005 for the professional theater at Matrix and decided to attend. She’s been at Matrix ever since, and now heads the educational theatre portion of the company.

“The more students are involved in Matrix, the more transformational the experience is,” Scobie said. “Most of these kids have never had the opportunity to be on stage themselves, and have certainly never had the opportunity to perform their own work, and use their own voice and their own ideas as the catalyst for this art.

The more students come back to do this, the more you see changes in their confidence and in their behavior.”

One student who was strongly influenced by Matrix is Eastern Michigan University freshman Analy Aguilar. Aguilar moved to Detroit’s Southwest side when she was ten years old. She went

to middle school in Detroit, where she said she meshed well with her peers. When it was time for high school, however, Aguilar’s parents decided to send her to high school in Madison Heights to avoid the violence and crime of Detroit Public Schools. At her new school, she was the only student of Mexican descent.

Four years after arriving to Matrix, Aguilar is still involved with the theatre and attending Eastern Michigan University for theatre arts.

“Matrix really helped me out,” Aguilar said. “When I was in high school I was bullied, and that caused me to become shy and kind of depressed. When I went to Matrix, they helped me open up and they made me happy, and they got me out of that phase. It helped me open up.

Even my teachers at school noticed the difference. Matrix gave me a lot of confidence in myself.”

During Aguilar’s time at Matrix, she helped write and act in a teen production called “The Skin I’m In,” a production which dealt with issues of racism, stereotyping, discrimination and homophobia in schools. In a dialogue immediately following the performance, audience members said time and time again that the play was eye-opening and was performed not only at Matrix but also at Cranbrook Kingswood School.

“The experience, the opportunities, the people are worth coming back for,” Aguilar said. “It’s like a huge family. I loved coming home from school which was so stressful, and then going to Matrix and being able to let that all out with friends, and being able to act, because acting is so freeing for me. The environment is so comforting and loving, and it was something that was so different than school.”

Scobie said Analy Aguilar is just one example of Matrix’s transformative effect on young people.

“Through being a part of Matrix she was able to gain the confidence and gain the voice to be able to stand up for herself,” Scobie said. “Two years later when she graduated her senior year she was nominated for homecoming queen, all of those kids who had bullied her were now her best friends because she really learned to use her own voice and to have confidence in her own self.”

Part of the reason that Matrix works so well is the fact that it has nestled so seamlessly into the Detroit community. Detroit is a city that has had its ups and downs, and monetary problems in the public school system leave gaps in education. For most Detroit children, there is no theater program in their school, no creative outlet to help them express themselves and the myriad of troubles that might face them in their everyday lives. Matrix gives these children a safe space to rebuild themselves, arising from the ashes as their city has so many times before.

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C A S S C L I N I C B R I N G S H E A LT H CARE TO THE COMMUNITY

BY PAIGE PEARCY

n a snowy Saturday at 8:45 a.m., Willie Oliver made the second trip of his life to the Cass Community Social Services building. He stood outside, underneath the red awning, in the line of people waiting to get inside when the doors opened at 9 a.m. Oliver has high blood pressure and like many of the people waiting in line with him, he couldn’t afford a trip to the doctor’s office.

“We see a lot of high blood pressure and diabetes,” said Julie Weber, a second year Wayne State Medical School student. “What’s really great about this clinic is that the people who we see who have those conditions come back every month and we give them free meds and it’s awesome because we’re actually managing their conditions.”

Oliver was waiting outside because every Saturday morning at 9 a.m., the Cass Community Social Services building, located in the Cass corridor in downtown Detroit, becomes Cass Clinic — a free clinic run by Wayne State School of Medicine students.

“Especially in your first and second year (of medical school) you don’t have any exposure to the clinic, you don’t ever really get to see patients,” Weber, who is one of the six student coordinators of the clinic, said. “That’s why I love coming here, because it’s really just students treating patients and you do your best,” “(The patients) know they’re seeing students, but it’s better than nothing because they don’t really have access to doctors and we have a doctor here, he just doesn’t necessarily come out to see patients,” she added.

