LIVING FOR CHANGE

Without A Vision Our Cities Perish

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Mar.18-24, 2007

Detroiters are cheating themselves if they don't participate in some of the more than 40 Shrinking Cities discussions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit at 4454 Woodward Ave. or the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills.

These wide-ranging discussions include visionary interventions as well as analyses of decline by local and international artists, activists, architects, academics and filmmakers.

The series began on February 3 with a presentation on the history of the Shrinking Cities project by Philipp Oswalt from Berlin. Oswalt is the director and chief curator of the multi-million dollar project which also involves cities in the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia,

It ends on March 31 with two films: an interview with Lee Burns, a retired engineer and co-founder of the Detroit Agricultural Network; and “Garden Stories” which focuses on gardening for subsistence and social engagement, and includes an interview with me.

In between are discussions on many other topics, e.g. the Chicago-Detroit split; the Impoverished in a Shrinking City; Projects for Development in Detroit.

I have participated in three programs: a City Planning discussion on March 1; a Detroit Summer LAMP (Live Media Arts Project) workshop on March 10; and “Symptoms and Waste: Comments on Uselessness in the Fabric of the City” on March 11.

The City Planning discussion, in which I was a panelist, revealed how the lack of vision and dialectical thinking in our city’s leaders over the last thirty years has accelerated the decline of Detroit. Refusing or unable to recognize that Detroit’s deindustrialization was a sign that we had come to the end of the industrial epoch, successive administrations and City Councils were unable to project a new vision of the self-reliant, sustainable city that Detroit and other cities can and must become for our own (and the planet’s) survival.

In the March 10 Detroit Summer (LAMP) workshop, it was exciting to watch the skill and self-confidence with which high school students led the audience of mostly young people in a discussion of the deepening crisis in and of our public schools, Using a CD which they had made of interviews with middle and high school students, they created a dialogue on why students drop out and on possible alternatives to a school system whose transformation is critical to rebuilding Detroit.

I was one of the panelists in the discussion on March 11 at the Cranbrook Art Museum of “Symptoms and Waste: Comments on Uselessness in the Fabric of the City," moderated by Dr. Michael Stone-Richards of the College of Creative Studies.

Jerry Herron, director of American Studies at Wayne State University, provided a refreshing view of Detroit as the most American place on the planet: in its enormous success in creating wealth, its shrinking as a city, its proliferation into Metro Detroit, and its inability to understand and/or remember the past,

Marygrove Professor Frank Rashid (an activist in the “Save Tiger Stadium” struggle) ”blamed” the decline of Detroit on the privatization of transportation and federal funding for highways which encouraged Detroiters to believe that by abandoning the city for the suburbs they were achieving the American Dream on their own.

Having just witnessed the creativity of the Detroit Summer Collective, I pointed out that the most glaring example of waste and uselessness in the fabric of the city has been the failure of our schools to engage the energies and imaginations of our young people in the reconstruction of life in our neighborhoods and communities.

I hope I have said enough to give Detroiters a sense of what you’re missing if you don’t participate in some of these challenging Shrinking Cities discussions.

They take place almost every night until the end of March.

For more information call MOCAD at 313 832 6622 or Cranbrook at 248 645 3323. The Jan. 28-Feb. 3 Michigan Citizen contains an insert listing all the programs in the series. Admission is free.

Email Grace Boggs Center,