Two weeks before, Oliver came to Cass for the first time. While he was there for a foot injury he was informed of his high blood pressure and became concerned. He came back to the clinic in order to continue monitoring it.

“I’m kind of in the shelter, so I got dropped off (in a van) and I just came over so I could see somebody and to have my blood pressure checked,” Oliver said. “Just last week I turned a year older, the older you get the more you have to watch out for your health.”

A history of healing Cass Clinic was founded in the late 1970s by a collaborative effort between Edwin Rowe, a reverend at Cass United Methodist Church, and George Costea, a family practice doctor. Costea rotated at the Haight Ashbury Clinic in San Francisco — which was one of the first free clinics in the country — and in 1975, he felt inspired to start a similar clinic in Detroit where he grew up.

“We felt we gave people an option,” Costea said. “The Detroit Medical Center isn’t very far away but people felt intimidated by the medical center, just the name itself, and we wanted to give them someplace they’d feel comfortable, another option, and where we don’t even ask

about whether they do or don’t have insurance.

“We treat everybody here,” he said of the Clinic. “We try to give them as much as possible from what we have here.”

Initially, the Clinic was given a very small space within the church — which still stands across the street from the social services building. But with the Clinic’s increasing popularity, once the church purchased the social services building in the late 1990s, the Clinic was given that space to use every Saturday morning.

“A lot of the people we see, we’re their primary caregiver,” Costea said. “We’ve been able to, I think, manage a number of people and hopefully keep them from going to the emergency room for routine care.”

In 1990, shortly before the clinic relocated across the street, the Wayne State University School of Medicine formed a partnership with Cass. Now six Wayne State School of Medicine students, each of whom serves as a coordinator of various departments, including finance, donations and scheduling, run the Clinic. Costea still serves as the overseeing physician.

Each Saturday, medical and undergraduate student volunteers populate square tables in the largest room of the social services building. Working in groups of two to four, the student volunteers serve the patients who make up the extended line outside. They evaluate each patient for symptoms and take note of their concerns, and then present their cases to Costea, who sits in the back room where the prescription medications are held and determines what patients need.

“We do all the assessments (in the main room), we take their blood pressure and listen to their heart and lungs and then we go back and do a presentation for the doctor, which is good for us because we learn how to present in real-time setting and the doctor is hearing all about the patient, so he can give an informed decision about how to treat the patient,” Weber said. “A lot of the time since he’s been here so long he has a sense of how people should be treated even if he hasn’t seen them but a lot of them he recognizes and he knows how to treat and he can adjust the regimens as needed.”

Kathryn Rice, the clinic’s volunteer resources coordinator, said Cass is unique in that the stu-

dents have significant interactions with the patients that they don’t often get in other clinic settings.

“You get to see firsthand what you’re doing,” Rice said. “It’s not that you’re just giving them medication and you’re walking away; you’re actually getting their history, you’re talking with them you’re getting to know them and it builds rapport with the community, and it gives you a sense of what you can do as a doctor.”

were they collecting fees for their services, would receive at least $85,800 each year.

As a result, the clinic sometimes can’t provide necessary medications for patients due to the high cost of a drug and lack of donations, so the students and Costea have to make recommendations for the patient to go elsewhere.

“The hardest part is when you can’t help someone,” Rice said. “You want to so badly because you know that you need it but you don’t always have the resources to help them.”

Insurance not accepted here Perhaps the most impressive part of this clinic is not its long standing history or that it’s student-run, but rather that in an era of rising healthcare costs, Cass functions at virtually no cost — all of the students and physicians are volunteers and most of the medications are donated.

Neha Meta, a first year Wayne State University School of Medicine student and the finance coordinator for the clinic, estimated that each year they receive about $20,000 in grant money, which she said they mainly use to purchase medications, like insulin, which they have not been able to get through donations.

Rice said each Saturday the clinic serves 30 to 40 patients while it’s open from 9 a.m. to noon.

According to Consumer Reports, an average retail clinic — which Consumer Reports deems as the lowest priced clinic compared to Urgent Care centers and Emergency Rooms — charges on average from $55 to $75 per visit, thus, doing the simple math, that means a clinic like Cass,

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RUBY WALLAU/Daily

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement

DETROIT WORKS

D E T RO I T F U T U R E CI T Y: A 5 0 -Y E A R E X PE R IM E N T I N U R BA N PL A N N I N G KATHERINE PEKALA/Daily

BY A MRU T HA SIVAKUM AR

H

ow long does it take to revive a city burdened with nearly $20 billion in debt, unfunded liabilities, a steadily declining population and over 70,000 abandoned structures?

According to Detroit Future City, many of these problems will be alleviated by 2065.

By then, Michigan’s biggest city will look a lot different, if everything goes according to plan. Transportation systems will be improved, vacant space will be repurposed for public use and Detroit will become a beacon of environmental friendliness.

Re-organizing the city is a tall task, considering the Motor City’s dwindling population, but it’s a challenge that’s not too daunting for the Detroit Works Project.

The project began in 2010 under former Mayor Dave Bing’s administration to rethink the land-use policies that affected Detroit’s future. In the fall of 2011, the Detroit Works project was divided into two components — Short-Term Actions and Long-Term Planning — and independent contractors were hired to separately develop long-term strategies for Detroit.

After a three-year-long process detailing the challenges and possible solutions facing the city of Detroit, the Detroit Works Long-Term Planning initiative, rebranded as Detroit Future City, released a 347-page strategic framework in December 2012 that suggested innovative policies that would reinvigorate the city.

By focusing on five planning areas — economic growth, land use, city systems, neighborhoods and building assets — the outline pinpoints areas of potential improvement and suggests short-term and long-term solutions that ease the city into transformation.

In some aspects, the Future City framework reflects a page out of an Economics 101 textbook. Since it operates on the premise that there will be very few resources available from the state, the framework considers how to best allocate its scarce resources among the different regions of Detroit.

“It should be shocking in some respects, but it’s also understandable once you understand the logic of the report,” said Wayne State University Law Prof. Peter J. Hammer, who teaches a course on reimagining development, calling the trade-offs made in the framework “defensible, logical triage choices.”

Though the Detroit Works Project plans to

improve the city community, it struggled to receive input from the citizens it would affect most in the earliest stages of development.

While early city planners looked to develop the framework around long-term land-use strategies, citizens who attended early civic engagement meetings were more interested in how the government could address their shortterm needs — such as improving neighborhood safety and demolishing abandoned households — June Thomas, centennial professor of urban and regional planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, said.

As a result, 24 “Process Leaders” were hired to incorporate civic engagement into the planning process. The Process Leaders comprised leaders from organizations that ranged from local churches to nonprofits and aimed to equitably reach out to all their constituents for input. They collectively held over 30,000 oneon-one conversations, Charles Cross, former Process Leader, said.

The Process Leaders developed a series of innovative tactics to reach out to the community. Such tactics included creating an Eastern Market Home Base — where citizens could attend regular open houses to clarify some of their inhibitions surrounding Detroit Works’ Long-Term Planning — and setting up Roaming Tables around different areas in the city to spread awareness.

“Part of the Process Leader concept was that it shouldn’t be a few people talking to many people, it should be many people talking to many people,” said Cross, who is currently a landscape and urban designer for the Detroit Collaborative Design Center. He added that the goal was to show community members that the Future City process was “authentic and transparent,” while ensuring that the input received was “meaningful.”

“This was to help develop a way to engage community and one of the ways we looked at this was not through the lens of ‘OK, we have got to have a community meeting, OK we can check that box off,’ ” he said. “We looked at community engagement or civic engagement as growing relationships. Through these relationships we then created dialogue.”

Thomas, who attended the early community engagement meetings, saw the disconnect between the citizen’s parochial requests for their neighborhood and the project sponsor’s long-term ambitions as one of the project’s

weaknesses, though she added that the project addressed issues that impacted a large number of citizens.

“It was the economic growth that seemed to have the most public interest,” Thomas noted.

“People would stand in front of the posters for that particular element (of the Future City engagement process) because people recognized that a lot of Detroit’s problems (are) related to its economy.”

Through the 347-page strategic framework, the Process Leaders embedded images of silhouettes and thought-bubbles that reflected the comments of the community pertaining to the issues addressed.

“I distinctly remember one woman coming in and she was reading different things on the wall and she said ‘Hey, I said that. That’s my comment,’ ” Cross recalled. “We have to make sure that people can see themselves in the document.”

Despite Future City’s extensive civic engagement efforts, Thomas said she believed the project prescribed recommendations for the city at a macro-level, and did not entirely reflect the exact desires of a citizen for the development of their neighborhood.

“When queried about this, the lead planner said that essentially they were doing this because they were looking at the broader scale and later, neighborhoods could be planned within the framework,” Thomas recalled.

“Because in some ways, the beauty of the document and its polish and its professional quality is a weakness. It didn’t have the time to build from the ground-up, it built from the top-down in terms of the expertise being flown in to prescribe.”

Although implementation projects for the Future City framework have just begun, the Process Leaders who lead the community engagement for Future City are no longer contractually hired by the organization.

“The big push for citizen engagement is likely over,” Thomas said. “There’s a disconnect between the citizen engagement and the issuance of these priority areas and I wondered because they’ve released the staff that were essentially charged with citizen engagement; they’ve been off the job for about a year.”

However, Cross said that though he was no longer on the Future City payroll, the Process Leader continually meet to consider ways in which they can provide the Future City with

community input. He further added that a formal partnership with Future City was not required to achieve the goals of the organization and he would continue to work with DCDC to further its mission.

“We didn’t have our contract renewed to continue in a leadership type role because what we think is that there is not only just one way to be a part of Future City,” he said. “You don’t have to go through and get a stamp of approval from Future City, and we, as the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, can be a conduit to do what we do and still be connected to Future City.”

For Thomas, the Future City strategic framework seems riddled with urban planning irregularities. Not only does the framework cover a longer planning horizon than what most other planning projects operate under, but it also lacks a concrete way to enact the document’s proposals.

“That’s a little bit unusual because usually comprehensive plans try to do that and if they’re connected with city government they try to find that,” Thomas, who has written several books on urban planning and the landscape of Detroit, said. “But this is disconnected, so it’s not safe in that way. But then again, people are beginning to use that, and the city itself is beginning to fund areas according to the priorities areas.”

In late February, nearly a year and a half after releasing the strategic framework and rebranding as Detroit Future City, the implementation team responsible for executing the proposals outlines in the framework released their priorities for 2014-2015 and announced the 31 projects they would work to support over the next year.

James Canning, media relations spokesperson for Detroit Future City, said the organization was now teaming with partners throughout the city to coordinate their efforts in line with the goals of their strategic framework, and help partners “make the most out of their budget.”

“It’s kind of really strange, it’s a strange time when this unofficial document that was funded by foundations is beginning to reshape investment decisions but it can’t g uarantee them, fund them, or lead them,” Thomas said. “It’s kind of an experiment.”

READ THE FULL VERSION AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement

READ THE FULL VERSION AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM

ERIN KIRKLAND/Daily

7B

INSIDEOUT LITERARY ARTS: YOUTH-DRIVEN AND INSPIRED

BY J EN NIFER C ALFA S

C

hristopher had an idea. Shifting his weight from side to side in his desk, the third grader raised his hand, begging to answer a question.

Upon being called on, Christopher stood up in his seat.

“A good writer never stops writing,” he proclaimed.

University alum Peter Markus looked around at the students who sat in his class to gauge their reactions to Christopher’s statement.

“They also not only never stop looking at the world, but also listening to it,” Markus added as he launched into the day’s lesson plan, which examined how a writer should describe sound with metaphors and similes.

This lesson is only one of hundreds Markus has taught over the course of 20 years. Having taught at several schools across Detroit, Markus has found his niche in the InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Throughout his career, he has found that students are not shy about sharing their work, but rather prideful, eliciting an exciting, almost chaotic atmosphere in his third grade class.

Founded in 1995, InsideOut has expanded from one to 27 schools across the Detroit area, reaching over 5,000 students. Established writers and poets work with K-12 students over a period of 25 weeks to explore various aspects of poetry, writing and thinking.

While Markus just started teaching at Mann Elementary School — a 30-minute drive from the University — he maintained the same goal for each school he encountered.

“We encourage students to create broadly, create bravely and experiment in how they see the world,” Markus said. “We want them to learn to express themselves and engage with each other in a deeper, more complicated way.”

A new approach The MEAP exam measures proficiency in several areas, including reading, writing and mathematics, among other categories. According to Mann Elementary School’s 2013 report released Feb. 28, the percent of students at least proficient in writing increased from 23.6 percent to 25.6 percent from the 2012 to 2013 year to the 2013 to 2014 year.

While the increase has established a promising trend, Markus said standardized testing is not how students should learn how to write.

During his classes, Markus tailors his lesson

plan individually to each student, allowing them to explore according to their individual needs.

One of his students, Mark, often jumps from his seat whenever given the opportunity. With his built up energy — typical of an eight-year-old boy — Mark has difficulty paying attention in class. To keep Mark engaged, Markus encourages him to perform what he is thinking in front of the class to release his energy.

“If you can invite the kids to go slightly outside of their bubble, they love it,” Markus said.

“That’s how you can keep kids engaged is to offer them alternatives to sitting in their chair, just numbing out, because all they do is take tests and prepare to take tests.”

As the nonprofit approaches its 20th year, Alise Alousi, InsideOut’s associate director, said there are plans for expansion — not externally, but internally. In several high schools already, InsideOut has already launched new afterschool programs and individual mentoring sessions.

While the program expands, its mission remains an interminable, constant entity.

“That’s what the great beauty of our program is — we’re sending writers who have a sense of their craft into a classroom to really engage students and give them an opportunity to explore that knowledge,” Alousi said.

Underappreciated, yet revolutionary Detroit is no stranger to national attention.

Reports of the city entering the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history and suffering a population decline from 1.86 million residents to 700,000 over the past 60 years continue to plague Detroit’s image.

InsideOut hopes to help those affected by this ongoing criticism.

Of all students in the state of Michigan, 83.1 percent are proficient in reading. In Detroit’s public schools, however, only 67.4 percent are.

At Mann Elementary, is only about 63.6 percent.

At Mann Elementary, 289 of the 491 students are deemed “economically disadvantaged.”

Despite not meeting state standards according to this test, these young students in Detroit are already published writers.

One of InsideOut’s most unique qualities is its effort to publish poems by each student at the end of every year.

“It’s a huge undertaking we’ve never stopped believing in,” Markus said. “It’s something we

really continue to value; students deserve recognition for their classroom work.”

In spring 2013, students from Mann Elementary School had their work published in a collaborative book titled “Here, There and Everywhere.” In the book, every student from the program ranging from third to fifth grade explored topics ranging from their desire to own a pet monster, to their favorite place in the world.

Each student receives a copy of the book as a memento of his or her work with InsideOut from the year. Just as screenwriters often carry around their manuscripts for films, Markus said he hopes students will do the same with their published pieces.

“Every student deserves to be heard,” Markus said. “They all have unique voices that are open, full of ideas and creatively showcased.

It’s really an empowering moment when you hand a student a book that they will preserve for years.”

From college to elementary school LSA junior Leela Denver grew up in Ann Arbor, but rarely ventured to Detroit. Sure, she attended a concert in the city every once in a while, but her visits, as she described, were “artificial.”

As the Spring 2013 semester approached, Denver was looking into study abroad opportunities when Semester In Detroit came to her attention. The program, which aspires to engage University students with the city’s community and culture, caught her eye. While she lived 40 miles away from Detroit her whole life, Denver considered the city as destination ready for exploration, topping the list of her study abroad aspirations.

“I chose Semester In Detroit instead,” Denver said. “I was going abroad, but to a place with more meaning; it’s my state and my country.

Everyone should have that kind of experience.”

Once she was accepted to the program, Denver chose to intern with InsideOut. As an English major, Denver was drawn to the program for its focus on creative writing and literary expression. However, what made the program unique to her was the city it was based in.

“Detroit shaped the whole thing,” she said.

“The whole experience was about learning about the city I’ve always been so close to and not known much about. It gave me a way to interact with people of the community that

wasn’t so artificial.”

Denver worked with Markus at Marcus Garvey Academy, a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade public school in Detroit. During her internship, she taught one of Markus’ classes a lesson on her own, as well as helped students around the classroom during Markus’ lessons.

“Their imaginations were really outstanding,” Denver said. “Getting in the mind of the kids was something I’ve never experienced before.”

Denver is one of several University students who have worked with the InsideOut program over the past four years.

Additionally, as part of the University’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, the Civitas Fellowship awards a small group of Master in Fine Arts students funding to work with InsideOut for 10 hours a week for 30 weeks.

Alousi said this program allows MFA students to expand their knowledge of teaching beyond a college environment, which she deemed as much easier to manage than an elementary school one.

“They have to deal with issues,” Alousi said.

“The kids want to be playing, and these students have to learn how to accommodate their lesson plans for the needs of the kids.”

A lasting impact Christopher sat down in his chair after he answered Markus’ question. Though his energy was still palpable, so were the wheels churning in his mind.

A few minutes later, Markus played sounds for the students to listen to. He then instructed them to announce what they believed each sound was — as descriptively as possible.

Christopher sat up in his seat and positioned a pencil in front of his nose, fixing his eyes on the eraser that hovered one inch from him. He gazed into what Markus described as a “dream pencil” — a mechanism that allows students to explore the depths of their mind, allowing fantasies to become realities on paper.

“It sounds like a knight running toward a woman trying to save her from the bad guy,” Christopher announced moments later during a flurry of students raising their hands to share what they heard.

“We’re teaching them how to see more than what others see and feel more than others feel,” Markus said. “The whole human being needs to be developed and needs to be innovative.”

8B

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 // The Statement

T H E V I S U A L S TAT E M E N T: S I S T E R ’ S F O O D T R U C K

BY V I R G I N I A LOZ A N O

A

s I drove through a neighborhood in Grand River Detroit, I was immediately drawn to a food cart sitting in the driveway of the house on 1861 Bassett Street.

With bright pink symbols on a large metal cart, it stood out from the repetition of small houses with perfectly gardened yards. When I returned on a Friday, I got out of my car and was greeted by the smell of fried food, an infectious laugh and a pink wig — all three of which belonged to Marqarette Squires, better known as Sister. The Clean Street Food Truck is her small business and contribution to fighting cancer. In fact, her motto is: “Fry for the Cure.” As a cancer survivor, Sister is truly tenacious — a trait she applies to her business. She works every Friday, moving hastily around her cart, making each order fresh on the spot and letting it live up to its name by keeping it extremely clean. The menu is reminiscent of Southern food, featuring Sister’s famous catfish sandwiches, and my personal favorite: her homemade banana pudding. Sister’s ability to create a community is her most impressive trait. She knows every customer by name. She currently has plans to help her friend Cynthia open a new food cart — Mother-dear’s Gumbo — a few streets away. Even though Basset Street is only a small part of Detroit, Sister’s Clean Street Food Truck embodies the ambition and sense of community that the city offers.